The Cassettes. Photo by David Holloway.
Steampunk music is a force unto itself: a broad, diffuse category, frequently encompassing many other forms of creative expression. Many musicians and performers deliver totally immersive experiences to their audiences, incorporating visual art, elaborate prop making, intricate costume design, and vivid storytelling.
At its core, Steampunk music often creates a soundtrack to an imagined world. All music is deeply personal, but this music is perhaps even more so, in that it adds an extra layer: its maker’s vision of an alternate history or an unlikely future.
Because Steampunk musicians are a varied and eccentric bunch, each group approaches this task of musical translation in a different way. In the words of musician and performer Professor Elemental, “Many bands like to build their own little Steampunk universes to live in.” The end result is a complex, wonderful profusion of sounds, styles, and songs; for a relatively unknown subgenre, Steampunk music can be a surprisingly wide tent—or, as two of our interviewees both chose to term it, a “broad church.” That said, there are two major groups that have emerged within the genre as a whole.
The first group consists of self-proclaimed Steampunk bands: musical acts that have consciously fashioned themselves in the Steampunk image. They frequently play at Steampunk conventions and participate as both artists and fans in the community scene. They create elaborate personas and backstories set in wildly adventurous Victorian-era milieus. They wear fabulous costumes and their performances are often inspired by musical theater: a combination of storytelling and music rolled into one. Take, for example, Abney Park, one of the longest-running acts in the Steampunk music world; the hardworking Voltaire; Professor Elemental (“the mad Steampunk professor”); and the Mechanisms (“Steampunk space pirates”).
Some bands, like the Unextraordinary Gentlemen, enjoy the storytelling aspect of their Steampunk universes nearly as much as they enjoy the music making. The Unextraordinary Gentlemen have even supplemented their website with an extensive “Unextraordinary Encyclopedia” that includes a detailed list of people, places, and things related to their imaginary world; it begins with an introduction that includes these slightly ominous remarks:
Savan Gupta, CEO of Steam-Funk Productions, LLC. Photo by Matt Norris of M.G.Norris Contemporary Photography.
The following is a record of written material recovered from an abandoned chapel in upstate Connecticut, in these United States. The bound manuscript was badly damaged by water, fungus and the ravages of time. It has been estimated to have been written just after the turn of the 20th Century. The contents are more than a passing interest to me for several reasons, not the least of which is this:
Recently, a musical group calling themselves Unextraordinary Gentlemen have emerged from the Los Angeles, California Art-wave scene. The lyrics to their songs contain references to characters, places and events that correspond, almost identically, with the material found in the pages of the rotting book from Connecticut.
Band member Malcom says, “That backstory stuff is pretty much my baby. I have tons and tons of little scraps of characters and plots and places and smells and tastes, et cetera. I throw out hints and shades of this/these universe(s) with the lyrics and the encyclopedia.”
Bad September delves into the riches of alternate history to inspire their lyrics. “First we figure out the history, find a compelling personality, and pick a really interesting ‘What if?’ Then we hypothesize. What if Tesla and Edison had a duel? What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand wasn’t shot? How would a steam-powered zeppelin operate? What would the anthem of a communist Britain sound like? Or a Steampunk carnival in Cádiz? We meld real history with Steampunk to create a compelling alternate world, and then build the songs from that. This means we often have lyrics that are rich with meaning, metaphor, and allusions.”
The second group of Steampunk songsters is more diffuse, and more difficult to define, as “Steampunk” may be only one of the labels they go by. These bands are also typically quite ambitious and innovative; they set out to accomplish something musically unusual and create an unfamiliar fusion of sounds. Their fans, rather than the bands themselves, are typically the ones who reach for descriptors, perhaps a language to use as they evangelize the music. Other fans—not to mention the bands—may look to equally valid labels.
For the Steampunk-associated performers featured in this chapter, these descriptors include “Victorian grindcore” (The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing), “carnivalesque world folk” (Crystal Bright), “Dickensian Kate Bush” (Sunday Driver), “mystic country” (The Cassettes), and “Victoriandustrial, glam rock, psychotic vaudeville burlesque” (Emilie Autumn). These categories hold plenty of ambiguity and overlap.
Interestingly, this fusion often exists within a single album or oeuvre. For Max of the Absinthe Drinkers, it’s one of the genre’s appeals. According to him, “The most liberating part of Steampunk or retro-futurism is how many genres it makes available to you as an artist. Modern pop is so segmented and often really limiting. You know, Lamb of God can’t sound like Lady Gaga or both artists’ fans would have a stroke. When you get involved in setting poetry to music, suddenly you are allowing the words to point you in a particular direction: Some poems want to be tangos and some poems want to be space-age bachelor pads. This forces you to keep flexible and keep listening to ever-wider sources of inspiration.”
Exploration and Adventure: Steampunk’s Central Story
So if Steampunk music covers such a varied range of musical styles, what—if anything—is the uniting theme that ties the genre together? In search of a more universal set of descriptors, we turned to our interviewees to ask what they think defines Steampunk music as a genre.
Professor Elemental offers a concise answer: “Politeness, camaraderie, invention . . . exploration and adventure.” Richard of the Unextraordinary Gentlemen adds: “The actual sound of Steampunk is all over the map, so in that regard I would leave it up to the individual’s music taste. I would hope they would dress the part and that the lyrics conjured up some nice, fantastic imagery. I would definitely have a violin, cello, banjo, accordion, or some instrument that would give it an ‘old-timey’ feel. And for extra credit, I would add a bit of machinery to the mix by way of electronic instruments or percussive metal elements to represent the fantastic machines, crazy inventions, or the Industrial Revolution in general.”
Most agree that Steampunk music remains relatively difficult to define. “There was/is no unifying style associated with the subculture—Steampunk is a massively broad church encompassing everything from neoclassical, old-time folk, and jazz to whimsical hip-hop, world music, electro-swing, and goth,” says Andy of the Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing. This flexibility created an important opportunity for the burgeoning band, as they found an interesting and unexplored niche to fill. Despite the wide variety of musical styles currently embraced by Steampunk, “there was nothing dirty and loud. We decided to take the ‘punk’ part of Steampunk literally and imagine what a punk band would be singing about if they were from 1880 instead of 1980.”
The Lisps are a Brooklyn-based band whose rollicking and lyrically complex music was first labeled as Steampunk not by its creators, but by its fans. The Lisps’ singer/songwriter, César Alvarez, says, “In 2008, I started trying to tell a story about a Civil War soldier who was super into proto–science fiction, and then people started telling me it was Steampunk. At that point I had never heard of Steampunk. I’ve always been interested in music that compressed multiple time periods, so when I came up with the idea it felt native to what I was working on already. I wanted to create music that had the effect of looking at an old artifact at a museum, and then seeing yourself reflected back in the glass of the display case.” This story became Futurity, a Civil War–era Steampunk musical that has been performed to broad acclaim in Boston and New York.
In fact, Alvarez comments, “We’ve actually never called ourselves Steampunk. We’ve never used the term in reference to ourselves that I know of.” And while Steampunk fans definitely connected with those elements in Futurity, it was also a powerful piece of storytelling with relevance to a much broader audience. As Alvarez describes it, “It is a story about America, and imagination, and our relationship to technology.”
Emilie Autumn is another one of those “outsider” musicians who have been embraced by Steampunk fans. (She is also revered by the Gothic Lolita scene. In fact, she has developed her own passionate and totally unique following—a group of dedicated superfans who term themselves the “Plague Rats.”)
One thing that does seem to define Steampunk is an embrace of idiosyncrasy, and a disregard for pedestrian practicalities. Emilie Autumn says, “I’m never against fame or popularity, but I have no desire to be mainstream or practical, and I would think the same goes for the Steampunk scene. I mean, there is nothing practical about wearing a cage crinoline, a corset, or oversized golden goggles when your eyesight is perfectly fine. . . . Being impractical is, to me, one of Steampunk’s defining characteristics. If it’s powered by the tools of the past, it is very likely not going to be the most efficient car/gun/wheelchair/computer/communication device. But practical isn’t very romantic, is it?”
On this last point, at least, Chris of the Absinthe Drinkers can agree. He says, “The last thing I would want is for Steampunk to be useful or practical. It’s the impracticality that is part of the allure. Practical is boring and repetitive. A corset isn’t very practical, but Lord, it is a good look. Just look at the Steampunk mods of consumer electronics: beautiful but impractical. And that, I think, is one of the core concepts of retro-futurism: the beautiful machine.”
Sammy Tunis portraying Ada Lovelace in the Lisps’ Steampunk musical Futurity. Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva, courtesy of American Repertory Theater.
Anna Chen is a writer, performer, poet, and blogger; her multimedia, genre-crossing works, which often tackle issues of culture, history, and identity, have connected powerfully with both critics and audiences. Commissioned by the National Maritime Museum to create a commemorative event to mark the opening of a new Traders gallery, Chen turned to history—and Steampunk. The Traders gallery—which Chen had also been tapped to cocurate for the season—was designed to preserve the history of the East India Company from the 1600s on. Thus, Chen’s production The Steampunk Opium Wars was born.
The Opium Wars, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century, were the violent outcome of a bitter trade dispute between imperialist Britain and Qing Dynasty China. Britain’s endless thirst for tea (over six million pounds imported a year), and other goods such as silks and spices, had begun to create a severe trade deficit, particularly because China preferred to be paid solely in silver. To redress the balance, British traders began illegally importing opium, cheaply produced in India. Eventually, they were smuggling more than thirty thousand chests a year into China.
“The profits from the opium trade made fortunes, earned revenues for the British government, paid for the administration of the Empire in India and even financed a large slice of Royal Navy costs,” says Chen’s write-up of the show on her website. “When the Chinese tried to halt the import of the drug, the narco-capitalists persuaded Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Lord Melbourne’s government to go to war in 1839. The first military conflict, lasting a bloody three years, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking and the transfer of territory including Hong Kong to British rule.” More than twenty thousand Chinese people were killed in the conflict.
Anna Chen as Narrator, plus Hugo Trebels as Lin Zexu and Louise Whittle as Queen Victoria. Photo by Jan Jefferies.
It’s a sobering tale, and a dark chapter in Britain’s history. But as a poet and performer, Chen is experienced in translating sensitive material for her audience. (Her advice to writers: “Read novels for empathy. Observe how emotions work, what drives people, what undercurrents are flowing beneath the surface.”) When it came to the heavy material of the Opium Wars, she says, “Rather than tell the story flatly, I wanted to exercise my inventiveness and stimulate the audience’s imagination. So, with a combination of poetry, songs, and set pieces from the history, accompanied by some heavy electrified guitar and bass, we brought the story into the belly of the beast and performed it at the Royal National Maritime Museum in February 2012.”
The story featured fictional characters, loosely based on real-life figures; the show’s war-mongering Sir Jardine Matheson is based on William Jardine and James Matheson, who pushed for war, and its Mr. Cobstone is an amalgam of Richard Cobden and William Gladstone, two activists who opposed it. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and a laudanum-stoned version of Queen Victoria also appear.
“The night kicked off with the cast selling silver foil wraps of opium (squished malt loaf) to the audience as they came in,” says Chen. “Then I entered to a Jimi Hendrixed–up British national anthem played on screeching guitar, like Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It was all very jolly. The most moving moments were Captain Ironside recalling the attacks on the Chinese in their own land in order to make them take the East India Company’s opium at the point of a gun, and the burning of the beautiful Summer Palace.
“As a sideshow in a room off the main drag, Gary Lammin demonstrated the Hackney Tea Ceremony—like the Chinese tea ceremony, only carried out by a Cockney geezer making mugs of what we call ‘builders’ tea’ (strong PG Tips with too much sugar and slopped up with milk). It was our little joke on orientalism and still makes me laugh.”
The Steampunk Opium Wars was performed to nearly three hundred people that evening (something of a record for the museum) and live-streamed to many more. But, Chen says, “the most pleasurable aspect at the end of the night was the number of people who were shocked, surprised, and delighted by the entertainment, and who told us they’d known nothing about the subject.”
Inspired by her work on the project, Chen is now working on expanding the story of The Steampunk Opium Wars into a novel, titled The Camellia and the Poppy. “My imagination has been set loose,” she says. “It’s an epic sweep, my alternative history of the engagement between two great cultures. There may very well be airships. No goggles yet, but I’m working on it.
“[Steampunk has] turned my world from monochrome to rich sepia tones,” says Chen. “Sometimes the limits of a form can be liberating as it gives you a structure. And yet the Steampunk form is still developing. Maybe we’re in a glorious golden heyday before it settles into anything rigid—which I fervently hope it never does.”
Lauren Osborn as Annabelle in The Dolls of New Albion, written by Paul Shapera and directed by Mark Swetz. Photo by Nadia Adame.
Bringing Steampunk to the Stage
Thanks to an enthusiastic tendency toward storytelling and world-building, many Steampunk music shows have a definite performative aspect. They’ve already staked out plenty of territory for themselves on the Steampunk stage. But Steampunk, with all its theatricality and drama, offers a real world of performance possibilities.
Finnish band Pepe Deluxé—an envelope-pushing electronic group that bills themselves as an “intercontinental collective orchestra”—offers one example. The band’s latest album, Queen of the Wave, is “an esoteric pop opera” that draws on the mythology of the lost city of Atlantis, told in the rollicking fashion of an old-style Edisonade, and set to music with an eerily nostalgic flair (samples that sound like they floated in from a long-lost era, instrumentation that includes a Tesla coil synthesizer and a pneumatic percussion machine). The album’s deluxe liner notes take the form of a hard-cover book filled with stories of historical oddities, retro-style imagery, and nineteenth-century esoterica; snippets of poetry, images of the band, retro-futuristic line art, and kaleidoscopic collage. As band member James Spectrum says, “Almost every page contains something more or less unique, yet more or less true (or claiming to be true). . . . We have already created something that is mixing reality and imagination in a very, very complex way.” The result is a truly multimedia, multisensory experience, bringing together a diverse selection of art forms.
Another Steampunk performance still under development is The Dolls of New Albion, a Steampunk opera by Paul Shapera. This ninety-minute musical portrays a multigenerational saga set in a fantastical city. According to Shapera, “The story begins with lonely scientist Annabelle McAlistair’s attempt to bring back her dead love into the body of a mechanical mannequin.” As a musician, Shapera worked hard to develop a uniquely “Steampunk” sound for the music, which represents the very heart of the show; for the curious, the soundtrack can be streamed or purchased online. As far as we know, it’s the first Steampunk opera in the world. Shapera ultimately plans to develop the musical into a trilogy, and we hear a Dieselpunk opera is also in the works.
An image from Galway Theatre’s production of Dradin, In Love, based on the novella of the same name in the book City of Saints & Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer. The set design repurposed actual pages from the book, printed with illustrations by Eric Schaller and John Coulthart.
A recent production of coauthor Jeff Vander-Meer’s “Dradin, In Love” points to some of the challenges of staging science fiction and fantasy. “Dradin” isn’t specifically Steampunk, but it does subvert Victorian-era tropes. It’s a close weird cousin, like perhaps . . . Squidpunk? The story features a deranged missionary who falls in love with a woman he’s never met, only seen in an upstairs window; a Festival of the Freshwater Squid; odd living saints; and several grotesque adventures in an imaginary city called Ambergris that is like a combination of Paris, London, and a metropolis from a more southern clime. Produced by Irish theatre group Tribe in partnership with The Granary Theatre, Cork, the show was also later staged at Galway Theatre Festival. Creator and performer Bob Kelly from the Tribe Theatre group spoke to us about the challenges in bringing the story to stage.
“The stage generally isn’t kind to alternate realities,” he says. “Reimagined technologies, nonhuman species, ‘magic,’ speculative fiction—these rarely succeed in theater. The best explanation I’ve come across for this comes from J. R. R. Tolkien, when he slammed the Macbeth witches as daft—he believed that by agreeing to suspend their awareness of the theater and the actors, the audience were already engaged in one false world—and that to ask them to believe in witches and magic was then a step too far. He reckoned that Shakespeare had taken the material for a good novel and made a silly play out of it. So we had to be very careful; the line between fantasy and farce is very thin onstage.”
How did Kelly and his troupe get around this problem—and create the right type of world-building on the stage?
“We kept the projections small and distant; the images themselves were neither photos nor video, but simple animated collage pieces—crackly and grainy, very lo-fi. We added the sound of an old slide projector clacking into life. The effect we were aiming for was that of cutting-edge alternate technology—we wanted to conjure up the idea that somewhere backstage there were some little guys frantically pedaling a penny-farthing to get the thing to work. If the show comes around again, I’ll work to heighten this—I’d much rather, for example, project onto a filthy glass lens than onto a rectangular screen.”
Stills from Galway Theatre’s production of Dradin, In Love, based on the novella by Jeff VanderMeer.
The basic aim was to give everything in the play the right edge of weirdness, “familiar yet strange,” to convey the story’s “gothic tone, urban setting, the looming architecture, the variety and danger on every street, the selling of corpses to willing buyers; the sense of a massive and barely repressed rabble, prone to violent rioting or celebrating; a certain sense of opulence or decadence in the richness of the imagery and language.
“As a reference, we worked in part with the art nouveau style from the turn of the century—in particular its architecture and furniture, the curves, parabolas, and plantlike forms, which were reminiscent of the squid references that permeated the story.”
This approach worked well to dramatize a text that “works subtly and skillfully to stop the reader from thinking that they understand the world’s boundaries. Early in the story, for example, automobiles are mentioned, but only briefly; the inclusion of technologies such as this—while not defining or explaining how they fit within the world—plays against our preconceptions of the world that have been conjured up by the ‘Victorian’ imagery; in this way, the piece keeps us open to anything being possible.”
Another great example of Steampunk staging is a recent production of Karin Tidbeck’s short story “Beatrice,” also featured in this chapter. Instead of human actors, this innovative production by Swedish drama troupe Tidsrum relies on the expressive capabilities of hand-crafted puppets. Conveying fantastic elements with both subtlety and flair can be a challenging undertaking, but fortunately, it can be done. And when it’s done well, the results are magical in the best way.
What qualifies as Steampunk making? At first, that seems like an easy question to answer. A modded computer. A well-cut, nineteenth-century-inspired dress. An intricate gear-work necklace. A prop gun that shoots out Nerf darts or roars like a fire engine when the trigger is pulled. When it comes to theater and performance, however, can you “make” a Steampunk experience?
The theatricality inherent in Steampunk objects is undeniable. They become characters themselves and have to explain two backstories: the technical one—“How did you make it?”—and the fantastical one, which is usually a highly embellished version of how the Steampunk character (cutely referred to as a “steamsona”) built this, and perhaps, a detailed explanation of how this invention uses electric eels, etheric energy, or sonic waves to function. The Steampunk aesthetic brings a heightened sense of imagination to its craftwork, because the art is also expected to act larger than life and tell its own story.
Mainstream interpretations of Steampunk performances aren’t hard to miss. There are highly stylized music videos of Panic! at the Disco, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Rush. Syfy’s Warehouse 13 sported gadgets invented by H. G. Wells and Nikola Tesla. NBC’s Dracula arguably became the “Steampunk TV show” currently on-air as soon as people noticed the gears turning in the opening credits. Often, however, the lot of Steampunk performers isn’t as appreciated by those outside the community, even though missing their presence is like not seeing the forest for the trees.
Steampunk performance manifests itself in a variety of ways. Firstly, the vintage arts—which have their roots in the nineteenth century—are being given renewed life: burlesque, pinups, vaudeville, circus acts, belly dancing. Enrique Velazquez, otherwise known as Doc Quincy E. Quarter-main (Doctor Q for short), is a Steampunk DJ who also runs the Artifice Club out of Atlanta, Georgia. The Artifice Club is an organization dedicated to fostering the vintage arts. He views the performers he supports and the events he creates as intricately tied to Steampunk’s innate creativity: “What Steampunk brings to the table is the spirit of reappropriation that the maker movement pioneered, blended with the sense of wonder of futures that never were, inspired by the founders of science fiction, all with our own unique spirit of independence with the occasional hint of anarchy. It makes for unbridled creativity with a touch of the familiar.”
Performance personas are worked into music, making, and fashion design. These steam-sonas are performed at conventions, role-playing games, and other events. Many creators who aren’t actors suddenly acquire stage selves and subculture names, like Jake von Slatt and the late Datamancer, or the musicians Captain Robert of Abney Park, Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer, and Doctor Steel (the originator of the catchphrase that serves as this sidebar’s title). Theater in Steampunk can be as top-notch as professional productions of Shakespeare using the industrial motif. Or it can be as simple as players in a live-action role-playing game, such as the well-known Steam & Cinders from Massachusetts.
More than your average cosplayer is a creator like Justin Stanley, an assemblage artist who also does performance work. Stanley describes his art as “taking puzzle pieces of someone’s past and forming them together to create a window into another world.” As the “Emperor Justinian Stan-islaus,” Stanley rules the Multiverse against the DULL. “Using imagination and creativity is the source of truly enjoying life,” he explains. The Emperor also runs the Red Fork Empire, which is a real-life artist collective as opposed to an oppressive regime.
The lightheartedness of Steampunk inspired activist Miriam Rosenberg Rocček to create her Steampunk persona, Emma Goldman, based on the historical Russian Jewish anarchist. “Part of what I’m always trying to do is make politics and history more fun and entertaining,” says Rocček, “and by putting in Steampunk, it is reassuring people that they are not looking for something too serious or academic.” As Steampunk Emma Goldman, Rocček has led political rallies at conventions to spread awareness, and she puts “your politics into your Steampunk, and your Steampunk into your politics” using her blog and Facebook page.
Steampunk opens the way for innovative storytelling methods as well. The League of S.T.E.A.M., a transmedia production company, does live shows, runs an award-winning web series, and manages the Jr. League W.A.T.C.H., an interactive fan club. “I like to describe [our work] as live shows using close-up magic with technology as opposed to trickery,” explains Glenn Freund, one of the members in this popular troupe. He started off as a hobbyist, but over the years he now considers himself an artist because of the League. To Freund, the difference between these labels is how an artist gains a sense of focus: “[the] act and energy into what you’re doing [versus] understanding the consequence of the art you’re doing.” The League inspired other people to do similar work worldwide; the newest organization of this type is the Adventurers League of G.E.A.R.S. artists’ collective in New Orleans.
Yomi Ayeni, producer of the transmedia event Clockwork Watch in London, agrees that this type of interactive platform-jumping gives everyone the capability to believe in their artistic selves. “Life is a multifaceted world, and the things that you share are deeply personal: A woman who gets off of a bus and is given a rose may think the world is beautiful, a man who stepped out of a movie theater may suddenly see the world as cosmic. . . . We want each aspect of the story that people bring to create some positive difference,” Ayeni says. During our Skype interview, he gushed about Haley Moore of Laser Lace Letters as an example. Moore had written stories set in the Clockwork Watch universe, and she became so inspired by her art for Clockwork Watch that she quit her job to become a full-time maker and independently crowd-sourced more than $17,000 to set up her own business. She is currently writing a six-part spin-off series that Clockwork Watch will publish.
Spaces for art and performance aren’t limited to the stage, either: even a hotel can suffice. Just ask Eric Larson, aka Lord Hastings Robert Bobbins, whose directorial method of running Wisconsin-based TeslaCon turns a convention into a theatrical experience. In TeslaCon’s “immersive” environment, people can come and play in TeslaCon’s world as their own characters. “People are able to explore a part of themselves, albeit with a character or invented person that they usually wouldn’t do in public that they feel okay doing here at the convention,” Larson observes. Steampunk isn’t only about the costuming, according to him, but the personality that can come out of the clothing. There, hallways and lobbies are transformed into interiors of submarines and rocket ships. A staff of professional actors (and some life-sized puppets!) facilitates an ongoing, four-year story line. Films let audiences travel to the moon or fight underwater battles. In this world that is more than make-believe, Larson says, “Attendees are able to express themselves in ways that make them grow as a person.”
The capability of opening the imagination to create stronger human connections is another lasting impact of Steampunk performance. The League of S.T.E.A.M., for example, has done shows at Disneyland, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and even at a private event of two hundred billionaires. No matter from what background, Steampunk catches people’s attention. “People are first curious, excited, and entertained. Our work is tangible disbelief,” says Freund. “It’s all plausible enough for people to enjoy it.”
Rocček notices how her informal acting establishes a shared love for an extraordinary historical figure. “I’ve had people write to me with personal stories about Emma, or even say, ‘I’m visiting the Haymarket and thought of you,’ or ‘I left a rose on your grave.’ People have things that they wish to say to her, and I think sometimes, on a good day, my character provides an outlet for that.”
Miriam Rosenburg Roček as Steampunk Emma Goldman at Steampunk World Fair. Photo credit: Miriam Rosen-burg Roček.
Velazquez recounted the story of one man who suffers from chronic pain and rarely left the house before he and his wife started attending the Artifice Club’s Mechanical Masquerade, and he looks forward to those minutes on the dance floor when he can be together with her. “What I work on, and what my team helps plan and run, provides hope for someone and something to look forward to.”
What Steampunk objects and performances have in common, then, is that both contain an effusive outpouring of creative excess that brings people together. The physicality of Steampunk is reinforced by performance: By dealing with the materials, people touch the immaterial parts of themselves, the bonds of a community. Hope and new possibilities become symbolized by the objects Steampunks cherish and construct. This is more than simple beauty, but the meaning of art itself.
Larson makes this point most succinctly: “I see Steampunk creation as a whole interconnected system, where different art forms cannot be sectioned off from each other. The makers are influenced by the designers; the designers, the mechanics; the mechanics, the dressmakers; the dressmakers back to the modders. That’s how it works.”
That is why, to many Steampunk creators, Steampunk isn’t only a “look” but also a mode of being, a state of creativity that draws upon both the darkness and the light of the past to try to create an imagined utopic space in the present day. Performance and queer studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz—not a Steampunk, but certainly one of the academic inspirations behind this article, and my late mentor—believed in the power that is embodied in a range of performances from drag shows to theater; we once talked about Steampunk in this light, too. Muñoz wrote about the importance of these performances as being extraordinary visions of new futures evoked against today’s drab, imperfect world: “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Likewise, Steampunk performance reaches for something greater than the sum of its parts—the dream of a more fascinating, beautiful, and wondrous reality.
Diana M. Pho is a scholar, editor, activist, and performer. In the Steampunk community, she is known as Ay-leen the Peacemaker and runs Beyond Victoriana, the award-winning blog on multicultural Steampunk. She also has a master’s degree in performance studies from New York University, where her final project focused on using Steampunk as an empowering storytelling vehicle for marginalized people.
Finding the Path to Steampunk
Are Steampunk musicians born or made? Perhaps a little of both. Though Steampunk music and performance remains a niche, for many of the artists we talked to, it was simply the most natural expression of their interests and experiences.
Take Voltaire. A longtime staple of the Steampunk scene, Voltaire is a multitasking Renaissance man whose creative output includes song-writing and musical performances, a career in stop-motion animation, a comic book series that was developed by Syfy into a fourteen-episode animated web series (written and directed by Voltaire himself), and even a foray into toy making. His music falls under the auspices of dark cabaret, or, according to his current bio, “a collection of murder ballads, tongue-in-cheek exercises in the macabre, with just enough bawdy songs about Star Trek and Star Wars to keep a convention audience rolling in the aisles.”
For someone so multitalented and creatively inclined, perhaps the gravitation toward Steampunk was inevitable. Voltaire says, “I’ve always loved the macabre, the gothic, science fiction, horror, fantasy, pageantry, the antiquated and elegant. I suppose it stands to reason that whatever I create will be informed by these things I love. The beauty of being inspired by many, sometimes disparate, things, is that the art you create in turn could potentially be a very new or unique melding of different influences; a new recipe using existing ingredients, if you will.”
For Shelby of the Cassettes, Victoriana served as an early reference point. He says, “I’ve always been attracted to imagery of early transportation and the imaginings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. . . . At a point in 2003, the Cassettes took a more roots-music turn and it felt right to begin to explore those ‘Steampunk’ themes with our music and imagery.”
Crystal Bright, front woman of the “kaleidophrenic cabaret” act Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands, grew into her unique, eclectic sound by way of a surprisingly circuitous journey around the world. “There was not one single path that led me to the music and art I create now, but many. I’ve always been interested in other cultures and their music, especially the Roma, and I went on to study anthropology and ethnomusicology, which expanded my knowledge and interests even more.” She’s played with a wide variety of musical ensembles, drawing on such diverse influences as mariachi, Ugandan, Chinese, and Brazilian music. She’s studied salsa, flamenco, and West African dance. She even plays the accordion and the concertina, an Argentinean drum, and an Ugandan harp.
Sunday Driver is another band with a particularly eclectic blend of influences, an exciting fusion of classical Indian music and English folk. Like many, Sunday Driver stumbled into Steampunk by happy accident, through interests both aesthetic and political. “We were kind of ‘doing’ Steampunk before we realized it existed as a genre. Our first album, In the City of Dreadful Night, was inspired by thinking about cities—particularly Calcutta and London—in Victorian times. We conjured up apocalyptic scenes of poverty and squalor—things people wouldn’t normally talk about or sing about but which existed behind all the decadence and grandeur. Our songs touched on vermin, whorehouses, opium dens, and other such delights. It was an attempt to expose the hypocrisy in how history is told.”
Sunday Driver worked to realize this vision through their entire act, drawing on visual aspects such as costumes and stage sets. The approach, however, elicited confusion from some of their viewers. “Most people didn’t know what to make of us when we turned up to play in indie music venues—why was the guitarist performing in a dirty old turban? Why was the clarinet player in a rather immodest corset?” Then, one day, the band turned up to play at an event billed as Steampunk . . . and found an incredibly receptive audience. “They just seemed to get our music and what we were doing without needing any explanation. It felt like coming home.”
Steampunk Music’s Past and Future: Steering Clear of Clichés
Despite its inclusive categories, Steampunk music—particularly those bands that self-identify as such—can also be a somewhat insular community, riffing on an increasingly self-referential set of material. As a result, there are certain genre conventions that have become a little too familiar to those in the Steampunk scene.
Abney Park is one of today’s longest-running Steampunk acts; they staked their claim when Steampunk was still a wild, woolly, and unfamiliar frontier. As a result, they are probably the best-known Steampunk band today, or at least one of the first names that comes to mind. They have observed Steampunk’s steady rise over the past decade or so, and all the changes that an exponential growth in popularity has brought to the scene.
Many of those have been wonderful changes, but some have also been less welcome; for example, Abney Park member Robert expressed frustration with the ways in which Steampunk has become a commodity. “I’m fairly annoyed by people dressing Steampunk, then making music with zero vintage in the sound, and calling themselves Steampunk music makers,” he says. “There are also a ton more clones these days. Cosplayers playacting they are Steampunks in a hotel lobby. People, instead of being their own original interpretation on Steampunk, show up looking almost identical to everyone else.”
Compared to Abney Park, the Clockwork Dolls are a much newer addition to the scene. Their first album, Dramatis Personae, is a richly narrative work set in a “neo-Victorian Steampunk universe.” Their second album, however, pushes into retro-futurist territory that is decidedly less well trod; inspired by the era of World War II, When Banners Fall is described by the band as “a tribute to our greatest generation in their darkest hour.” Despite the different approaches in their work, the Clockwork Dolls’ composer and keyboardist Allison Curval agrees with Abney Park’s take on Steampunk music clichés; she says, “I would love—and I know people will kill me for talking about this—to see less of an emphasis on just playing music with goggles on your hats and more of an emphasis in creating music that takes its inspiration from history. After all, isn’t that a big part of what Steampunk is? The fictional future filtered through the imagination of the past?”
But for the most part, musicians seem to take a pretty tolerant attitude toward Steampunk clichés. For example, the Mechanisms, another folk-inspired cabaret act that incorporates spirited storytelling into their boisterous performances, playacting futuristic fairy tales as portrayed by Steampunk space pirates. They spoke up on behalf of conventions: “First, we’d like to say we’re really uncomfortable with being disparaging about clichés. Tropes and clichés are not in themselves a bad thing. We don’t want to say that, for instance, goggles are clichéd, and have that come across as our saying ‘Don’t wear goggles.’ Apart from anything else, that would be wildly hypocritical, given how many of us own goggles!”
The important thing is feeling free to experiment, neither beholden to convention nor determined to flout it. “What is more of a problem than clichés themselves is people feeling constrained by clichés,” the Mechanisms add. “Tropes and clichés aren’t bad, but it’s important to have the freedom to play with them, and to recognize that there is space under the ‘Steampunk’ label for people who embrace them, people who want to subvert them or use them in unusual ways, and people who avoid them in favor of less commonly explored areas.”
One interesting musical act currently exploring the far edges of subversion is the Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing. Their rather unwieldy name is a reference to a scrawled line of enigmatic graffiti attributed by some to Jack the Ripper, the mysterious serial killer who terrorized London in the late 1880s. Vocalist and guitarist Andy Heintz also emphasized the diversity of Steampunk music, which has just as much room for a raucous, abrasive, and bitingly comedic band like the Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing. “I don’t think anything is clichéd in Steampunk music, simply because there is no particular sound you can point at and call Steampunk—it’s more to do with attitude, visual style, and lyrical subject matter,” he says, adding, “Every Steampunk band approaches the music from their own direction, and there is room in the scene for all of us, from Abney Park’s cosplay world of sky pirates, through the whimsy of Professor Elemental’s chap-hop, to our filthy Victorian Whitechapel punk underclass.”
Steampunk Music’s Past and Future: Pursuing the New
So what does the future hold for Steampunk music and performance? Hopefully, lots more experimentation and innovation, with a generous dose of mad invention and social change.
“It would be great if more Steampunk artists would write less for a genre and more from their own personal creativity and inspiration,” observes Crystal Bright. “I personally would love to see more instruments like my own being used, such as accordion, saw, and other acoustic instruments, because if that apocalypse that Steampunk refers to a lot comes, and we have limited sources of power, then the show will go on!”
The Cassettes, a self-described “mystic country” band, are an inventive and original group that tends to skirt the boundary between vaudevillian Steampunk and scrappy indie rock. With an eye toward Steampunk music’s future, front man Shelby Cinca tells us, “I’d like to see more explorations in the rhythms of locomotives, music with minimal or no electricity, to really engage the thoughts of an alternate ‘Steampunk’ retro-future and what that would be inspired from, with less of the ‘Hollywood’ aspects.” He adds, “I think, ethically, I’d love to see a more ‘punk’ approach to it all—booking shows in barns, Victorian mansions, etc. . . . breaking out of the sci-fi/fantasy conventions and rock club thing.”
Speaking of that “punk” approach, the Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing focus less on Steampunk’s musical future and more on its untapped potential as a political movement. According to Andy Heintz, Steampunk is still mired in some of the especially problematic aspects of the Victorian era, at times supporting rather than subverting. “Steampunk as a whole tends to fetishize the upper classes, aristocracy, and military—we want to redress the balance. In the words of Occupy, we are the ninety-nine percent,” says Andy. “Victorian society was a horrible, racist, sexist, violent, sick place, and pretending to be Lord This or Lady That denies that reality. The most interesting and inspiring people of those times actually hated being Victorians and all the rules and etiquette that society forced on them. We want to celebrate the underdogs, the workers, and the misfits, but also use the Victorian era as an allegory to comment on the present.”
Perhaps there’s a reason why Steampunk feels so politically relevant to this day and age, as comments Max of the Absinthe Drinkers. “Steampunk’s preoccupation with Victorianism and the Gilded Age is interesting, considering that we are in a sort of second Gilded Age right now,” he says. “Just as today, great scientific advancements and mind-boggling wealth went hand in hand with terrible inequality and a political system still muddling to adapt to these new conditions. I think that the Victorian/Gilded Age speaks to us because people then were so fascinated and appalled by their own modernity, rather the way we are by our own gains and failures.”
DIY for Musicians and Performers
The do-it-yourself impulse manifests itself in the maker’s fascination with technology that can be taken apart and tinkered with (and hopefully put back together again), and the cosplayer’s commitment to crafting a gorgeous costume from bits and scraps. But does the DIY ethic apply to musical acts, too? The answer is a resounding, enthusiastic YES.
For example, Abney Park says, “Everything we do is DIY. Nothing we use onstage is unadorned. Our studio is fully Steampunk, from floor to ceiling. Our outfits are all handmade. We ourselves do nearly everything that goes into our albums, and anything we ‘farm out’ we are really just employing our friends to do.”
“DIY is paramount for us,” agree the Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing. “We do everything ourselves—from organizing our gigs and tours to recording and releasing records and making merchandise. We produce fanzines and encourage others to do things and make things for themselves. (We released two wax cylinders of songs along with instructions on how to make an ‘Edison-style’ player to play them on, for example.) This is why we feel so at home in the Steampunk scene.”
And, for some performers, DIY extends beyond the art of set design or the business of marketing and promotion into the more technical aspects of music making itself. Shelby Cinca offers up the Cassettes’ own thereminist as an example: “Our thereminist has been working on sequences and theremins since the eighties,” says Cinca. “He creates his own designs and sells them online. . . . It is his life’s work to perfect his theremin designs and it is just what drives him in his creativity.”
Where do Steampunk-style musicians and performers find their ideas? Everywhere! As Malcom from the Unextraordinary Gentlemen comments, “Inspiration is the name of the universe”—and the sources that inspire creativity are wild, joyous, and diverse. So open your eyes, and your ears!
“Comics inspire me a lot, as do long journeys and my ridiculous children. Beyond that, it is mostly conversations that help turn ideas into songs—ideally those late-night CONVERSATIONS with close friends that end with the words ‘Well, you could never do a SONG about that.’”
—Professor Elemental
“Movies, TV, and books. Spending time away from music and living life tends to RECHARGE the batteries. I tend to not be creative if I just sit there and say, ‘I’m going to write a song today.’”
—Richard, Unextraordinary Gentlemen
“I always say that I’m inspired by mediocrity and garbage. SERIOUSLY. When I turn on the radio or a TV and I’m appalled by what passes as ‘art,’ I have a dialogue with myself. It generally consists of me telling myself that I’m probably not the best musician, or filmmaker, or author, but that I could probably do better than what I’ve just seen. It inspires me to create. It gives me the confidence to try.”
—Voltaire
“I’m inspired by my life. As traumatic THINGS happen, I tend to try to put them into little METAPHORICAL stories to help me deal with them.”
—Robert, Abney Park
“Stories, I love stories. Stories flesh out our lives and give our experiences context. They also make writing a song a visceral experience. Without a narrative there can be no product. That’s the serious answer. . . . The other answer is video games. I play a lot of VIDEO games.”
—Allison, Clockwork Dolls
“I am inspired by characters, archetypes, and great stories. I want to go on journeys, and I want to take beautiful people with me. I want to live these stories and I don’t want to do it alone. I need people to come with me, and I need my STORY to be good enough that they will want to. I need to share, and I need to give. I was put on this earth to serve. I know this. I love this. Share with me your ears, your eyes, your time, and I will give you the world. I’ll even make you a whole new world. That’s all I need.”
—Emilie Autumn
I am a percussionist. Lots of percussionists perform music that was composed entirely by someone else (often someone whom they’ve never met, and more likely still, someone who hasn’t celebrated their own birthday in a few centuries). These types of percussionists have their complete parts transcribed in meticulous detail on many pages of paper that they carefully monitor and respond to accordingly, always obliging the frantic, baton-wielding traffic cop that gestures from a center-stage podium.
I have never been one of those types of percussionists.
I spent my teenage years (the 1990s) playing a variety of popular musical styles in suburban basements and garages, took a wrong turn into a conservatory jazz program that lacked forward thinking, found myself in the middle of a bustling arts community in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (replete with absinthe-fueled, orgiastic happenings, operating out of the then-multitude of abandoned spaces in the area), and worked as a burlesque drummer—alongside graceful contortionists and sword-swallowing comedians—for nearly a decade; it was perhaps the twenty-first-century equivalent of joining the circus.
Feeling constrained by my store-bought, mass-produced musical equipment, in 2007 I began experimenting with an array of found objects. I’ve heard that necessity is the mother of invention, and around that time I found myself in creative musical situations that begged for a more diverse collection of sounds than my typical assortment of drums, cymbals, and standard auxiliary percussion could supply.
I had recently joined the Brooklyn-based indie-vaudeville band the Lisps, and the contributing songwriter—César Alvarez—and I were digging through his father’s collection of rusty tools in the garage of his parents’ house in Yonkers, New York, searching for something that we felt was missing from one of the tracks off of our nearly completed debut full-length album—Country Doctor Museum.
Eric Farber posing with his work Batterie-en-Valise: music for two percussionists and five suitcases. Photo by Dani Leventhal.
We were unable to specify exactly what we were looking for, but recognized that the current state of the percussion sounds on the rowdy song “The Familiar Drunk” were too conventional to match the whiskey-induced auctioneer-paced lyrics, and the woozy, irreverent vocal melody. Buried in an abandoned corner of the garage was an empty two-door filing cabinet. We also discovered a collection of large monkey wrenches, and a few other nameless, dust-covered items. Banging on the thin steel top of the filing cabinet with the heavy monkey wrenches produced a unique cavernous thud that complemented the recording nicely, and which ultimately became integrated in the Lisps’ live performances. This experiment sparked my interest in the creative process of bricolage—the generating of work from components that happen to be available or accessible at the time.
Since then I have done a great deal of collecting and tinkering, developing a unique arsenal of found-percussion, which I employ in a multitude of contexts. I built a series of large, manually powered percussion machines for the Lisps’ sci-fi Civil War musical FuTURITY (in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA). Juxtaposing decaying remains of mechanized industry, these hand-cranked “drum machines” play a series of melodies upon activation—a forgotten flywheel becomes a giant music box; a Victorian sewing machine treadle plays a melody on a pair of spinning art deco film reels.
For the Foundry Theatre’s 2013 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan (which appeared at La MaMa and the Public Theater in New York City), I created a portable assemblage of percussive found objects which are mounted to the inside of a wood-framed attaché case from the mid-1960s. The briefcase flips open and its contents get played while it rests on my lap. Enjoying the challenge and value of building such assemblages tailored to the inside dimensions of an existing space, I built five more cases with various percussive purposes, and composed a series of music for a new original project—Batterie-en-Valise: music for two percussionists and five suitcases.
This type of work is intrinsically tied to the act of happening upon objects and materials, since much of what I use is not regularly stocked at a local retailer, but is found farther out on the fringes. A certain amount of “luck” (which involves some mix of access, learned skill, intuition, and literal dumb luck) plays a huge role in the outcome of these projects, as it determines the materials that I will work with. Also required is a creative imagination, within which I can play with an object that I may come across, and wonder about its potential, while considering the context of other objects or projects I may already have.
I began this writing describing a certain relationship between composers and musicians, and considering where I fit into that equation. Many composers start their work with a certain sound, melody, or concept in mind, and then set out to find the appropriate instrumentation—whether conventional musical instruments or objects that are less standard—to satisfy their demands. I tend to take an opposite approach.
I’d like to think that my projects represent a collaboration between myself and the objects that I work with. An object’s formal qualities—to what extent it is resonant, mountable, functional, etc.—is the greatest factor in determining the way the pieces come together structurally, and the music that is ultimately generated from the assemblages. Approaching an object by considering its potential to perform reliably in some way, while conjuring a certain respect for it as an autonomous object with its own historical reality, has been the closest thing to a formula that I have developed for asking an object about how it wants to be involved in my project of making music.
Eric Farber has lived in Brooklyn, New York, since 2004. His “found-percussion” assemblages have been featured in a number of regional and off-Broadway theater productions, including the Foundry Theatre’s Good Person of Szechwan, and Futurity: A Musical by The Lisps. See Eric’s work at www.kineticontology.com.
Pennsylvania by Eric Farber, built in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA. Photo by Dani Leventhal.
Inspired to try your own DIY project? In this next piece, musician and performer Matt Lorenz demonstrates how he created two offbeat musical instruments from found materials. The first—the “bonebox”—is a percussion instrument similar to a wind chime, created from an unlikely source. The second is a banjo-like instrument made from a tin can, leading to the obvious moniker “canjo.”
Part I: Making the Bonebox
I’m the type of person who collects bones, old silverware, and odd little items that seem to have life in them. For the longest time, this ever-growing collection cluttered my shelves and drawers, occasionally overflowing and finding its way into some kind of sculpture project. Recently, I was searching for sounds for the Suitcase Junket (my one-man band) and dropped a box of bones on the floor. It sounded great, so I decided to do something about it. Here’s a play-by-play.
1. I used a cheap hi-hat stand I had laying around.
2, 3. I found a nice old box (I like the sound of wood, but metal would probably be interesting, too) and drilled a hole in the middle of it the size of the hi-hat stand where it will sit. Then I set the box onto the stand.
4. The clutch for the hi-hat stand is what usually holds the top cymbal and attaches it to the rod that moves up and down.
5. I decided on an old 8mm film reel to act as my “top cymbal.”
6. Attaching the clutch to the film reel can be tricky. Some fit quite nicely, but you may have to widen the hole in the reel with a drill bit.
7. Next, I tied all the trinkets, doodads, and whatnots to the reel, trying to keep the weight balanced.
8, 9. Lastly, I put the clutch and reel onto the hi-hat stand and experimented with height. I set mine so that most of the pieces are just barely touching the box or are floating slightly above it. It sounds like a little tiny troop of marching marionettes. I intend to make more of these with different sets of objects, as I still have a lot of detritus kicking around in my room.
1. Here are some things you will need in order to make a canjo: A can (the size and shape of which will determine the sound you get), a sturdy piece of wood such as a broom handle (this will be the neck and fingerboard), a guitar or banjo string, an awl (anything that can poke a hole through metal will do), some pliers, an eye hook, and a random object that will serve as a bridge. (I prefer teeth, a nicely shaped bone, or that particular piece of curtain rod hardware that holds the rod to the window frame.)
2. Lay the wood across the middle of the closed end of the can and mark just below the can’s lip the approximate size of the wood. Make your marks slightly smaller than the wood. This will make for a more snug fit later on.
3. Poke a hole in the middle of the marked spots.
4. Use the pliers to widen the small holes to just under the size of your wood. This is fairly easily done by pushing and twisting the pliers into the can. (Do be careful with the edges of the metal, as they are sharp and will draw blood.)
5. You should now have two holes directly across from each other just under the closed end of the can.
6. Insert the wood handle and work it through both holes.
7. Twisting back and forth as you push usually works nicely and makes a fine little design as well. Leaving the two holes slightly smaller than the wood makes it so the can itself is holding the wood in place so there is no need for extra hardware.
8. Starting to look like an instrument already!
9. I forgot to mention that you will need a drill of some kind and a drill bit. The bit should be larger than the string but smaller than the ball at the end of the string. This hole here is in what you’d call the tailpiece.
10. This next hole is to be drilled on the other end, in the headstock.
11. The third hole is a pilot hole. It goes about halfway through and should be an inch or two above the other hole in the headstock on the backside of the neck. This is where the eye hook will be screwed in. Without a pilot hole, the eye hook will most likely split the wood.
12. Screw in the eye hook just a few turns.
13. Insert the string up through the hole in the tailpiece . . .
14. Then down through the hole in the headstock.
15. Tie the string to the eye hook using a double granny knot. (Instead of looping the string through once, do it twice.)
16, 17. Using a nail to tighten the eye hook spares your fingers and gives you some mechanical advantage.
18. In choosing a bridge, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, it needs to be tall enough to lift the string above the lip of the can. (Sometimes I hammer down the edge of the can so as to have more leeway for the string.) Second, the bridge is what transfers the sound from the string to the can bottom. Different materials/objects very much control the sound of the instrument. I recommend experimenting with different things. In my experience, tooth and bone do a good job of this, but metal and wood have their own interesting sounds as well.
19. Picks can be made from just about anything. Bouncing the tuning nail on the string sounds pretty good, too. If you like a slide sound, I recommend using a bottle neck or a knife, and if you want to try bowing the string and don’t have a violin bow, try unwaxed dental floss strung between the ends of a bent sapling branch. (You will need a lot of rosin on the bow strings if you try this. It can be bought at almost any music store.)
Matt Lorenz is a compulsive creator of sights and sounds. He hails from the Connecticut River Valley in Vermont and Massachusetts and can often be found touring with the Suitcase Junket (his one-man band; www.thesuitcasejunket.com) or Rusty Belle (a sibling trio; www.rustybelle.com). You can see more of Lorenz’s projects at www.makingwhatiwant.com.
Learning the Basics: The Steampunk Musician’s Tools
Just as fortune favors the prepared, DIY rewards the diligent. Luckily, it’s a self-reinforcing cycle; the more you do it yourself, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more successful your DIY projects will be.
That’s not to say it will always be easy. At one point or another, every creative person faces a gap between the limits of their ability and the reaches of their ambition; the trick is working through it. “My difficulty from the very start has always been trying to express myself onstage and tell my stories within the limitations of essentially having a budget of ten dollars, and with a creative staff of exactly one person—me,” comments Emilie Autumn. “I’ve always wanted more tools at my creative disposal, naturally, and have worked every day from the beginning toward building those tools.”
So how do you learn the basics? And what can an aspiring musician do to expand the tools at their disposal? For César Alvarez of the Lisps, the learning process involved: “School. Reading. Making work. Putting my work onstage even though it wasn’t quite ready. Asking successful people to speak with me about their work. After failing and being rejected numerous times, just keep going.”
Amour Obscur is a Brooklyn-based band with a retro-futurist sound that New York magazine termed “Weimar punk”; their influences include traditional Romany music and 1920s Berlin cabaret. (In fact, singer Dee Dee Vega’s past experience includes performing in a contemporary cabaret in Berlin.) The band beefed up their skills and logged their practice hours together, using a method that’s a bit unusual in this day and age: busking.
It makes sense, considering they live in Brooklyn, where it’s not uncommon for buskers to set up shop on busy blocks, in tourist-heavy parks, and on crowded subway platforms. “Busking is an excellent way of streamlining your performance,” says the band’s accordion player, Matt Dallow. “When I started busking, I would busk alone, and I would play most of my repertoire, then figure out what songs made me the most money, and I’d play them over and over again. When recording Amour Obscur’s upcoming album, our single ‘Berlin, Your Dance Partner Is Death’ was only recently written, and as we performed it more and more, it changed a little bit, not majorly, but little glissandos and fills and whatnot were added to showcase transitions and the next sections. . . . I call this the marination period of a song. . . . It’s like how a play is so much more powerful and exciting after the first week.”
“Like with anything, it’s just a lot of practice, discipline, and having the drive to keep going,” concludes Richard of the Unextraordinary Gentlemen. “Plus, it helps to know people who are doing what you want to do and learn from them. Also, we get by with a little help from our friends.”
It’s true; the Steampunk community is a particularly supportive one. Chances are, if you need a little help or guidance, all you have to do is ask.
The Creative Life: A Working Process for Musicians and Performers
So. You have your grand idea. You have an idea of what your sound sounds like. And you aren’t half bad on the harmonica. What comes next? How do you turn a whistled couple of notes or a fragment of a lyric into a finished song? Well, César Alvarez of the Lisps broke down his working process for us like this:
Have idea. > Look up on Internet. >
Read Wikipedia. > Read books. >
Watch videos. > Write songs. >
Apply for grants. > Get rejected. >
Put on show anyway. > Invite friends. >
Pay bills somehow. > Repeat.
More seriously, most musical acts—especially those with two or more members—have a process that involves both solitary and collaborative brainstorming. Typically, musicians make a point of recording those fleeting, random bursts of inspiration, whether by writing down the lyrics, transcribing the musical notes, or recording themselves as they play the tune. Then they bring these pieces to the group and work together to flesh the fragments out into a full-length song. (A solo performer often has a similar process, except instead of setting aside time to brainstorm with bandmates, they devote a specific time to working in a focused way; this time is distinct from more flexible periods of unfocused creative noodling.) Once they have a working song, they play it through a few times and allow it to evolve naturally and organically.
Research can also play a role, especially for performers with a more narrative approach to songwriting. Take, for example, when the Clockwork Dolls were putting together their World War II–influenced album, When Banners Fall. Composer Allison Curval took her research duties for this project seriously: “I did research as far as immersing myself in the cultural landscape of the period. I listened to a lot of newsreels, old-time radio, speeches from the leaders of the time, and at one point even tried to ration myself appropriately (it didn’t go so well).” She believes this kind of work is essential: “I think historical research is vital for anyone interested even on the superficial level of going into Steampunk or any sort of retro-futurism, because it’s the framework that one builds upon,” she says.
While implementing an Industrial Age diet may be a bit extreme, there is no doubt that every creative team has its own little quirks. Whether for an individual artist or a collaborative group, there are certain practices that signal “Okay, it’s time to work.” When you hit on one of these talismanic symbols or Pavlovian practices, it’s best to go with the flow. For Amour Obscur, the creative process includes holing up together in singer Dee Dee’s apartment “for an evening with a handle of Evan Williams and her weird little dog.” Robert of Abney Park likes to spend rainy days in the studio, going through notes and turning the fragments of inspiration into songs. And Kat from Sunday Driver says, “I don’t want to give away too many of our secrets, but I can tell you it involves a lot of tea.”
One thing is evident: Our accomplished musicians and performers rely heavily on their creative beverage of choice. So pick your poison—whether it be a bottle of whiskey, a pot of tea, or a historically appropriate glass of absinthe—and settle down to brainstorm.
Collaboration with the Band
As evidenced by the previous section, collaboration is often a critical aspect of the creative process, especially for musical acts. Of course, when you get together a bunch of talented people with an ambitious goal, an assortment of instruments, and quite possibly a big pot of tea, there is plenty of energy to fuel the creative process—and, occasionally, a few obstacles to slow it down.
On the one hand, having a large group comprised of different personalities makes it easier to work through creative challenges, and solve them; there are lots of advantages when it comes to heavy-duty brainstorming or tackling a variety of responsibilities. On the other hand, visions can conflict, and compromise can be a slow and sticky process. But collaboration also has its rewards.
Robert of Abney Park commented on one advantage: never having to shoulder the burden of invention alone. “Occasionally even the most prolific artists will get stuck on songs,” says Robert. “Having a small army of talented people at your call to help you push a song from ‘Eh’ to ‘Wow!’ really helps keep things moving forward.”
“What’s nice about being together for so long is that we’ve got used to how we work, and have learned how to harness our creative tensions in a very positive way,” says Kat of Sunday Driver. “We used to argue a lot . . . but now we can do it in a way that leads to something great, rather than stropping out to make tea. I think it’s a lot like a marriage, but with seven people. You have to learn to give and take, and you get comfortable with each other’s quirks, but there’s still a big dollop of passion that makes for great sex. Did I say sex? I meant great music.”
There are also logistical challenges to achieving creative harmony as a group. It’s great having lots of hands on deck for brainstorming sessions, but those sessions can be hard to schedule—a challenge that increases exponentially as the group grows in size. This is something the Mechanisms have particularly discovered, as “the crew” currently numbers ten, more or less. “There are practical difficulties in getting everyone in the same place at the same time . . . and sometimes with fitting everyone onstage!” But the advantages of having a big group grow exponentially as well: “There’s also a lot of diversity of ideas and tastes, which is both a good and a bad thing—we talk over each other and get sidetracked a lot, but in the end we do come up with a far richer and more varied end product than any one or two of us could produce alone.”
As the Cassettes’ Shelby Cinca comments, “It can definitely be tricky to organize the different types of personalities in a group. Thereminists can be fickle, and tabla players can wander, but in the end it is extremely rewarding, since, when such a mismatched and ragtag bunch are all onstage syncing musically, it is truly beautiful.”
When collaboration works, it’s magic, and when a group of creatively talented people just click, the result is often sublime, producing much more fantastic and original work than any one person could create on their own. The trick is finding the conspirators and co-creators who make your musical heart soar. For Voltaire, that means looking to work with people he truly admires from an artistic perspective. He says, “I like to surround myself with people who do things better than I do. So for instance, in making an album, I have Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls play drums, rather than myself. I have Melora Creager of Rasputina play the cello, rather than myself. I could not begin to hold a candle to the abilities these people have. And moreover, their involvement brings ideas to the table that I don’t possess. All in all, the final product becomes greater than the sum of its parts when you combine your own ideas and abilities with the ideas and superior skills of virtuosos.”
Collaboration with the Audience
For live performers, there is another essential angle to collaboration: the spontaneous give-and-take that occurs between performer and audience. Many performers crave that immediacy and energy. In some instances, it’s the shared energy—the electric connection between artist and audience—that enables the most powerful performances.
Emilie Autumn spoke to us about this dynamic, and her evolving attitude toward audience as she’s matured in her talent and her career. “When I began writing, recording, and releasing books and albums, I didn’t allow anyone to influence my creative process, and that’s why I think it worked . . . because everything I put out was so intense and sincere and honest.” She worked hard to nurture what she calls the “fuck off” mentality—the decision to place her own creative vision above anyone else’s opinion or commentary.
But today, she’s more focused on creating live performances than recording albums. “I’m working on turning my book into a Broadway-style musical, and I’m working on the soundtrack (or score) to that musical. So now I think about the audience . . . anyone who will play with me in this game of ‘Let’s go on a wild adventure together and let’s return home completely changed,’ and that now influences my creative process. When I’m writing this musical, I’m not just thinking about where the pause between words should be . . . I’m thinking about the audible gasp from the guy in the front row during that pause.”
Carlton Cyrus Ward as White Rabbit in Third Rail’s production of Then She Fell. Photo by Darial Sneed.
The musical in question is based on Autumn’s autobiographical novel, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. The book, which draws in part on the author’s own experiences when she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, is illustrated with full-color drawings, paintings, and photography; the multimedia aspect creates an immersive effect, one which Autumn intends to considerably magnify in the musical. “I think that the audience and I agree on our desire to enjoy a complete entertainment experience,” she says. “I want to enter another world, and so do they. We all want a sanctuary where we feel like we belong, and you don’t build a community or a sanctuary by choosing between music and theater, aural and visual. . . You appeal to all senses, use everything you have to affect people’s emotions, and I feel I am only just getting started in being able to effectively accomplish this. It’s all important.”
In many ways, interactive performance is an uncharted art form, with plenty of room for exploration and innovation. One fascinating show that’s currently getting rave reviews is Third Rail Projects’ production of Then She Fell. This interactive performance draws on surprisingly similar subject matter to Emilie Autumn’s Asylum; described by its creators as “immersive theater,” Then She Fell draws on the writings of Lewis Carroll and takes place in an abandoned hospital ward in Brooklyn. (Third Rail Projects’ co–artistic director Tom Pearson says, “Steampunk fans may recognize it from our last Steampunk Haunted House in 2011, back when our Wonderland characters were punked out a bit more. We’ve since recontextualized it within a hospital ward and as an evening-length immersive theater experience, but it still retains a lot of the creepy quality and Victorian patina.”)
No more than fifteen audience members are admitted per show; this intimate group is allowed to explore the set room by room, interacting with actors whose roles are based on characters like the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen, and exploring a set that offers hidden treasures and dark conundrums. The experience is a surreal, dreamlike journey through an enigmatic world, where each audience member is in some small way a part of the cast. As of this writing, the show has run for over a year, with more than five hundred performances.
Pearson, who also plays the role of the White Rabbit, is a choreographer, director, performer, and visual artist, so he brings a diverse artistic skill set to the table; multisensory experiences such as Then She Fell are an intriguing way to bring all these forms of creative expression together. Pearson says, “I think problem solving is where some of the most creative moments emerge. If you can figure out how to do something that at first does not seem possible, you often find yourself working in new and unexpected ways, and the results can be very fresh and inventive.”
You know the story: Boy meets airship. Boy falls in love with airship. Boy cannot win airship from owner because it is a prototype, so boy orders a copy, which doesn’t care for him so much. Boy later meets girl, who is in love with a steam engine. Boy and girl rent a warehouse to shelter both of their mechanical loves, until girl gives birth to baby hybrid steam engine. Mother dies in childbirth, leaving boy and airship as foster parents. Baby hybrid steam engine ends up running away with foster mother airship. And at least two of them live happily ever after.
Karin Tidbeck’s story “Beatrice” takes us on the journey of Franz Hiller and Anna Goldberg, both of whom have the misfortune to fall in love with a machine. Their pursuit of these mechanical objects is fueled by earlier fascinations and infatuations. When younger, Anna fell for a Koenig & Bauer printing press, but realized she couldn’t follow it everywhere, and so she sets her sights on Hercules, “a round-bellied oven coupled to an upright, broad-shouldered engine. He exuded a heavy aroma of hot iron with a tart overtone of coal smoke that made her thighs tingle.”
Franz, on the other hand, cannot quite get over his airship, Beatrice. He encounters her in a Berlin fair, where “She bobbed in a slow up-down motion, like a sleeping whale. But she was very much awake. Franz could feel her attention turn to him and remain there, the heat of her sightless gaze.” The owners refuse to sell Beatrice to Franz, since she’s a prototype, so he buys a copy of the airship instead.
But once delivered and assembled in the warehouse, Franz senses that this airship does not return his favor the way the original did: “He summoned the sensation of warm cushions receiving him, how she dipped under his weight. But this Beatrice, Beatrice II, had a seat with firm stuffing that didn’t give.” Rather than give the airship her freedom, he assures her that “We’ll manage. You can be my Beatrice. We’ll get used to each other.”
While Anna’s relationship with Hercules is both satisfying and reciprocal (she constantly feeds him coal), Beatrice II never warms up to Franz’s advances and merely tolerates his lovemaking. Anna gives birth to Josephine, a hybrid human with pistons embedded in her skin, but loses her life in the process. Franz becomes Josephine’s adoptive father, and it is only when she senses the little one that Beatrice II begins to show any interest. The story takes a darker turn once Josephine, who thus far could only sing through her pipes, learns to speak. Because she is a hybrid, at the tender age of four Josephine becomes an interpreter for Beatrice II. The first words that Franz hears Josephine speak, in fact, inform him that the airship’s name isn’t Beatrice and that “she had lived as a slave” under Franz, “and he had raped her while pretending her to be someone else. She hated him.” The one thing the airship wants is to fly. Franz finally allows the airship to leave, and Josephine to escape with her, too.
Tidbeck calls Franz “the tragic hero of his own drama,” since it is his own abuse of machines which foretells his separation with his daughter, who is half-machine. The story explores ideas of reproduction, both human and mechanical, as Franz desires an exact replica of his Beatrice, even though her sentience denies such a possibility. He refuses to let the airship do the one thing an airship is supposed to do—fly. Conversely, Anna recognizes her love for the printing press as “an infatuation” and finds a different companion in the steam engine. She also interacts with Hercules as a lover who has physical needs she can fulfill (coal), while also allowing him to fulfill his own mechanistic role (to burn the coal). There is a fascinating interplay between aesthetics and functionality.
This complex layering makes the story fertile ground for adaptation. The Danish group Tidsrum—which consists of players Ida Marie Tjalve and Karina Nielsen, set designer/puppet builder Sarah Piyannah Cederstrand, dramaturge Sandra Theresa Buch, and composer Andreas Busk—received funding from the Danish Agency for Culture and the Danish Actors’ Association to adapt “Beatrice” into a puppet show for children and young adults. The story begins to morph: A single-author text becomes an orchestra of creative input, provoking plenty of interesting questions along the way. For instance—what kind of background music supports such a piece? “During our workshops we tried out a lot of different music, and we got very fond of some Charleston jazz,” says Sarah Cederstrand. “It works very well for the more ‘upbeat’ scenes, but we also needed something more mechanical.”
Enter Andreas Busk, the composer who devised an ingenious, retro-futurist system to capture the subtly haunting aspects of the story: “Basically, we’re building two turntables into the stage, to be operated live by the performers. On the first turn-table they put specially designed wooden bricks. Each brick has a sound source attached on top of it, in other words, a crystal glass or a copper rod. The second turntable, placed right next to the first, has different mallets installed. When the two turntables spin, the mallets hit the sound sources, creating loops that evolve over time, due to the fact that the turntables run at different speeds. The sounds are picked up via a microphone with a reverb effect that gives all the sounds an abandoned factory–type quality.” Busk is still working out the specifics of capturing Josephine’s voice, which is both “high and fluting” and yet mechanical because of “a set of minuscule pipes arrayed in her larynx.”
Tidsrum’s artistic vision also adds new layers to the story; in the early stages of development they discussed using art nouveau and Victorian aesthetics, as they’ve set the story near 1900. They work with mock-up puppets, testing to see how they need to move, and then dramaturge Sandra Theresa Buch creates them. The puppeteers also have the task of bringing Hercules, the Beatrices, and Josephine to life, to show them in action as characters with feelings and thoughts. “We started looking for references in other art forms such as pictures and books about steam engines, airships, and Victorian technology,” Cederstrand says. “We also did some more accurate research on steam engines to be able to design Hercules and Josephine. I had a lot of help from the technical museum in Helsingør, where they have many different machines on display, a lot of books, and a very helpful staff. Andreas and I were lucky to get a grant for a workshop space in a fantastic place, Statens Værksteder for Kunst, where we have access to a fully equipped carpenter’s workshop and a metalworking shop. We will be working on the instruments, the set, and the puppets there.”
On the other hand, there are still a few practical concerns to work out. Ida Marie Tjalve said she wasn’t sure just how they were going to display the sexual interaction between Franz and Beatrice II just yet, “though we did have some rather hilarious tryouts in rehearsals with Franz doing vigorous humping on top of the zeppelin and inside the gondola.” Cederstrand, who learned how to make classical Czech marionettes at Puppets in Prague, believes that “the poetic language of puppetry calls for a very strong suspension of disbelief,” adding, “when you as the audience accept that the puppets are the characters of the story, it is a much smaller obstacle to accept that they are in love with, and have sex with, living machines.”
Using shadow play and puppets also creates an immediate and intimate interaction with a collective audience that eludes mechanical capturing. Sure, one can always record the show, and with today’s electronics, make it a high-quality film, but the basic tenet of theater is to see it live, to experience the actors (much in the same way that Franz and Anna experience the fairs they attend). While it emphasizes the unique culture of the fair, the performance uses totally low-tech accoutrements; in some ways it might be considered a commentary on the aesthetics of Steampunk itself. Certainly, the process of adaptation, of creating a copy that is as viable as the original, intersects with Franz’s own journey from the original Beatrice to the copy he purchases. He never truly embraces the new airship as her own entity, never asks her name, and only assumes the copy is an exact replica of Beatrice. But Beatrice is a sentient being; there can be no true exact copy of her. Had Franz been able to understand the foundations of his infatuation with Beatrice, he might have found love.
It is much the same way with a story and its adaptation. The story is its own living and breathing thing that the reader encounters; while he or she might want or expect a visual performance to replicate the story, it is impossible, because the copy has a life of its own. This makes the creative process all the more exciting, as stories turn and spin, and are even allowed to fly.
Nancy Hightower’s short fiction and poetry has been published in Strange Horizons, Word Riot, storySouth, Gargoyle, Electric Velocipede, Interfictions, Prick of the Spindle, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. Her epic fantasy Elementarí Rising was published by Pink Narcissus Press in 2013. She is also one of the art columnists for Weird Fiction Review.
Seven Pieces of Advice for Aspiring Musicians and Performers
1. “Do it. Start. It will probably be ugly and silly at first. Fine. Keep doing it. Do your very best. Then DO BETTER. If you’re not better after a year or two, maybe do something else. Pretend you’re a rock star or a master painter or a best-selling author if it helps motivate your work, but never despair when those dreams continue to elude you. Do something you love. Somebody else will, too, or maybe they won’t. So?”
—Malcom, Unextraordinary Gentlemen
2. “Break the idea down into lots of manageable, bite-sized portions. . . . Also, sometimes the way to solve problems is by NOT thinking about them. If I’m stuck with a song, then I know the way to finish it is to walk away from it and let my subconscious do the work.”
—Chandy, Sunday Driver
3. “If you want to work with a group, find PEOPLE who you can work with. Skills can be learned; belief, trust, and the ability to work together, less so. Everyone involved has to get along, and they have to care. Technical skill is secondary.”
—The Mechanisms
4. “Don’t make what you think people will like. Make what you like. That’s what people will like. We all want to see things which are truth. Truth to the person that made it.”
—The Lisps
5. “You need a TEAM of people who SUPPORT you and understand your ideas—maybe they have similar inspirations or aesthetics—and someone who has great organizational skills, if you don’t. But realize you can only truly rely on yourself to get things done. So find the big purposes that lie behind your idea and use those to stabilize and motivate you.”
—Crystal Bright
6. “Write it down is the best start. Whatever the idea is, sketch it out on paper, then rewrite it and add more detail. Then leave it a while and do it again. When you are comfortable that the idea is how it had looked in your head, then you can get on with working out ways to make it into reality.”
—Professor Elemental
7. “Your slate is never as blank as it seems. In another reality, everything you DREAM of has already happened, you’ve already ACHIEVED it, and it was AWESOME. Your only job is to catch up. And remember that the most beautiful, powerful, honest things you will ever create and give to this world will cost you nothing to produce. Let your big idea be driven by real work on your craft and real-life experience, and nothing can stop you from achieving your vision.”
—Emilie Autumn
