Rasputina Find Vitality In Cello

"I got tired of playing in conventional rock bands as decoration, when you can't hear the cello," relates the 36 year-old, Kansas native who started playing her instrument at the age of nine. "I thought it would be a really powerful thing, judging from the response I got, if I had some other women playing cello with
me, and if that was all we had going on. I had the same ideas about costumes and the concepts and themes back then - that just seemed obvious, like the right
thing to do, to me."

The manifestation of this new and unusual mode of music-making took the form of Creager's band, the New York City-based Rasputina, who are releasing their fourth LP, Frustration Plantation (Instinct Records), on March 16th. The album
breaks away both stylistically and logistically from 2002's Cabin Fever (Instinct Records), which Creager wrote, played, and produced entirely on her own.

"I barely had band members, so it was really me by myself in my house, just doing it by myself," she explains. " . . . [T]hat was great and I loved it, but now we've [Creager and the other current members of Rasputina] just done so much
touring together and love playing together, and then I worked with another producer, so it was much more collaborative. I'm never that collaborative, but definitely more so than in the past."

In fact, Creager has been the only consistent member of Rasputina since its inception 13 years ago, the primary orchestrator in the evolution of the group's sound. The band's official Website proclaims, in the vein of Creager's off-color humor, "Rasputina holds forth the dream that any young girl could theoretically join the group. Much like the American presidency, no?"

The revolving door of cellists has most recently shuttled out K. Copperthwaite, who accompanied Creager on the Cabin Fever tour, and brought in Zöe Keating, a cellist from San Francisco whom Creager met via the Internet. The two are backed on Frustration Plantation by drummer Jonathon TeBeest, who falls into the lineage of Rasputina's solely male drummers, including Nine Inch Nails' Chris Vrenna.

"It's come over time," Creager says, in regards to her music. "There's some things you can't, no matter how badly you want to, just acquire a skill through wishing or interest. Just from times working with different equipment and wanting to get different sounds and seeing what makes them, it's become kind of second nature to us."

In addition to their creative talents, Rasputina are aesthetically captivating on stage, the cellists donning full regalia that falls somewhere between ethereal gypsy and gothic, an integral part of the band's overall conception.

"We don't sew from scratch that much stuff. We enjoy to mend things in a really gerry-rigged way. Most of it comes from flea markets and antique dealers. Some of the corsets were made for us," explains Creager. "It started out as you could only wear white, and it was all historical underwear, which ends up to be a lot more covered up than a lot of typical modern clothes, but it had to be that. And we've broken out of that a lot more. It's a definite theme, and there are definite constraints, but it's hard to put into words. All the girls that have played in the band have understood that theme and had a lot of fun working
within it." Yet while Creager once termed Rasputina a "positive-goth" band, she now considers the qualification a mistake on her part. "I was meaning more like, if goth is black and negative, . . . [then conversely] we're always wearing white and that's not very goth. I like to think that we're positive about everything. So I really meant like, positive and negative, light and dark."

Rasputina has always pushed musical boundaries, yet retained continuity through deliberate composition that keeps the songs contained even when they veer all over the place, transitioning easily from '70s heavy metal riffs into a classical strings fugue or more ambient electronica into a cascade of string-plucking that evokes a jazz sensibility - largely facilitated through applied effects. Sometimes the cellos play simultaneously, combining and building up the raw energy of the instrument, while other pieces are arranged for distinct cello parts to complement each other, always leaving room for the solos that showcase the sheer technical skill that the musicians possess. Creager seems unafraid to experiment with any musical genre in her songwriting, despite her claim that she is influenced "[m]ore by a lot of history that I read, movies, and architecture, rather than music."

Like the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, lyrically Rasputina explores the less palatable aspects of humanity with an eye of great wit and verve, transforming it into something mythological, redeemable. Rooting through the layers of tongue-in-cheek double-entendres, one finds in the songs a running commentary on popular culture, both contemporary and historical, exploring subjects as varied as the sadism of medieval healing practices, the hypocrisy of the American pilgrims, and the exaggerated value of commodities like diamonds. "Most of the things I do, to me, it just seems obvious, or there's no other way, or there'snot that much thought and background into it," Creager reasons. ". . . [It} starts off the top of my head, or subconscious, or how I feel. And I think there's some open-endedness in what I do that makes different meanings seem really obvious to other people."

Creager also has a penchant for incorporating melody-backed monologues into albums, such as Cabin Fever's "PJ + Vincent &
Matthew + Björk" an imagined celebrity double date "brought to you by the Church of the Latter Day Saints," satirizing the characters' most notorious personal and professional traits.

"I think I knew that Björk and [artist] Matthew Barney were going out - and they're both, you know, 'so talented.' Then when I found out that PJ Harvey and [actor] Vincent Gallo were going out, I was like, that's too much for me! . . . Just imagining them all together - oh, how nice for y'all!" Creager jokes.

Celebrity may be a phenomenon worth laughing over, but Creager has certainly come into contact with it more than once throughout her career as a musician. In addition to performing on her own with Nirvana, Rasputina has worked with bands such as Cheap Trick, Porno for Pyros, Belle & Sebastian. "I think it's good to do as many things as you can, and it's hard to do that - those jobs are hard to come by and it's hard to break out of what's comfortable and what you're good at," notes Creager. "I try to maintain practicing classical music as well as playing band music, so with those musicians it's just good to hear how somebody else writes a song, and if you have to make up the part or learn what they tell you, it's all constructive."

The band has also collaborated with Marilyn Manson, with whom Creager and company toured in 1997, shortly after the release of their first album, Thanks for the Ether (1996). Manson ended up
producing an EP of remixes of Rasputina's earliest single, which also appeared on Thanks for the Ether, "Transylvanian Concubine."

"[T]hat was a really old song for us," Creager recalls. "It was in all the old demos, it was like a 7-inch that we put out when we first started, and that's just a song that people wanted to work with. When we met up with Manson and he said he wanted to do a remix, he had the pick of the songs from Thanks for the
Ether, and that's what he chose. I felt like, 'Oh no, not that song again!' But it was very fun working on it. It was when we were on tour at the time, and he and his producers and crew people worked on it in the banquet rooms of hotels as we traveled around."[P]laying with them on that tour and him doing that
remix, it's a lot harsher sound. And a lot of times when I hear guitars it doesn't sound like music or notes, it sounds like noise. But I learned a lot from him . . . it just made me really interested to learn like, 'What is rock?' and 'What makes it?' and 'How do you do that?'"

Rasputina's second LP, How We Quit the Forest (Columbia Records), now out of print, came out in 1998, followed by Cabin Fever and most recently Frustration Plantation, for which the band will tour this spring. While the band has never achieved radio-level popularity, their remarkably steadfast, even zealous,
fanbase continues to fuel their efforts. "I think that having some kind of integrity can do nothing but help you. We've never had a hit, we've never been really famous, never sold a lot of records, but I just do my best and I think that comes back to help me. Like we're not going to be trendy and fade away, which is the most typical thing to happen," asserts Creager.

Having finally consolidated the band's structure, this tour promises to be different than the last one around. "Normally we just race around the whole country in about four weeks, but we're going to take a lot more smaller trips to get a more detailed approach to places," Creager says.

The time constraints have partially to do with Creager's other full-time occupation, taking care of her four year-old daughter, Hollis. "It's definitely hard," admits Creager about being both a working musician and a parent. "She doesn't know any different because I'm her only mom. I know she's really proud of me and gets excited about different things with my work . . . she's got her favorite songs."

While her daughter doesn't play any instruments yet, Creager has already begun to note some musical predilections. Another cellist, perhaps? "I don't know, she seems more like a drummer," Creager laughs. So Rasputina may open the door to a female percussionist one of these days? "Yeah, that would be great."