What started as Casey Spooner alone in a Starbucks in a really bad outfit has now spawned into the global phenomenon that is Fischerspooner. This electronic music art act, who are not afraid of bridging genres, have risen to international fame with their charmingly disarming albums, 1 and Odyssey, and are now all set to hit Australia for Global Gathering in November when they burn up the stage for a killer DJ set.

But it’s been a long road for Fischerspooner. They started off in 1998 as a post-art school collaboration but now, thanks to the marvels of Napster and globalization, they have broken down the barriers of the postmodern age to offer the world – as a whole – their unique sound.

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‘I love working with Warren Fischer: he’s so musically complex and you can’t even start to imagine how frustrating it can be,’ said Spooner of his partner in crime, the “Fischer” in Fischerspooner. ‘You’ll work on a song and be like oh that’s great and he’ll be no! It takes a lot to satisfy him, so the way I would describe the sound of Fischerspooner is that it’s Warren Fischer’s absolutely insane, compulsive and incredible aesthetic point of view.

‘But then I also think there’s always a heaviness which is unavoidable in our music. Yet it’s not intentionally gothic. But I think that there’s just a drama we’re both drawn to and it’s hard for us to make something that is literally frothy. We try as hard as we can to make stuff that’s fun and upbeat but often times we’re just naturally drawn to more heady and more complex topics, so I think that naturally influences the sound.’

Of course, Spooner is more than happy to discuss the complex, and he does so with gusto – particularly when it comes to the artists’ place in modern American culture. ‘It’s so difficult to be an artist in America,’ Spooner said. ‘American culture is so driven by entertainment and by commercialism. And there’s really no support for the arts, no support for dance, there’s no work for being a visual artist. It feels like it’s indulgent, elitist, it feels irrelevant, it feels disconnected and it feels meaningless in American culture.

‘In America it’s really about the next hot thing, about the next product about just driving this giant capitalistic machine. So to be an artist and not somehow react or respond or be influenced by that and be American is impossible.’

The notion of the next big thing and everyone having their 15 minutes of fame stems from the great pop artist Andy Warhol but it is a concept – Spooner suggests – that should be outmoded. Or, at the least, broken. ‘I’m sick of Warhol,’ slammed Spooner. ‘I wish we could break through. I wish the whole thing would collapse. Then it would feel as though we weren’t working with these similar ideas about reproduction about products and about commerce. But the thing I had to do personally was to confront this very American experience and in a way kind of embrace it.

‘And instead of sort of making paintings about entertainment or making video art that exists as making a comment on music videos it’s more interesting for me to try to take my experience and my education and my love of these arts and share that with a larger more popular audience. It makes the avante garde feel more relevant and it makes entertainment seem potentially revolutionary.’

Spooner points to the recent boom of the internet and the throw around catchphrase of globalisation as the new direction – or paradigm – art should embrace. As such, postmodernism is essentially dying, a new-human experience taking its place.

‘It’s like a Wild West,’ Spooner said of globalisation and the internet’s part in it. ‘People are going to look back on the early days of the internet as an incredibly beautiful period because it doesn’t feel like a period of coldness it actually feels like a period of strange contradiction, in that we’re able to communicate more but we’re more detached and so there’s this strange thing happening right now that I don’t know if anybody understands or has even begun to articulate it.

‘There’s an intimacy and there is an access to information that was not the reality of Warhol’s era. It’s specifically our era. So there’s this kind of grassroots thing that can happen. We have the tools to communicate and to make things and to be creative in a way that’s more self-sufficient, more autonomous, where we don’t have to have a major cooperation give us the tools to create images or connect with people.

‘We’re living in a totally new amazing time,’ Spooner concluded, ‘where we can make an idea and we can then share it with thousands and millions of people by a click of a button.’

Of course, pushing buttons are exactly what Fischerspooner will be doing when they appear at Global Gathering on Sunday November 23 – they will be belting out a fierce DJ set with the prospect of a new album (and consequent Australian tour) occurring in the new year. But until then, Fischerspooner will keep pushing boundaries in a world where boundaries are ever diminishing.

Tickets are available now for Global Gathering. For further information check out www.mellenevents.com.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell