Creeps, Creepers and Creep: When Doppelgangers Make Music

Lauren Flax and Lauren Dillard are beautiful. Not foo-foo beautiful. Not crimp your hair and call me dolly beautiful. No, they're part of the new generation. Erudite females, well-versed in pop culture and black leather. Do's that DON'T go styled.The type of girls that are best friends with gay guys and call them fags, and drink beer. Who go to a brothel inZurichdressed in Phillip Lim. Who used to thrash hell to Siouxsie and the Banshees, but are now able to see something eerily gothic about Katy Perry and KE$HA.Their music is loud, blaring from the big ass speakers at a venue inChelsea. It has the personality and roar of an eighteen wheeler, and when they DJ, they focus like school kids on Adderall. They chill. They play. They rock. But mostly, they're fucking creeps.

I caught up with the dynamic DJ duo after they played a set last weekend at a party held by indie phenom RCRD LBL. For all intensive purposes, I wrote this interview as if CREEP were a schizophrenic entity. One person dueling in jargon. They dished me some dirt on creeps, creepers and CREEP.

How do you guys feel about the set you just played? -It was good. It was kind of hard to see who was dancing because it seemed to go in pockets. -One girl broke out the glow sticks in the end. -That means we won. -If people break out the glow sticks that's good.

Tell me about the birthing of CREEP? -We've known each other forever. Lauren was doing all of her amazing house stuff and I was Doing a bunch of weird shit. I started this one song that ended up being "Days." It was a skeleton of a song, but then I played it for Lauren and she was like "drop a bass line on it." From there we built on it. Beers and music. -So many beers. I fell asleep with a beer under my pillow. -Crushed. Her head crushed the beer can under the pillow. We played it for a bunch of our friends and they liked it, so we thought we might be onto something and kept writing.

What does the name CREEP mean to you guys? -It just sounds good. Quite literally I like how it sounds.

Are you Creeper pros? -We do like Creepers. -I like Creepers. I don't own them, but I borrow some off my friends sometimes.

Who's the biggest fucking creep in the world? -Melissa from Telepathy. -Michael Jackson. -Yeah kind of. RIP.

How would you describe your sound? -Tonight it was up in the air. We didn't know what to start with. We know and love Diplo, but we've never played with him, and we know that he's a bit harder than we are. So it was difficult to judge what we play. -It was difficult, yeah, but we're kind of all over the map when we decide what to play. -House, UK, funky, bass.

How's the way you performed changed since you formed? -It's so crazy how it started! We literally had no idea how to do anything in the beginning, but it started in front of a crowd, behind a big table, I didn't have a drum machine. We learned as we went. -It was a big learning curve for us, but I'm glad we were thrown into it, because I feel like we wouldn't have learned it if we hadn't been thrown out to the wolves. -We got thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim. -I still don't know how to physically swim, but I know how to swim on stage.

Have you had a traumatic experience with swimming? -Lauren grew up on a lake, and her mom had a pool and she still can't swim. -I had an episode when I was younger. I WAS REALLY SMALL. -She was like 5, and she was black out drunk. She took her car for a drive right into the lake. -Right into the lake. I was on probably like 5 hits of E. -5 or 6-years-old.

5 hits of E at 5? -It was the 90's!

How do you hope to progress together? -We want to add more strings to our live show. We want to work visually with artists. There're a lot of things we want to do to progress. We have a lot of pipe dreams, but I think they could become reality easily. -I totally disagree with you. It's not gonna be easy, it's gonna be hard and take the next ten years. -I'm talking about small pipe dreams. Like midsize pipe dreams.

Any side projects? -I'm gonna be producing some projects in the next year. I would like to do a little more dance music to cleanse the palette and sage the area.

Where are you guys based right now? -Brooklyn and Berlin. -The B's!

Two pretty different places. How's that affect your work? -Our musical family lives in Berlin. The people that inspire us. When I'm there it's home. There's a lot of creative energy there. -When we play Europe, Berlin is easier. A lot of our friends who are amazing, and big influences on us are there. It's a nice creative energy there. -Everyone walks fast for a reason inNew York. In Berlin it's just a different pace, but just as creative.

How can people get access to your live sets? Do you record them? -Sometimes the venue records them. -We do mixes occasionally. We don't usually put live sets on the web site, but we put some tracks up there.

It sounds like you guys have had some crazy misadventures. What is the greatest misadventureyou'vehad? -We went to a brothel in Zurich. -Yeah, I had no idea until the next day. This was our first tour throughEurope, we had maybe four days off. Our agent put us through the ringer. So on one of our days off we polished off like, three quarters a bottle of tequila. Went back to the hotel dropped our shit off. Asked the concierge, clearly a gay dude, where we could party. He sent us some place in the sex district, but it was closed. So then I looked across the street and I was like, "Boobs! Look! Let's go." -So we went in and it was this very small room, with one stripper pole, and old woman behind the bar. Five chicks lined up in front of the bar. Sosheslaps her credit card down on the bar. -Boom! Tequila! The menlovedus. One of the girl comes over and asks me to buy her a drink, and I'm like, "Girl, I'll buy you a drink. Whatchoo want?" So she brings over this bottle menu, like hundreds of euros. I'm like, "I'm not buying you abottle." -I've watched a lot of documentaries about prostitution, so I knew we were at a brothel, and I tried telling her, but Lauren didn't know. It was an interesting experience. We saw someone do a strip teaser to "Private Dancer." -Amazing! When does that happen? Tina Turner, "Private Dancer," when does that happen? The next day we went to Hooters.