As the co-owner of an Amsterdam record store (located deep in the heart of that city's infamous red-light district), Elisabeth Esselink has had plenty of opportunity to discover lost sound, be it good, bad or merely forgettable. And as the lead singer in a local noise pop band, Esselink was one of those blessed audiophiles who'd found a way to surround herself with the thing she loved the most. Then she purchased an antiquated sampler at a record auction, an impulse buy that resulted in a drastic change to her relatively quiet life. Setting up a ramshackle studio in the shop's basement, Esselink began to experiment with sampling, cutting and pasting forgotten beats from her discount bin and transforming them into a cheery collage of sound. She occasionally added her high, throaty vocals to the mix, and patchworked together a four-song demo that she sent to some of her favorite labels. In only a few short months she found herself unexpectedly signed to Matador under the name Solex (a moniker she copped from a Hungarian scooter manufacturer).
Three years later, Esselink has quit her band, toured the world, scaled back her hours at the record store and released three more albums, including her newest, Low Kick and Hard Bop. Yet another cleverly selected assemblage of infectiously catchy beats, Low Kick contains bootlegged metal solos and forgotten television theme songs. She has found a way of recycling unlikely bits of music into sweetly sparse collages, weaving the lost debris of music history into something like pop music gold. She was interviewed by phone from Amsterdam.
How have you enjoyed being a solo artist as opposed to being in a band?
I like it much better. Most people who are in bands, they feel at times like it's really frustrating. Even if you're just the singer, you may have ideas about what would be good for the band to play and at the same time the band have ideas about how and what I should sing. But with the sampler, it's a great tool to actually do what you think is best. Every band that I've been in was a democratic band, so you have to respect other people's opinions?even if it's not the best thing for the music.
So now you're drunk with power! It must be nice to have complete control.
[Laughing] Yes, it is, yes!
And with the sampler you can have anyone in your band?a banjo player from 1920, a 1960s torch singer from Hong Kong...
Yes, and it's nice because it's not totally overwhelming, you're pretty much depending on intros and outros most of the time when you're making samples. Otherwise you're sampling a whole band, which makes it harder to use because it's just too dominant. Maybe one out of 10 songs has an intro or an outro where you can hear a single instrument playing. So you don't have that much choice.
Do you have a particular style or sound you're more drawn to than others?
Most of the time I can get really good samples from 60s guitar bands, but in part that's because I really like the sound of the instruments and the drum kits. The 60s production is so great and I love that kind of surfy guitar sounds. I do also use some samples of metal guitar, but sometimes the portion is so small that you cannot really identify it as guitar anymore, it's more like an effect. You can take a fraction of a second of a metal guitar and put it under the snare or something so that it gives the snare sound a sharpness, but you don't really know, as a listener, exactly why that sharpness is there.
What's your process when you go down into the basement and start writing?
I don't use a sequencer, it's all just recorded in real time so I just press rec/play, and I trigger the samples by pushing a key on the midi keyboard and then the 16-track records that. But I always start with a drum loop or some kind of loop that serves the function of a click track, so I know when to press the keys. I work on several sounds at the same time, then when I bump into a very good sample, I try to fit it into one of the loops that I have. And if it doesn't fit into a loop I just forget about it.
And the lyrics?
They come later. When all the tracks are filled I start touching them up and erasing parts so the chorus/verse structure becomes a little bit clearer. Then I try to make a melody for the vocals and after the melody line is a little bit settled I try to write lyrics that fit the melody. It sounds a little bit complicated, but it's not. Most people probably write the lyrics first and then the melody line evolves out of the words, but English is not really my native language and when I do try to work that way I get really crappy lyrics.
Your songs tend to have very specific atmospheres, both lyrically and melodically. Have you ever done any film scoring?
I actually just finished some music for a television program. It's a little bit stupid?it's a sort of documentary about furniture in hotels. They spoke with hotels that have rooms that are designed by artists. There is a lot of need for music because all they do is follow the rooms with the camera. It's all instrumental and I did use the sequencer for that because it had to be finished really quickly. If I had done it the Solex way it would have taken a year or so. So it's a simple kind of atmospheric thing with some beats under it. They gave me the footage and I wrote to it.
I would love to try more of it; it would be a great challenge for me. It would also be hard because a film is already there and a filmmaker needs you to make music that can make the visuals stronger while not attracting too much attention. It's sort of the same thing if you are using projections in a live show. I made a film where I put a video camera on my bike and I rode through Amsterdam and I would play it while I played live, as backdrop. But it was very bumpy ride and if you watch it too carefully you get a little bit nauseous. I found out that it attracted so much attention it took away from audience reacting to the music.
There's certainly a lot of really wonderful music coming out of Europe right now, like Tahiti 80 or Air or Kruder & Dorfmeister. Why do you think that is?
Well, there's a globalization of course. It also has to do with the industry; the European industry was focused on their own countries, because it was really hard to compete with American bands or English bands for that matter. And because it's a very conventional world, everyone wants to hear at least one guitar playing. They like to recognize tradition in music and those roots are in America most of the time. European traditions can't compete. But electronic music I think has maybe begun to change that, there are new standards in music and Europe is becoming a stronger force in music because of electronica.
Do you feel like your music is defined in any way by the fact that you're Dutch?
I think it doesn't really have to do with me being Dutch, I think it's more that I've learned how to listen to music with completely different ears. I listen to everything right now; I'm way more open-minded than I was before, because now I see every song as a possible ingredient to my music. I listen more to things I wouldn't have before, like modern classical music. If it weren't for that way of listening, I think I would lack the patience to get into that music, but now I do listen to it, looking for sounds. On one hand you can say that I lack the respect to other artists and their music because I take samples from them and use them to my own benefit, but on the other hand there's not such a thing to me as a bad band or a bad song because it's always good for something.