“A lot of my sound is just grabbing things from different zones — experimental jazz, electronic noise, dance music — and trying to put them together like nobody has.”
You Always Wanted to Be a Part of What Went on in Places Like This feels like a collection of sounds, ranging from razor noises to no wave influences. Abbie from Mars dances around genres sourced from her radio resume, giving her audience a glimpse into different sonical spheres. death of a rabbit got to sit down with the musician to delve into her latest album and the context around it.
DEATH OF A RABBIT: What drew you to New York in the late 2020’s, especially during turbulent times?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I was wrapping up college in 2020 and graduated that spring; so, it was already in the cards. I went to school in New Jersey and was always checking (New York)out on the weekends and was like, “Okay, I think I like it. I think I want to be there.” And it just so happened that the pandemic was happening; it wasn’t going to stop me.
DOAR: Do you still feel like you’re from Mars, even though you built a world for yourself in New York?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I think increasingly, I appreciate where I grew up and feel drawn to it more and more. The city is really exciting when you’ve never lived in one. Then after you know what it’s all about, it can be a little exhausting. Mars[, PA] was so quiet and beautiful and there’s so much green and hills. I saw this great take on Subway Takes saying it’s cooler to be a cool person from a small town than to be a cool person from a big town. If you’re from a big town, it’s expected of you, but if you’re from a small town, you had to work to get cool. I guess I take a little pride in being from a small town.
DOAR: Do you feel like being a transplant from a smaller town gives you a different perspective on the NYC music scene?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I think it resulted in me idealizing it at first, being from the outside, and then having a harder crash and burn when the reality hit. It’s the difference between putting (the city) on a pedestal your whole life versus if you’ve just grown up around it. To me, it was like, “Wow, this is something larger than life.” then after a while here, I’m like, “Oh, this is just life and these are normal people.”
DOAR: Jumping into the record, you described it as referential but also forging its own course. How do you navigate honoring your influences while also making something new?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I credit my experience with freeform radio for a lot of my own output and my own sort of voice and tastes, because – at WPRB, where I started doing radio, and at WFMU, where I currently do radio – it’s super encouraged to play rare stuff, like a super rare record that there’s 50 copies of or some obscure thing from Bandcamp that nobody’s listening to or talking about, and being the person to dig that up. Obscurity is like a badge of honor. Since I was a freshman in college, I had been thinking about music in that way, grabbing all these different things from all these different zones, like experimental jazz to electronic noise to dance music – trying to put them together like nobody has. A lot of my sound is just the result of a really wide variety of things that people don’t normally fuse together.
DOAR: Does it ever feel like a niche-off competition to be the most unique?
ABBIE FROM MARS: Oh, it totally felt like that, especially during college, where everyone’s a little insecure and trying to find their identity and it’s like you have to prove yourself. That was definitely a little intimidating at first. The older I got, the more I was like, ‘It doesn’t actually matter. I don’t need to find something obscure just for the sake of obscurity.’ Pop music is cool too! Everything is good and equally weighted in my eyes now, whereas the more insecure me, who needed to prove that I knew about music, didn’t feel that way.
DOAR: I also wanted to talk about some of the songs on the records. One of my favorites is “Find Me!,” which feels charged with themes of disempowerment, control, and identity. What was the feeling you were channeling when you were writing it?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I was in a three-year-long situationship where I was kept a secret. There was the part of me that was like, ‘I’m being hidden,” but I wanted to take some power back a little bit. So it’s the attitude of the speaker in that song – trying to be like, “Whatever, I don’t care” and act a little more unfazed by the whole thing. At the end there’s the line, “What will it take for someone to find me when there are so many men who have been hiding me?” So it’s this plea of, “Okay, actually, this isn’t feeling that great. I actually want to have something real.”
DOAR: I also really liked “Haircut.” I enjoyed all the layering and such in these songs. I especially like the sound where it mimics a razor, it feels both raw and playful. How did this track come together?
ABBIE FROM MARS: In this track, I wanted these binky, like, tinny sounding beats with a hip hop-y but rock-guitar-driven thing going on. There was a specific DIY/punk rap rock song that I was trying to imitate – “THE SAGA NEVER ENDS” by Juiceboxxx – and it was such a different style than I’d ever done. Then, I put a bunch of noise guitar on the end, which is that razor sound you were talking about. That was kind of me pulling more from 1980s New York no wave stuff and just throwing it all together. I started with the beat and the baseline and just the groove of it and started doing some rambling and riffing over top. I didn’t have a clear theme in mind, and it was one of those things where after some words came out, I was like, “Maybe it means that?” While the lyrics started pretty stream of consciousness or improv-y, I found as I molded the verses that I was writing critically about “the scene” that I landed in here in the city. The song is sort of about the struggle of indie and DIY musicians trying to “make it” and my realization that aggressively trying to network your way through the industry maybe isn’t the most fun, fulfilling, or admirable way to approach this whole making-and-sharing-music thing.
DOAR: How was cutting your songs down, making sure it was the right amount of different tracks and such? How were you able to identify adding influences in, putting a type of genre on it, but then stepping back and saying maybe that too much or not enough?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I think I have a more minimal writing style, usually based around a percussive electronic thing or a bassline. I usually start with one or two of those things and then start to sprinkle things on top. I think of myself as having minimalist tendencies, but on this album, I guess I was going more maximalist. This is the first album where I worked with a co-producer – who took my demos and helped me with things like, “This kick drum should be bigger,” or “Let’s start with a sax solo” – getting an outsider perspective on what’s too much or not enough. Every time we met up for mixing and finalizing the album, he was saying, “There’s so many tracks here,” when I had always thought of myself as more minimal. He helped pair it down, while also not taking too much out. He was mostly helping to balance it and make sure the right things were at the right levels, what was supposed to be louder and what was taking the forefront. He did a great job of giving different layers their chance to have a moment in the front before they go back, just so that people can hear them and be like, “Oh, that’s a cool sound effect.”
DOAR: Do you think of your songs as confrontational or playful, or a mixture of both or neither?
ABBIE FROM MARS: I think both. I think my performance style is also that way, and it bleeds into the writing, or vice versa. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with this guy James Chance, who was part of the 80s New York no wave scene – he was known for being confrontational and getting into fist fights with audience members for not dancing and such. And like that is so me – not that I get into fist fights with people, but I was inspired by that energy. I want to be confrontational but also nice, and I don’t want to be scary to people, and I want to be inclusive and not alienating. I think my version of confrontation is a playful version.
DOAR: Have you done a lot of shows?
ABBIE FROM MARS: Yeah, I like to joke that I started writing music as an excuse to get on stage. I was a poetry certificate student in college and that was my original medium, I’m a writer. Then there was part of me that was like, “I just want to get on stage.” Lately I’ve been going on stage probably once or twice a month out here, which is getting to be maybe more than I need to perform. I should make myself a little more scarce and make the performances bigger, instead of just performing all the time. But yeah, I love to do it.
DOAR: I’m trying to imagine how you’d even set up your show, because you have so many moving parts in your music that I can’t comprehend how you would even recreate that in real life.
ABBIE FROM MARS: It’s been a process for this new album, figuring out how to convert these songs for live without making it a karaoke show. I have a great synth player that I perform with who’s brilliant, Brice. I do a little bit of keys over some of the drum tracks, I’ll press play on my tracks and then I’ll play some stuff over top. I have a sax player as well, Kate Mohanty, who is also brilliant and plays with me often.
DOAR: death of a rabbit likes to focus on lyricism and poetry — I was wondering, what’s a lyric that you’ve listened to lately that you really enjoyed, or what’s a lyric that you wish you’d written?
ABBIE FROM MARS:
Your heart is a strange little orange to peel
St. Vincent, “Human Racing”
Check out Abbie from Mars’ latest album and more here!
Leave a comment