Fashion Club Wants to Overwhelm
⤏ FASHION CLUB’S PASCAL STEVENSON ON FRONTING A BAND, HER DREAM GUITAR, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF GOING VIRAL ON TIKTOK
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH SADIE DUPUIS
⤏ PHOTOGRAPHY BY JON DEL REAL
⤏ MAKEUP BY KATIE MANN
As Fashion Club, Pascal Stevenson makes mesmerizing, larger-than-life songs, artfully melting gothic synthesis, haunting vocals, and dark post-punk flourishes. Many tracks start from the back of a tour van, where she’s clocked time with her other band Moaning, and as a ringer for artists including Girlpool and Cherry Glazerr. Lately, she’s been producing from her East Hollywood living room, where she and dog Teddy rise early and hit the home studio. In between comparing notes about our shared favorite TV shows (Real Housewives, duh), Pascal tells me about her thoughtful process as a songwriter, and the coveted equipment that helps craft her elaborate visions.
SADIE DUPUIS: I heard you were working on more delicate sounds. What sounds and influences are you favoring?
PASCAL STEVENSON: I’ve been listening to a lot less guitar music. Electronic music has its share of harshness, but I’m trying to strike a balance. I’m trying to write more emotionally impactful music instead of — I don’t know — what I was trying to do with my first record! I was trying to make something that felt smart, but I don’t know if there was anything truly heartbreaking on that record. I’m always trying to find things to make myself cry or feel something intensely. I want to replicate that. That is what feels authentic to me right now.
SD: What songs make you cry?
PS: The ones I can think of off the top of my head are the song “Transit” by Fennesz. It’s an ambient song with vocals, which has been a huge inspiration for my new record. It’s so moving. It always moves me to tears. Maybe a year into Covid, I was having a hard day and put on the Whitney Houston version of “I Will Always Love You,” and when the chorus came in I started sobbing, like full body bawling. It ruined my entire day, and since then I haven’t been able to listen to that song without crying very hard.
SD: Your album — Scrutiny — was finished about two years before it was released. If a creative project is done but unreleased, do you find it hard to work on new material?
PS: I have the opposite problem. It’s difficult for me to feel excited fully about whatever I’ve just released because I’ve been working on new stuff for so long. I write really fast, so I move on from things really fast. Even in the batch of songs for the next record, there are ones I wrote a year ago and already feel like I’ve moved on from. I have way too many songs for this new record. So I kind of wish I didn’t work on new things until the record was out, but you gotta take it where you can get it. If songs come to you, you have to go with it, because I can go months without writing anything.
SD: Your solo setup seems pretty interesting. What excites you about new equipment?
PS: It’s constantly shifting, and my setup has changed even more now. It’s weirdly disordered, the way I move through gear, but creatively, there’s benefit. I always have some vision in my mind of an amazing setup that combines live input and sampling and some tracks playback, some improvisation, some room for mistakes and errors. So I think I’m always chasing the way to make it the most interesting for myself and the audience, and that chase ends up being endless. When I play solo, I really want people to not know how things are happening, but for it to feel overwhelming. I keep making it more complicated even though I know I could go up with a sampler and sing and no one would care.
SD: Yeah, but you would care.
PS: I would care. I feel better knowing I can ruin a performance by doing something wrong, then if everything goes right, but there was no risk. It feels so much more rewarding to have gotten there.
SD: You don’t get that same adrenaline hit if everything’s to the grid. What was your first dream instrument?
PS: My dream guitar when I was thirteen was probably a Jaguar, which is what I play now.
SD: Who played a Jaguar that made you want to play one?
PS: Probably My Bloody Valentine, but others as well. They’re terrible guitars but I love them. They sound so peculiar. I recorded the record on one, but would play another guitar live that was a better guitar. It sounded too good! It didn’t have the weird percussiveness and trashiness that the Jaguar has, so I went back to it. When I first started getting into synthesizers, I wanted a Prophet-5 — and I own one of those now because they reissued it! I can’t remember where I first saw one, but Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japan were some big ones. There’s an amazing video of Suzanne Ciani, an early electronic music pioneer, on Letterman. Letterman was being super condescending to Suzanne and she’s just making insane explosion sounds on a Prophet and it’s amazing.
SD: What was your first instrument? And first band?
PS: I started playing bass when I was really young because my dad plays it. I was in a band in middle school with some of my friends. There were two basses in the band, because neither me or my friend played anything else at the time. We played “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” obviously, and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” No originals, all covers. And after that I was not in any bands until Moses Campbell, which was a band for eight or nine years. There were a lot of strange one-off noise performances, though. Usually at the Smell and Pehrspace. In DIY at that point, we knew all the people who ran the venues, so you could decide to start a weird project and play a show that month and then never do it again. And then Moaning, and now Fashion Club, and I’ve played in other people’s bands, but that’s typically hired work.
“I’m always chasing the way to make it the most interesting for myself and the audience. When I play solo, I really want people to not know how things are happening, but for it to feel overwhelming.”
SD: Is Fashion Club a Daria reference?
PS: No! I do like Daria, but it was a label on a weird shirt I got from a thrift store. One of those ‘80s/‘90s labels where you buy something and it has a bonkers brand name you’ve never heard of that probably existed for a couple years. It’s always strange button down shirts or silk lingerie. At the time, the concept for the band was to be guitar-centric and kind of post-punk. I thought it was a funny, tongue-in-cheek name for a punk band, because you look at a punk band and they’re all dressed the same. They’ve got their uniform, their fashion club. It was self deprecating humor.
SD: But you do watch TV. What are your favorites? I already know Real Housewives.
PS: I got really into Love Island a few months ago. So much so that on tour with Girlpool, I’d be in the back of the van for six hours just watching it on my phone. I’ve been trying to watch more narrative television, because the reality shows have a little too much screaming and it was starting to give me anxiety. I just started White Lotus, which is good. Right now I’m rewatching Gilmore Girls for maybe the fourth time. Everybody has these shows they watch for different purposes. If I’m in a place where I need to kind of get stuff done, but not enough to where I can’t have the TV on, I have my shows I put on. Your Gilmore Girls, your Gossip Girl, The OC, maybe Sex and the City if I want to be offended.
SD: What are your favorite extracurricular activities on tour?
PS: I like going to a local coffee shop, especially if my friends recommend something. In Chicago there’s obviously a ton and I always get good coffee there. You’re in Philly, right?
SD: Mmhmm. We have a couple good ones here, but the ones close to home are never as exciting as, like, the amazing one in Columbus, OH…which is Parable, by the way.
PS: Have you ever experienced the strange phenomenon where you roll up at a coffee shop and it turns out to be a church? Sometimes I think it’s funny, and most of the time the coffee is good, but the vibes are heinous. You walk in and it’s the biggest room you’ve ever been to in your life, with the smallest little counter for coffee. If it doesn’t feel dangerous — that’s obviously the exception — I like when the vibe is a little off on tour and you get to experience it with three of your very good friends. That can be kind of fun. The opposite of the Christian coffee shop is when you’re in the nowhere town, and you find the liberal bastion that is the only place like itself.
SD: Who has Fashion Club toured with?
PS: Shamir! It was amazing. I was really nervous about it because it was the first tour I had ever done fronting a band. Moaning is very much a collaborative band and we’re best friends and everything happens together. It’s not like I didn’t have responsibility on those tours, but something about feeling more responsible for everyone really stressed me out. I want to make sure everyone with me is comfortable and having a good time. Now I feel better about future touring. But the shows were great. Moaning has always toured with bands that are just dudes. We’re a guitar band, we were on Sub Pop, we get asked to open for bands that are rock boys.
SD: I know this feeling. Though I have tried very hard to avoid it.
PS: We’ve never gotten to the point where we can bring support, so we’re always the support band, and we take what we can get — especially now. And the people we’ve toured with, I love, and have all been so sweet. But in that scene of music, it’s a lot of men. So it was nice to do that Shamir tour, and have the vibe be totally different audience-wise.
SD: Who’s an artist you’d most like to support?
PS: I saw that Everything but the GIrl is about to put out new music, and I’d love to tour with them. And Deftones — I think that’s everybody’s dream, to play with them. They’re playing that crazy festival in Las Vegas, which I’d love to go to…if it wasn’t in Las Vegas. Anybody in their right mind would wanna play with Björk. I’d love to play with Perfume Genius. I know Mike and Alan peripherally, and they seem like sweet people to tour with. My friend Lillie’s band, Lala Lala. And some bands in LA. There’s a new band called Cupid & Psyche, that’s Juan and Michael from Abe Vigoda.
SD: Are there non-musical artists you wanna collaborate with?
PS: I’d love to get to a point where I’m not conceptualizing my own visual art and music videos. Not because I’m lazy and don’t want to do the work, but because I’m a musician and I’d love to have the money to hire someone to do their thing. I’ve always wanted Robert Beatty to do something. He’s had some insanely popular album covers at this point, but in 2010 I went to Amoeba and bought this Burning Star Core record called Challenger that he’d done the artwork for. It’s still some of my favorite artwork. Since then he’s gotten much more popular, but he seems down to earth!
“I thought [fashion club] was a funny, tongue-in-cheek name for a punk band, because you look at a punk band and they’re all dressed the same. They’ve got their uniform, their fashion club. It was self deprecating humor.”
SD: What’s going on with the rest of your day?
PS: I have band practice tonight for a show on Thursday at Zebulon. We’re opening a showcase for Felte, the label I’m on.
SD: How did you wind up working with them?
PS: Jeff reached out to me. We’d met at SXSW years ago, I had one song out at the time. He reached out to hear more. I sent him the record and he was into it and released it. I didn’t even send it to any other record labels because I liked that Felte had a lot of female artists and artists of color even before other labels were making an active effort. it didn’t feel like a move, or something. Chasms, who’s playing the show Thursday, is amazing. There’s a band from Mexico called Mint Field who are playing and are awesome as well, a dream poppy, shoegaze-y band. Houses of Heaven and Ritual Howls are honestly both great. It’s solid! There’s nothing on the label I don’t like.
SD: Let’s say Fashion Club blows up on TikTok today and you go platinum tomorrow. What are you doing to celebrate?
PS: I like that TikTok is the platform I’d blow up on. But I don’t think I will ever make a song that has the capability of blowing up on TikTok. I’m only moving further and further away from that possibility.
SD: It’s impossible to predict! I find out about things that blew up on TikTok and am like… that?
PS: If Colin Stetson can be trending, or the theme from Annihilation, I guess something weird could be. Hmm. Do I have money in this situation?
SD: You just went platinum!
PS: That doesn’t always mean money!
SD: That’s true. I don’t know what your deal looks like with Felte.
PS: [laughs] I’d probably go on vacation. I’d stay in the States — I like to travel close. It’s a weird thing about having toured so much, and toured out of the country so much. When I do go on vacation, I want to be within two hours of home. I don’t wanna drive that far. Maybe Big Bear?