Annie O Presents: Dollshot

Indie-pop band Dollshot is Rosie and Noah K, husband and wife, a beguiling voice and a killer sax. Rosalie, from small-town Virginia, and Noah, from Topanga Canyon, meet at New England Conservatory, move to Brooklyn, and write songs that twist the threads of their outsider influences... Our Annie O caught up with them prior to their show at The Standard, East Village.

Your music has been called “Dream Pop” music-what does it really mean in your case?
In our case, it's the dream logic our songs follow, something beautiful becomes violent, the switch is flipped and your sense of gravity is inverted – it's chimeric. What makes it pop is that it's subversively fucking with you in an appealing way, as pop does.

How was Dollshot conceived? Rosie being from Virginia and Noah K from LA? When did you meet?
We met in Boston, fell in love and moved to New York. We've been working together since. Dollshot expresses the contradictions we live in – it's glitter and doom. The heart of it is the play between voice and sax. It grew from there. . . .

Where does the album title “Lalande” comes from?
We were both really taken with the idea of this made-up word 'Lalande' in Clarice Lispector's novel Near to the Wild Heart. It describes a certain kind of liminal state that "…is also the night sea, when no one has set eyes on the beach yet, when the sun hasn't risen." It's a feeling we connected to, an intense awareness of the world in the dark.

 

Tell us about your connection and collaboration with Hampton Fancher, the veteran scriptwriter for Blade Runner (first and second one)?
In 2010, we made a piece together called Rat Lunch. Since then, we've done a lot of things. A few years ago we assisted him while he was working on Blade Runner 2049. His creative process really influenced us in how to work.

For the past few years, we have been collaborating with Hampton on an opera called Salvation. It's a new creation myth, if the creator didn't get his antipsychotic that day. Hampton wrote an incredible libretto and we are working now to bring the piece to life.

Where are you based these days?
We're bi-coastal, splitting our time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Our new venture in LA is a pop-up venue called The Outhaus that we opened with two very forward-thinking musicians, Christopher Douthitt and Daniel Silliman.

What are you listening to?
The Internet
Éliane Radigue
Prokofiev's Toccata Op. 11 (Martha Argerich)
Du Yun's Angel's Bone

What can we expect from your show at the Standard, East Village as part of the AnnieO Music series?
Whatever your expectancy, things aren't quite what they seem to be.

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