Erika M. Anderson plays in Gowns and Some Dark Holler: she’s an incredible guitarist, a keen and serious shredder whose work I have always been a huge fan of. She’s a bright young artistic force in California as part of the punk and experimental scenes, though she is originally from South Dakota. My friend saw her play last week and wrote to me: “To see her play live is just, mind blowing. Literally Jessica, MIND BLOWING I felt like I was watching Jimi Hendrix.”
Here’s some footage of Erika in various phases of rock action:
Here’s Erika covering “Mother” by Danzig in her bedroom.
And here is her recording some blistering song in her living room. SO MEGA!
Erika M. Anderson & Some Dark Holler from Erica Tyron on Vimeo.
And here she is opening for Throbbing Gristle.
I had some questions for Erika about her start and her inspirations and requested she pepper her answers with her wisdom and advice.
What’s your equipment set up? Please give it to us in full glorious detail, including pedals:
Live I either play a Fender Jaguar or a Fender Mustang. I don’t know why I always chose Fenders, I think maybe I liked the way they looked. Both are great guitars although their tone is kind of bright. I think the Mustang is a perfect guitar for someone just starting to play, because it’s small and lightweight, which makes it easy to move around onstage. And it has a smaller neck and fretboard. It’s really, really fun to play. It’s like a sports car.
For pedals I often use some combination of:
a tuner
a delay/reverb pedal
an MXR double shot distortion
a big muff distortion
a loop station
volume pedal
What order you put your pedals in really makes a difference. For example, I put the BIG MUFF distortion after the MXR distortion because the BIG MUFF compresses and sustains the MXR feedback. Sometimes I put my volume pedal before the loop station so I can control the levels going in to the loop. Sometimes I put the volume pedal after so I can control the volume of the entire finished loop. You just have to play around. For amps I use little Fender tube amps. I love their reverb. Also, if you play through a little amp instead of a huge one, you can get feedback and distortion at lower volumes.
What did you start playing on?
I started playing on a red Squier Stratocaster. It really did not sound that great. But once I had shown that I was going to stick with playing my parents got me a Jaguar for my 16th birthday. I still have it today! Don’t feel too bad if when you first start to play you don’t sound that great. It could be the guitar. Cheap guitars are hard to keep in tune.
What started you playing?
You know, that’s hard to say. When we were little my sister asked for an electric guitar for Xmas and my parents got her this red toy-like one. It wasn’t quite a real guitar but it was made of heavy plastic and had real strings on it. For some reason one day I went down to the basement and just smashed it to pieces. I don’t know why! I don’t think I was trying to be mean to her. I just had the urge to smash it. It’s the only guitar I ever destroyed.
So I probably always wanted to play in some way. Guitars are powerful and violent instruments, and I wanted to harness that.
But what made me realize I actually could play was probably seeing Hole playing electric guitars on MTV when I was 12. Lots of people dislike Courtney Love, but her influence on me as kid was really positive and empowering. Seeing a woman on prime time TV playing guitar made it a real possibility to me.
I lived in the rural Midwest, so it was pretty out of the way of the punk or riot grrrl movement (although I got turned on to that pretty quick). It was probably years before I saw a woman in real life playing guitar onstage. I think it was Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland.
I was the only girl I knew that played, and considering that, it’s kind of crazy that I kept it up!
To this day, it’s hard for me to conjure up other images of a woman playing electric guitar on TV, like in her own video. I think it’s important to have female players represented in the mainstream. It validates things for people who haven’t been turned on to the underground yet. Some people have this mindset that unless something is big and famous, it’s not good. It’s not an ideal that particularly motivates me, but I think a lack of mainstream female presence can be disheartening for girls who are looking for role models and don’t know where to find them.
How did you learn to play? Did you teach yourself? How did you learn to play solos? Do you ever get frustrated with your playing still?
I took lessons for a little while, maybe a year at most. It was helpful and I wish I would have stuck with it so I could have learned more theory and scales and stuff. But being mostly self-taught helped me approach the guitar from a different place, as a whole instrument to bang on and feedback and bend and break.
As far as solos go, just pick one you like and learn it. Start simple. You’d be surprised how many good solos are really simple. Also, practice your scales! Find someone else to play with and just improvise in one key. I had a good friend who played bass and we used to just hang out and jam together.
There are some things I am better at than others.
The way I write music is largely based on improvisation. So if I’m playing with a band, we won’t necessarily say, “ok, let’s play 4 measures of this part and then 8 measures of this part”. It’s more like, “let’s play this loud part for a while until it’s time to switch to the next part”. So the song can vary a lot between each time we practice it. I get frustrated if I can’t give a good performance or I can’t just write something on the spot. It’s a lot of trial and error and I always think, oh man if I just practiced more I would come up with the right part a lot more quickly.
You have done some fairly conceptual work over the years–can you talk about that and what inspired that? What made you think music was the right carrier for these ideas?
Music is cool because it’s got the best distribution network and it reaches the largest amount of people. I make videos and write as well, but even if people don’t watch experimental shorts or read blogs, everyone listens to music.
On the other hand, people don’t always take advantage of everything you can do with sound, and they often don’t want to take it to the theoretical level that artists in other disciplines do. For example, if you want to be a painter or a photographer, you have to learn how to write a formal artist’s statement explaining your work. You have to explain it’s historical context and what all of the elements mean. In music, it’s mostly the record reviewers who try to explain a piece of music. But why should musicians leave it up to the critics to define what their work means?
Also, the public understands that the purpose of a painting is not just to entertain, but to provoke thought and dialog and comment on ideas and history. More people go to rock concerts than to museums, so why shouldn’t music do the same? People have such a great understanding of music and they don’t even realize it. But even if you’ve never studied music, you know what a distorted guitar means. It signifies aggression and energy and youth. You know what a twangy banjo means, it means country; a hip-hop beat means city. You know what a cowbell means. It’s rock music’s punchline!
So we have this whole other language that we’ve been learning our whole lives. Because people already understand so much about music, an album can be as complex as a novel or a movie. And it can be as theoretical or impressionistic as a painting.
Conceptual work is attractive it to me because it seems to stimulate more of my senses. It stimulates me on an intellectual level, and also on a visual and sensory level, because I can see the colors of music and feel the textures of sound.
For people who are interested but just starting to explore experimental work, don’t be intimidated! Everyone starts somewhere and you don’t even have to decide if you like something right away. Just check it out and be open-minded.
What or who is inspiring you now? Idealogically and musically?
Right now I’m kind of on this “genius” lady artist kick, trying to discover more about the work of people like Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk.
They have these amazing careers that are interdisciplinary, combining music with visual and performance art. They basically invented their own language and art forms, and because of that they’re able to have much longer creative careers than that of the average “rock star”.
When you first started making music, what was something that you believed was true that turned out not to be?
I think I put too much stock in the “right” way to play over just having good ideas. I thought that other people (boys) wouldn’t want to play with me because I wasn’t as technically good as them, but I was wrong. Having confidence, good ideas and your own unique style is way more important than being able to play something perfectly every time.
I have to say that the way I play is not technical. It’s not virtuostic. It’s intuitive and performative.
Playing the guitar is not technically hard. What is hard is having the confidence to play that way. To visualize and understand what you want to do and then to do it. I don’t think women lack the innate ability to play. They lack the confidence and the interest. 90% of the time when I ask a girl if she plays music, she says yes but i’m not very good. That may be true but guys never say that. Playing guitar in noise or punk is essentially a con game. To me the worst is when girls play in kind of a sheepish way. So it’s sloppy but there’s also this kind of embarrassed eye-rolling, kind of like ‘yeah i’m not very good, isn’t it funny?’ You just have to commit to it. Commit to a performance, commit to a riff, and don’t be afraid to just play something if you like the way it sounds even if it’s dissonant. In fact, be dissonant!
Also, learn how to play with boys. Playing with other women is awesome, but there’s no need to limit yourself. Boys and girls can learn a lot from each other. Plus, learning how to successfully communicate your ideas with the opposite gender is a skill that is useful for the rest of your life, not just in music.And last but not least, It’s ok to fail. Learning how to play and perform means that you are probably at some point going to publicly fail in front of friends, family and peers. Yes, it will be embarrassing. But it’s ok. It doesn’t mean you suck, it means you’re brave. If you never fail, it means you are playing it too safe. Think about what happened (equipment malfunction? stage fright?) and learn from it. And then GET UP AND TRY AGAIN.
