Underskog

Kom og hør enkvinns trommebandet Ill ease

“Sounding like an entire band while being a solo artist is one accomplishment, but
this hot thing is making bad-ass bluesy rock that would make the whiskey-soaked Jennifer Royal Trux proud!” iD

“Think The Breeders with added funk or an analogue, spikier Peaches –
smart, gritty and sneakily compulsive.” Kerrang KKKK

IllEase, from Brooklyn New York, is the one-woman band in which Elizabeth Sharp plays guitar, bass, drums, tambourine, shaker, car horn and anything else that rattles, buzzes, shakes or hums in a riff-o-matic racket – all in “a flurry of intoxication” (Plan B).

IllEase began as a recording project when an old 8-track, a haunted piano and a guitar amp with no off-switch for the vibrato were left in an abandoned auto shop in Brooklyn. For several years thereafter, Elizabeth Sharp, aka IllEase, recorded pop songs with fiendish instrumentation in unusual locales – such as 2001’s Live at the Holiday Sin, which was recorded in a hotel room in Atlantic City.

All Systems A-Go-Go! is the culmination of two years of touring, over two hundred live shows, and an untold number of hotel room/backstage after parties: it is the most leave-your-pants-on-the-dance-floor Ill Ease album to date!

Playing all the instruments herself, Sharp uses loops to build up dancey noise grooves: first thrashy drums playing hip hop beats, then heavy bass laying down sick grooves, then lo-fi fuzzed out guitars winding through the middle, and finally, toy instruments or unwieldy percussion vibrating on top.

With production help from long-time collaborator Thom Monahan (Devendra Banhart, Beechwood Sparks, The Lilys), and with remixing duties sublimely performed by Subtitle (GSL) and Napoleon III (Dance to the Radio/Brainlove), All Systems captures all the frenetic rhythms, lyrical subtleties and crazy energy of the IllEase live show.

Live, this female-fronted band – with the unique combination of an all-female one-woman band behind her – is an experience not to be missed: somehow channeling the energy of Deerhoof, The Fiery Furnaces, The Knife and Clap Your Hands into one, big,
ill-a-tastic, loopy, dance mash up!

*****
VIDEOS

• Its Worldwide! Its Fashion Suicide!
  Video from All Systems A-Go-Go!

• Brooklyn/Queens Expressway Shuffle
  Live @ Dot-to Dot Fest
  Nottingham 28 May, 05

• Jersey-o-matic
  Video from the Too Pure album The Exorcist

Surplus People .. a weird trio with dignity. Organic and metallic, the bearded lady is on a date in high-heeled shoes and diamonded out. Glamour meets an oil slick on a car mechanics floor, and city meets countryside. Hypnotic rhythms of bass, organs and samplings are forcing the music forward, turning it up side down. Voice, trombone and organs build simple melodies, sometimes on top of each other, rounded off by a strangled trumpet. Everything is held together by the primitive drum machine; a swinging, boiling, rhythm box that might be the only human component. Surplus People are very much appreciated as a live band. Visually they might look like a circus, with small movements, as they seduce and demolish, inviting you to a walk in the electronic forest, scaring and cradling you to feel safe. They encourage a riot. Magdalena Ågren is singing, screaming and making sounds, sometimes in a megaphone, trumpet or trombone. Petra Kiiskinen makes noise and melodies on one or another old organ. Helena Engarås is playing with the bass, sometimes a madly distorted bass.