Leonie Schlager, a.k.a. The Zew, creates vivid minimalist stories that are all the more urgent for their intimacy – and she does it so well that she’s in danger of losing her underground status. This year, she’s been playing some of Austria’s top alternative stages in support of her album 1Fl1FO (“One Foot In One Foot Out”). In an interview with Sebastian J. Götzendorfer, she talks about the difference between cyber-folk and cyborg folk, the collective nature of music, and what it’s like for an introvert to perform in front of an audience.
If you could choose the setting for people to listen to your album 1Fl1F0, what would it be?
Leonie Schlager: A movie theater [laughs]. I want my songs to attract attention because of the stories they tell, but I also want them to be able to serve as accompaniment – for pictures, or for thoughts. I think the movies, or the movies in people’s heads, are a good match for the songs. They’re very intimate, very introspective and introverted; some of them are also very quiet. So maybe experiencing them through headphones from vinyl works, too.
About the films in people’s heads: the album conjures very clear images in my mind – an apocalyptic Western, for instance. What images are you trying to convey with your music?
Leonie Schlager: I don’t one hundred percent agree with ‘apocalyptic’…maybe 60%. I think that’s the reason that ZINN (a band/collective with which she performs) and The Zew work so well together. ‘Western’ for sure, though – I’m very influenced by music from Western films. I wanted every song on this album to be like a film of its own. That goes well with the six eyes that are part of the artwork and my performance – as though the eyes represented multiple personalities, and each song pulls a different role from inside of me. That’s my goal. At the same time, this album is painted in very muted colors. I plan to paint the next songs in other colors.
In terms of instrumentation, different moods that you want to create, or…?
Leonie Schlager: I’m talking more about the moods; the instrumentation results from that. I also have to see what my options and limitations are. I’d like to concentrate more on the producing aspect – to see what sounds I can get out of my setup by myself.
“I actually don’t believe in mistakes.”
The Zew’s music seems very playful, very curious to me – as if you were to put someone with musical ability in a room with a great guitar and five effect pedals, then say to them: “see what you can do with it.” What’s your approach to sound aesthetics?
Leonie Schlager: I always need time to experiment. The effects I use have to work intuitively; I can’t deal with anything technical – otherwise my brain doesn’t work, and it holds me back while I’m playing. The recording process is really interesting to me, and also recreating that process live. When I was recording [the album], I left a lot to chance. Slips of the tongue, misunderstandings, feedback, electronic crackling – I like using that kind of thing. I actually don’t believe in mistakes, certainly not in music. Sometimes I hear myself singing on some recording and think, “oh, that sounds wrong” – and then I think, it’s not about whether it sounds right or wrong. The ear that you listen with in the first moment is the wrong one, and hopefully I can say to it: “Shut up! That’s not what it’s about.”
“You share your courage, your fear, your failure.”
Speaking of reduction, privacy, introversion – it’s interesting when artists with those personality traits go onstage to play music, specifically to be seen and heard. What’s your attitude toward that?
Leonie Schlager: It’s really weird, but also really nice. You have to be ready to snuggle emotionally with a whole lot of people you don’t know – that’s what it feels like, and it’s a very strange feeling if you’re normally introverted. It’s beautiful and creepy at the same time. The first few times that I was onstage in front of people, three years ago – I actually wasn’t planning on it; it wasn’t originally my intention to make music – were such wonderful experiences. When you see that there are people who really like the music, when you can share your courage, your fear, your failure with them – that’s also a kind of responsibility that you take on when you’re onstage. Whether you want to or not. [laughs] That’s what you share in that moment – your vulnerability.
That’s the artist’s perspective, but often people in the audience just want to be entertained.
Leonie Schlager: Entertainment is important, too. But with the setup I perform with – me, with a guitar, effects, and my voice – my entertainment value is limited. I can’t put on a ‘show’ – I can’t even move that much, because of the pedal board and because I’m stuck to the microphone. I can’t jump around like Helene Fischer, and I don’t have any other tricks. But you can still shape the performance – every evening has to have some kind of dramatic arc. In a concert setting, at least you already have people’s attention, in contrast to a lot of moments in everyday life where the attention span is often very short. You can repeat things or stretch them dramatically – actually I’d like to do that a lot more, but I haven’t dared to yet.
Monotony and repetition as stylistic devices?
Leonie Schlager: Exactly! But also creating scare moments and variety in between. One time I managed to scare someone without meaning to – I just hit the first chord on the guitar, and suddenly someone in the audience yelled [laughs]. It was great! And I ask myself: how can you intentionally create moments like that and play with them?
In terms of dramaturgy, I’m curious about how important the lyrics actually are in your music.
Leonie Schlager: [hesitates] I feel like…if [a song] doesn’t need lyrics, it doesn’t need lyrics. A sound or a chord progression can often communicate much more than a few words. But the lyrics are important to me, in the sense of being able to play with them – what stories they conjure, and for whom. Is it always the same? Ideally, I’d like every story I tell to be different for each person.
So do you intentionally leave as much room as possible for interpretation when you write lyrics?
Leonie Schlager: I write lyrics so that they even surprise me – they tell me a story while I’m writing them. When I’m done with a text, I interpret what it means to me. Some people have a similar interpretation and some people hear something completely different. But to me, that’s exactly the point of poetry.
“It can’t be monetized”
Do you see yourself as a singer-songwriter in the classic sense?
Leonie Schlager: I find the term completely absurd. When was that, even? It’s ancient. Also, I think women get called singer-songwriters more often [than men], because women tend to be identified more as singers than instrumentalists. But I have no idea how I see myself in that context…to me, ‘singer-songwriter’ is too broad. There are so, so many of them who have nothing at all in common musically. In terms of approach, I have more in common with people who make post-rock, krautrock, and art-pop.
When I say singer-songwriter, I think of people like Bob Dylan, Nick Drake…actually, when I think about it: men with acoustic guitars, who strum chords and tell stories.
Leonie Schlager: I think more of Taylor Swift. Although she’s also generally a pop star, of course. To me, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake – and Joni Mitchell – are folk musicians.
You refer to your music as ‘cyborg folk’. What does that mean?
Leonie Schlager: That has more than one level to it. Since we’re talking about folk, and folk personalities: folk music comes out of a very communal tradition. The word ‘folk’ isn’t just a musical term. In principle, it means: for the people, by the people. It’s nothing that can be plagiarized or monetized; it’s something that’s created communally. And in my head, every idea is a communal idea – because we’re all communal beings, and it’s only through external influences that we’re able to spit out words.
“my new bionic limbs”
So, the D-minor chord that you play on the guitar isn’t your D-minor?
Leonie Schlager: Exactly! And in folk music, songs are traditionally shared and worked on together. In our times, that’s taken on another dimension – or even in the past, as soon as folk was put into a medium, like being pressed onto a record. Even then, folk started moving into cyberspace a little bit – from performance to functioning in a medium. Now it’s more like hyper-folk, or cyber-folk, because we’re so overconnected. Which can give rise to completely different things. Cyborg folk is the way I perform: the original form of folk is that you stand there with two resonating instruments – the voice and the guitar – and you create something with them. But I don’t make folk in the classic way; I use effects, distortion, all kinds of electronic gadgets. That raises the whole thing from the human level to the machine level, the digital level, where I extend myself with the aid of machines. That makes me a cyborg – they’re my new bionic limbs.
When you look at it that way, the painted eyes are additional sense organs, right?
Leonie Schlager: That’s right! That’s actually almost trans-human, isn’t it? [laughs]
“The female gaze, staring fearlessly back”
What do the eyes mean, exactly?
Leonie Schlager: The eyes take on more meaning in the concerts. Originally it was just about overcoming my fear of performing: they allowed me to be someone else on stage – I wasn’t Leo, I was The Zew. It also had to do with my fear of having so many eyes looking at me; it allowed me to look back, even when I was singing with my real eyes closed, concentrated on myself. Over time, it developed further, embodied the concept of the ‘female gaze’ as a counterpart to the male gaze. The female gaze, staring fearlessly back. And another aspect is that they represent the different people who tell the different stories that are my songs.
You played a number of high-profile events this year – Popfest Wien, the summer edition of the Bluebird Festival, the Klangfestival. What’s next for The Zew?
Leonie Schlager: To keep experimenting. And to keep seeing the whole thing as my baby. It’s public now, and I am happy about that – but it’s still my playground, the space where I can do whatever I want. I want to protect that, so that I can always continue to try things out and see what happens. I hope it’s a productive process, but I don’t want to measure it in terms of how many albums I sell. But it can be measured by the fact that there are people who are moved or inspired by it, people I can share the music with.
Sebastian J. Götzendorfer, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger.