Locate S, 1

Interview + new release “Whisper 2000”

written by alex free

Locate S, 1 has just released the music video for Whisper 2000 off her forthcoming album Personalia, out April 3rd. The video, rolling with high-color frames and splicey graphics, has a late 80s/early 90s aesthetic that is both an homage to that era of rock and roll and internet culture, and pointing delirious fun at it. It’s full of ironic reverence. A romp through the best of the worst of internet archives. The video splices together footage of faces and bodies of random people at parades, festivals, from home footage, commercials, news, tv shows, some of modern-day Locate S, 1, and the super occasional Arabian product advertisement.

All with a constant, rotating splash of visual effects and graphics, and a red-brightened and bedazzled, disembodied version of Locate S, 1’s mouth, superimposed and singing along. As Whisper 2000 opens into the rock and layered chorus, the video explodes into blocks of color and the repeated image of Locate S, 1 strumming her guitar energetically behind lengths of her waving, white-blonde hair. An image which, fittingly, closes out the song to the repeated anthem- ’If you cannot behold my miracle/step away from the vehicle.’

watch the music video + read the interview with Locate S, 1 below!

Locate S, 1 talks touring, living, the battle of personas and the process of making Personalia below.

Alex Free: Can you talk a little bit about your background with music and performance? Especially with this new project, this recent video release, this tour and quitting your job. What are your hopes for the future? Can you describe where you’re at as an artist?

Locate S, 1: I come from a more DIY background. Living in New York I was recording my own music, myself, and then with Zack Phillips, who I was in a band with. The shift, I think, to where I am now, is really a shift in how people are responding, not so much a shift in what I’m doing. I’m obviously working with a different pallet now, and with Kevin producing it brings a completely new flavor to my songs, but I still write the songs the same way I always have.

AF: What was it like getting your current crew together, your community?

LS,1: I was working with a lot of great people in the more DIY, New York scene. And my old band Solutions got invited to open for of Montreal on this tour, and that’s how I met Kevin. We fell in love, and I moved to Athens. We started recording my last album, Healing Contest, and it was a very big shift musically and with what I was working with. I went from working with totally analog, real instrumentation to completely in the box, synthetic music.

AF: How’s it been living in Athens? How do feel it’s influenced your sound, especially on the upcoming album?

LS,1: I think feeling safer, emotionally, has allowed me to open up a little bit more in the songwriting, and to be more straightforward, which I used to be more afraid of. I used to go more towards psychedelic, indecipherable poetry. With this new album I’m trying to keep the spirit of that but say more, if that makes sense.

AF: Being in a more emotionally open environment for you— where you’re living and who you’re spending your time with— do you feel like you're more willing to be yourself with this project?

LS,1: I just feel a little bit more empowered, lately. It’s been healthy for me to constantly remind myself what’s actually important to me. Having faith in what I’m doing has become more important, so I’m trying to exercise that muscle more.

AF: I’m so interested in cultivating an honest voice, and that self-confidence.
LS,1: Honesty is tricky. I feel like as an artist you’re supposed to be this really opaque character. I’m trying to wear who I am and all my imperfections on my sleeve, and make that my super power.

AF: Can we talk about the title of the upcoming album, and how it relates to precisely that— the lack of a persona, or wearing yourself as your own character.

LS,1: I read this Mary Ruefle poem called ‘Personalia,’ and it’s about these different characters inside of you, battling it out. It’s the self as this aspect of horror— a thing that is in constant tension with itself.

AF: Is the whole album centered on that theme?

LS,1: There’s definitely more of that on the album, but it branches out into others areas too, like into corporate feminism, and capitalism, and California being on fire, and Australia. It’s kind of what the world is telling me to write, right now.

AF: What was it like to create this album?

LS,1: I enjoy writing, but only when the process of writing has really come to fruition. I don’t know much music theory, I didn’t study music in an academic setting. A lot of times I’ll play a thousand chord progressions and chord voicings, playing everything by ear. I’ll start off with chords, usually.

I always keep a notebook full of lyric ideas and song titles. A phrase will pop in my head and I’ll think, ‘That is a song title,’ and that’s my base for writing the lyrics. Sometimes when I’m writing a chord progression, I feel like I’m embodying a character, and I have to finish the song in that character’s voice. Not really a narrative, but a point of view that I adopt. And it’s not like I’m fully embodying this character- it’s still me. It’s more that I feel like there’s so many aspects of my life that force me to be quiet, like go to my job and be a yes-man, and then there’s a part of me that opens up and can be super powerful in a way. Music allows me to be powerful.

AF: What are you looking forward to with tour, and how is going to be navigating that space a partner, who is your living partner?

LS,1: Oh, well he [Kevin] is in my band, and that’s crucial to my survival. I love touring, but I hate touring without Kevin. I’m kind of a home body, but only in the sense that my love, Kevin, is my home. But I love traveling and touring, and I love my band so much. They’re such amazing musicians, and such amazing people. And I pray to god that they don’t get fed up with not making any money. [laughs] But I’m really looking forward to it, because I love hanging out with them, and I’ve never felt better about my live show.

AF: Is there anything you’re particularly excited about, or any surprises you have in store? Any hints?

LS,1: We’re going to play a lot of songs that we haven’t even arranged yet, from the new album, that I’m really excited to make happen live, because they have a really big kind of dance-heavy, bass feeling. I’ve never done that in a live setting, so I’m really excited feel what that’s like in a live setting.

about the artist:

After a particularly rough solo performance in 2018 when one of her own friends talked loudly throughout her set, Christina Schneider exited the venue and told herself, “If they’re not even going to listen, then I’m fucking done.” It wasn’t quite the feeling she’d hoped for after dedicating her life to creating subversive, genre-fluid pop music. Working under various aliases since 2014—including CE Schneider Topical, Jepeto Solutions, Christina Schneider’s Genius Grant and now Locate S,1—she’s explored everything from groovy garage rock to minimalist bedroom pop to Syd Barrett-style psychedelia. 

But when she got home that night Schneider gave herself a little pep talk, and after some self-reflection she came away determined to begin another chapter. “I thought, I don’t really need this world to value me,” Schneider says. “The process of writing and playing is what I really love, I’m simply getting lost in this other thing that’s ruining it for me.” Buoyed by her desire to create the same “crazy, powerful feeling” she gets when she hears an ABBA or Kate Bush song, she reached again for the outer limits of pop music and recorded Personalia, her sophomore album as Locate S,1.

Named after a poem by Mary Ruefle, “Personalia,” the lead single and title track, is a retelling of that emotional night in 2018 when she nearly quit. “Almost killed myself so I went home / I just cannot take these local shows,” she sings over a gloomy, despondent bassline. “Drive through thunderlight all alone just to play while they’re looking at their phones / curse another crowd that doesn’t get it,” she later sneers. But in-between this melancholy Schneider suddenly finds her spark. “Plug in tonight when I get to my room / pretend I’m someone that I could believe in,” she sings during the songs fizzy, euphoric chorus. “I’ve shorted out but if I play long enough I'll become the person that I wanna be again,” she cries, echoing some of Blondie’s most triumphant moments. 

The song signals Schneider’s desire to center Personalia in the present. Much like the character in Mary Ruefle’s poem, Schneider spends much of the album trying to understand and expel a darkness that has come over her (and society at large) in order to live a more fulfilling life. While she was writing and recording the album in her home studio in Athens, GA over the past year, she was thinking a lot about her own growth and self-worth as an artist, and where her constantly evolving and always experimental music fits in the digital age. Environmentalism, money, power, and modern feminism formed part of that conversation, too. Throughout Personalia Schneider seeks to address how the attention economy is plaguing us with feelings of FOMO and anxiety, and is causing many of us to abandon their progreesive values.

One of the more profound statements about this topic comes via a song called “After The Final Rose,” which is based on Schneider’s observations of the final two seasons of the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. “At the end of the season they have this episode called “After The Final Rose,” and the Bachelor or Bachelorette meets up with all the other contestants and they yell at each other,” Schneider explains. “I thought that was a very funny and unintentionally self-reflexive title for the episode, so I borrowed it to criticize corporate feminism and its lethal effects on romance. On The Bachelorette women feel like they’re powerful because they have money and can travel all over the world. It seems like that’s replaced any kind of meaningful feminism or romance in the world, currently.”  

Her partner Kevin Barnes, of the rock band of Montreal, co-produced and engineered the album, and shares a writing credit on “Even the Good Boys Are Bad,” which references a conversation she had with Barnes about his daughter beginning to date. Schneider coined the phrase “even the good boys are bad” in reference to his paternal anxiety, they then took it and it turned into the album’s biggest hook—“Even the good boys are bad / even the best ones, even the good sons.” The song reached its final form after Schneider listened obsessively to Britney Spears’ hit single “Toxic.” You can hear this influence in the charging drums, spiraling synths and the song’s enigmatic chorus. 

Schneider also has a sharp sense of humor, and while it’s more obvious on stage, if you listen closely you can also hear it on Personalia. Opening track “Sanctimitus Detrimitus” is named after a phrase she misheard while watching the James Stewart movie “Made for Each Other”. “I love songs where people completely make up words, like Steve Miller’s ‘pompatus of love’ but I thought it would be even funnier if I just made up some Latin, though ‘Sancitmitus Detrimitus’ does mean something to me now” Schneider says of the devotional, MIDI-saturated jam. “Futureless Hives of Bel Air” is an apocalyptic, anticapitalist song about how we are killing our ecosystem, yet something about the idea of the ultra rich leaving behind their empty mansions and fleeing Earth to live in space (the idea came to Schneider in a dream) seems decidedly absurd. 

At its core, Personalia is about rebuilding, not rebranding. It’s about evolving and moving forward despite knowing the world is falling apart around you. On the peppy, dance hit “Whisper 2000” Schneider fully embraces this idea: “If you cannot behold my miracle, step away from the vehicle,” she sings with a defiant spring in step.