Casey Dienel’s Fight For ‘Imitation Of A Woman To Love,’ A Record Of Glittering, Midnight Noise-Pop

Casey Dienel’s music sound like a dark splash of oil hitting cool water; it’s the high of midnight hitting with the same heat of the midday sun. Her new album has the thick air of desperation that all fantastic pop music requires, and the fight to get it out into the world was not an easy one. The melodies she makes aren’t sweet or precise like good formula pop, instead they easily stray and come unhinged, pulsing with the abandon of a woman who has no f*cks left to give. Often, it’s the very forces that drive an artist to the brink that also drive them into the arms of greatness — such is the case with her new album Imitation Of A Woman To Love, her second under her given name. So, while there’s an undercurrent of frustration on Dienel’s latest album, there’s also a sense that the record wouldn’t be here without it; anger as artistic pop praxis.

Though Imitation is only Dienel’s second record under her given name, its the sixth project where she’s served as the driving musical force; she released four projects as White Hinterland from 2008-2014 for the indie label Dead Oceans. In 2016 she initiated a lawsuit against Justin Bieber, Skrillex, and the crew of songwriters who helmed Bieber’s 2015 smash hit “Sorry” for the similarities it has to a song called “Ring The Bell,” off her 2014 White Hinterland album Baby, particularly focused on a distinctive vocal riff that arguably made the song.

While even indie tastemaker sites like Pitchfork have sided against Dienel, due to a video Skrillex uploaded that purports to explain how he created the similar sample, it’s impossible to listen to White Hinterland’s last record, along with Imitation, and not hear the number of distinct jittery-synths or operatic and breathy soprano hooks she routinely creates as a clear precursor to the newly-ubiquitous, dark, rubbery glitch that’s all over the mainstream pop world.

Perhaps this helps explain why Dienel felt compelled to write, sing, produce, and engineer every single sound you hear on Imitation Of A Woman To Love; it is the choice of a woman sick of explaining her own genius. Imitation came out last week — on the label she created to release it — Paddle Your Own Canoe Society, and Casey even did most of initial PR outreach for the record on her own. Independence is a specific kind of weapon against thievery or, well, imitation, but it serves another purpose for Dienel; it is also a balm.

“I realized the best times for me are when I’m by myself,” Dienel told me by phone a couple weeks ago, before the record came out. “The most fun I had, and the best ideas are when I’m not having to be ‘on.’ I just turn on the mic and the craziest sh*t will come out of my mouth. Or, I’m just goofing around, having fun for myself. There’s something really liberating about having a pure joyful moment on record, and selfishly, I wanted to have as many of those as possible this time around.”

At its core, Imitation is an album about these very selfish, specific moments that define a single woman in her late twenties and early thirties. The strangely static, almost abrasive quality of the noise elements on her album feels necessary then, to evoke the uncertainty of female loneliness; a romantic urge expressed creatively, even the capability to attain that status — a woman in the prime of her life, and alone — is only a few decades old. Imitation is about deep lust and creative frustration, loneliness, self-discovery, and partners who can’t quite be made to fit. It’s about sex and fear and satisfaction, and it’s a majestic, magnetic, and marvelously sad record. It’s about being a woman, and one of the few records of its kind that reflect solely a woman’s input on that experience.

“I think in some ways it can still seem radical for people to hear a woman be selfish,” Dienel said of her direct, intimate and specific songwriting. “Every time I share the record with someone I’m a little bit scared, like people that I know especially, I get a little bit nervous that they’re going to be turned off, if they’re my friends. Then I think, ‘Would I feel this way if I weren’t a woman?’ If I was like Bob Dylan would I be bummed if you thought that the songs on my record came from a real story? I don’t know! But, I think it’s important at times in your life to be a little bit selfish, if you want to grow.”

Imitation does show a lot of of growth for Casey, even if it is a short album. The record is only nine tracks, but the songs themselves are long, ranging to five or six minutes via strange codas or wandering synth solos. The mood of the record is dark and romantic, the sound of noise pop that’s been spiked with a dose of feminist theory, or hell, even just the accurate, reported details of a real woman’s life. Even the most straightforward listener won’t be bogged down in Dienel’s politics; this is a personal politic, and she’s clear that her decision to break with men for a creative spell wasn’t the product of anger.

“It’s not a slight against any of the men I’ve worked with,” she said of her independence. “I’ve had really great collaborators, most of the men; I’ve worked on the business side with mostly men. But there is this powerful assumption that if someone else is in the room I didn’t think it up, I didn’t feel it. I always felt really exhausted having to like clarify that: ‘Yeah, they’re great. nothing against that person but that was my arrangement,’ or, ‘no, I played that bass line.’ It just starts to wear on you over time. I always felt like such a f*cking showoff. It’s really not my personality. I always wanted to believe if you just do good work it’ll speak for itself, but I do find now that I am a lot more assertive in my professional life especially.”

Even in 2017, in the age of DIY bedroom pop albums and hashtag feminism, it’s rare to hear an album that a man had absolutely no say in. The only other album I can vouch bears no fingerprints but that of a female artist’s is the excellent 2015 Grimes record Art Angels — and Grimes had to point that out herself. There’s a bit of a kinship between the Angels and Imitation, they both take the darkness at the bottom of pop songs and blow it up until it fills the screen, adding small glittering twists to enormous brutal truths. Usually, in pop at least, those proportions happen in reverse. Perhaps, it’s the female perspective tilts the scale.

Because, when it comes to enormous, brutal truths here is one: The music industry is a corrupt and brutal place, but it is doubly so for women. Dienel’s choice release her album independently and work solo wasn’t a direct attack on her former label or collaborators, but it was intended to send a message. “I think it would feel funny to have songs about how the system is not working for me and then release them in that same system,” she said. “A song off the record, ‘Paper Mache,’ is about the music industry and how it’s a mess. It’s not just a mess for artists, it’s a mess for most women working within it. I think we have a lot of work to do and I think there’s a lot of soul-searching that I can see people are definitely beginning to have. I’m hopeful based on the amount of dialogue that’s happening now. I’ve been doing this for twelve years, and when I started no one was talking about, ‘Maybe we should do a better job when we interview female artists,’ or ‘maybe we should talk about sexual harassment in this business.'”

Some of the songs on Imitation specifically address these questions of power distribution for women, going beyond how that plays out in the business world and veering straight toward romantic and sexual appetites economies as well. The record’s lead single, “High Times,” is a freewheeling story about heading to Palm Springs for a one night stand — or two.

“I actually did a lot of research on this subject,” Dienel laughed. “Very horny research where I just was like, ‘how many songs are there about a woman who just wants to cum?’ I’d go through them and I’d find a lot of songs where it was always this layer of spirituality like women as goddess, which to me is beautiful… but maybe not how I feel about myself in those moments. I wanted it to be really Earth-bound.”

As a single woman in her thirties, Dienel wanted to write freely about female sexual desire as it happens, divorced from a desire for relationships or future plans. While that theme runs throughout the record, the lead single in particular is a centering of that very human urge, and an attempt to divorce it from the shame that our culture so often foists on women who are openly sexual.

“I wanted a song like ‘High Times’ to proclaim there’s no shame,” she said. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what that narrator is doing because both people are kind of exploiting the same situation for what I think is a really healthy and responsible reason. There’s a lot of songs about women having sex, but it still feels to me like it’s under the male gaze: ‘I just want to look good for you,’ or performing for men to please them and not really talking about female pleasure. A lot of the men in my songs are pieces of furniture in the room, and the women in the songs are the real center; the focus is on the way it feels for women when you just have desire or when you want someone.”

The title of the album also pulls at the way women are taught to design themselves in specific ways to please men. By calling it an “imitation” of a woman to love, Dienel is casting a spotlight on the way love is centered in our culture — women are objects to be loved, their own ability to love is never the focus — and by revealing this flawed dichotomy she hopes to break down petrified notions of gender in relationships.

“Sometimes in intimate situations I would be catching myself almost in personality drag,” she said. “It’d be like, ‘I’m more woman now, do you like this?’ I always wondered, who is this really serving? Is this really going to attract someone who will actually love me? And if I get the attention I’m seeking will it fix this craving or fill this gap that I’m feeling inside? I think women, on some level or at a very young age, are taught to be the object of desire rather than to think about what desire is on a personal level for them. It’s enough just that someone desires you rather than thinking about, ‘What do I want? Who is out there that actually is good for me?'”

Grappling with subject matter this complex and intimate is always difficult, and Dienel chipped away at the ice by combining intense bursts of noise with compelling and sticky pop hooks. As a composer, her contrasts are sometimes Yeezus-like in scope, walls of grating white noise and sirens sidled right up to poignant, societal commentary that’s catchy enough to sing back, even when the lyrics cut.

“It also feels true to me to have a song that’s packed with chaotic textures because that’s life for me,” she said. “I love when I can bang on something. But I also watched a lot of films to kind of figure out how to paint each song sonically. I’m almost more drawn direction-wise to sound based on watching movies. Weirdly, this album is inspired by like every Nancy Meyers movie, which sounds strange. But I’m thinking about how that could relate in the song, where maybe I’m saying something kind of nasty but I want the textures to really, really glisten. I really love sounds that are almost repellent — I think that’s why I love distortion so much because you almost want to turn away, it’s kind of disgusting, but then there’s something about it that’s really beautiful.”

Dienel recorded the album herself in two of her own studios; one in her hometown in Massachusetts, and the other built into her apartment in Brooklyn, where she currently lives. This flexibility allowed her to split her time between intensive recording and writing sessions, and retrospective editing sessions, after the dust had cleared a bit.

“I have one studio, in Massachusetts in the town where I grew up,” she said. “It’s pretty small and no frills. I’m not a gear hoarder and I don’t like buying things unless I need them, so I’m very hesitant to pick up anything new. I just have what I use the most regularly, and it’s in a basement. It’s not anything flashy, but it has pretty great acoustics. It’s also within walking distance from the beach, which is really, really nice. When I’m recording I tend to just zone out, then, if I’m getting a little stuck, I can go for a walk in the woods, or go the beach and kayak or something. I also have a small editing studio at my apartment here in Brooklyn where I can do a lot of the programming and dry editing stuff. I like it to be modular because then I don’t feel like I have to adhere to any space. I can kind of work wherever I am and that’s the best feeling for me.”

When it came to other records or artists, there weren’t a lot of touchstones Casey had in mind, but some of the movies that inspired this record came very easily, and included In The Realm Of The Senses, That Obscure Object Of Desire, Summer With Monika and Marie Antoinette. That last one, Marie Antoinette is perhaps the one that resonates the most upon listening; all the lavish and ornate synths and earworm hooks are suspended in a background of foreboding and ominous doom.

The gloom doesn’t necessarily cancel out the light and bright parts, but it weighs down what could potentially be seen as a giddy album with an undercurrent of hard-earned wisdom and premonition. The price to pay for independence is carrying all the burden yourself, and not knowing how heavy that may get, but the weight of being your own woman is the same responsibility that brings all the joy of it. Instead of taking away from the parts that glisten, that nastiness only brings them into focus, making them shine more in contrast. It’s the dark splash of oil in water, not a drink that you thought you wanted, but one that’s too strangely fascinating to leave untasted.

Imitation Of A Woman To Love is out 5/19 via Paddle Your Own Canoe Society. Get it here and stream it below.

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