Composer: ‘I get my music tools from a sex shop’

The adventurous composer Elizabeth A Baker has been talking to Van magazine:

…. What’s really cool with the vibrators, because they’re all different shapes and sizes, they have different patterns. You start getting these really tiny inner dialogues, even between the “command voices.” I could just listen to it forever.

Have you ever rejected a vibrator because it didn’t sound cool?
Yes. There are certain vibrators that I’m not down with. It’s funny because my duo partner, Eric, was like, “Let me try one of these vibrators on my banjo.” And I was like, “Hold on, you don’t want this one.” And I have so many delightful stories from the sex shop to find the vibrators.

Let’s hear them.
The first visit I went to procure vibrators, I went into to the sex shop. It was 9 a.m., and there were also a lot of guys in there, going straight to that video arcade with absolutely no eye contact. I was like, “Are they starting their day or ending it?” I have so many questions that have never been answered [laughs].

Anyway, the lady’s helping me: “This one might work, and that one is really big, it might do something cool.” I’m like, “Can we get something that’s a little less…conspicuous?” She literally looked me in the eye and said, “We have it in blue.”

The second time I went, there were two workers there. I said I was using the vibrators for a piano. The looks of shock on their faces were priceless. They were like, “You get street cred for shocking a sex shop worker. Nothing shocks us.” So I now have sex shop street cred.

To me, I don’t really see them as sex objects, but as tools for making music. But people can’t remove that connotation from it. We moved from calling them vibrators to “the vibrating objects,” because we’re trying to elevate them…

More here.