SOLEX VS THE PIGDOG

Text by Mister Bad, RatSnatcher, and Splicer
Excellent comic strip design and graphics by Splicer his own damn self

(Pigdog Journal's crack interview team gangs up on avant-garde Dutch musician SOLEX; bad craziness ensues)

Argh. I'm tired. We've had this goddamned interview sitting around for MONTHS and it hasn't gone out because I'm such a lazy fuck that I can't write a goddamned intro. And without the intro, the thing doesn't make ANY SENSE whatsoever. None. I mean, it's a goddamned COMIC STRIP INTERVIEW. How's anybody gonna even GROK that?

Splice Doggy Dog put a whole lot of work into this. But he's been crawling up my ass about writing an intro for so long that I can't stand to be in the same room with him any more. So I give in. Here's the goods. Solexocity.

If you don't know it yet, you're gonna know soon: Solex is the MAN. Her given name is Elisabeth Esselink, but she goes by Solex, a name she borrowed from a motorscooter company by way of her cat. She does really cool music. REALLY cool. I call it techno, she calls it "Happy Music for Happy People." I don't care: it's good. Best factoid of all: she's DUTCH. In other words, she's BAD PEOPLE -- just our type.

Photo of the actual interview.

I've already chronicled how I first found out about coolio Solex in my review of her fabu first album, "Solex vs. The Hitmeister." Since then, Solex has been reviewed, interviewed and profiled in a variety of online and offline pubs, like SPIN and Rolling Stone and other nancyboy mainstream mags. But it hasn't really seemed to affect her performance; she's still got that underground feel.

A few months after that review, I was going over our web logs when I realized that we were getting a lot of hits from a Solex fan site in Holland. I checked it out and sent them mail saying they had our link a little mucked up. I was surprised to get mail back from SOLEX HERSELF. It turns out that Solex runs her own fan site, complete with links to her business, a music store in Amsterdam called "de C&D."

So, I did some figuring and then came to a quick conclusion: I had to kiss major Dutch ass to convince her to do an interview. And it worked! We did some arguing about how to do it (telephone? fly to Amsterdam? email?) and settled on the old tried and true: ICQ. OK, it's a crazy-ass idea, but we managed.

We had some mishaps getting our schedule together and meeting on line. OK, so, most of the mishaps happened on my side. Remember that she's in HOLLAND ferchrissakes, which is if you don't know IN THE FUTURE. SO it was hard making a time when we could meet. And since the best time to meet was, like, 3AM, I kept scheduling interviews and then (thinking I had to stay up all night anyways) going out and getting sicko crazy drunk at creepy Mission bars and, despite having interesting adventures, usually not ending up anywhere near a computer when oh-three-hundred eventually rolled around.

I realized after a couple such incidents that I better get on the ball and make this interview or we weren't gonna have any Solex at all. So our story begins in the middle of the fucking night back a while ago. I've limited myself to ONE BEER and snuck into work to keep myself from drinking more and passing out again. The award-winning Pigdog Eyewitness Interview team (me, Snatcher, and Splicer) has convened on ICQ to await Solex. It turns out that she took a while getting on. But that's OK: we're professionals.

-- Mister Bad