Even trailblazers get sick of the thick undergrowth and lack of amenities. After six albums and nearly two decades of touring, Rasputina’s Melora Creager quietly laid down her cello bow, not so much calling it quits as whispering it under her breath.
“Touring the same places for so many years and the whole process, I was really tired of it and didn’t want to do it anymore,” Creager explains on her way back from her first tour dates in several years, supporting a new album, Unknown.
She puts a strikingly human face on Newton’s third law of motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A self-described “shy misanthrope,” Creager had her world turned inside out when hackers stole her identity and corrupted her laptop, ultimately leading to the deletion of years of pictures, songs, and artistic and personal musings.
It was an intensely personal violation to have her innermost digital sanctum breached and her identity compromised. It made her paranoid and distrustful at first, but ultimately she had to make her way through that. Now she’s more focused on people and humanity than ever before, over life lived through a screen.
“I just think that the reliance on the Internet and how everyone spends their time there instead of with really human exchange is unhealthy,” she says.
Creager played cello in the early ’90s on albums by Nirvana and Marilyn Manson before deciding she wanted to be heard over the guitars and starting a cello trio. Featuring three women in corsets playing cellos with a gothic air, Rasputina was striking from the jump of their 1996 debut, Thanks for the Ether.
“Coming from art school I started very structured with a manifesto,” she says. “It was more about ideas and it’s taken me a lot of years to get my skills to the level of the original idea of 20 years ago. How I’ve survived this long is to be open to different presentations with a solid core.”
As time went on, the musical style continued to evolve and membership changed to include men, drums and keyboards at times. Similarly, albums began to explore conceptual themes from institutional enslavement and repression of women (2004’s Frustration Plantation) to steampunk capitalist critiques (2007’s Oh Perilous World!).
“I’ve never had the typical need to talk about myself and through historical situations and characters I’ve talked about my feelings and my own ideas, which are kind of hidden in there,” she says. “It’s also open ended and open to interpretation. That makes individuals able to put their own meaning onto it which makes it mean more to them.”
That experimental ken continues on this tour as Creager brings back cellist Carpella Parvo and is joined by a beatboxer, Luis Mojica. She says the gritty humanity of beatboxing has proven a nice counterpoint to the cello’s elegance.
“I love it because it’s a very organic sound made by human beings, but when you use a looping pedal, that’s very futuristic and modern and it gives a modern edge to the show,” she says. “Plus I love not having to lug around the drums and deal with a drummer’s ego.”
Unknown was written and recorded in less than a month, largely inspired by her identity theft, but delving even deeper into the subject of our digital and authentic selves. For the first time she played all the instruments on the album, and, in a nod to the thematic conceit, is only selling it on CD, which she personally mails. It’s not available digitally anywhere.
Without a label, bandmates or any expectations on her at all, it was a strangely freeing experience. “It didn’t matter what happened,” she says. “Nobody was waiting to find out. It was nice to do it in a vacuum.”
Time away from the industry has softened some of Creager’s harder edges, such as the sour taste she got watching newly minted and corseted goth girls riding Rasputina’s long coattails to staggering success despite rather thin résumés.
“That’s the kind of thing I was frustrated with when I stopped and the kind of thing about which my attitude has improved,” she says. “I have a private life and even though I’m performing right now, I can keep it that way and I don’t feel involved in the musical world. My fans love me and I can feel it when I play and that’s good enough for me.”
Rasputina headlines Shank Hall on Sunday, Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. with opener Eliza Rickman.
