BIANCA CASADY isn’t just the endearingly vague singer from freak folk group COCOROSIE. As ADRIAN POTTS discovers, she moonlights as an artist, record exec, art curator and drag act.

It’s early in the morning and CocoRosie’s Bianca Casady doesn’t quite know where she is. “I know I’m in Germany somewhere,” she says, a little groggy having just woken up. “I’m in a venue in Germany, oh, I think I remember: it’s in Dresden. I don’t pay too much attention, but I heard someone say that.”

Whether they invite it or not, sister duo CocoRosie certainly carry an aura of quirkiness. Be it with Bianca’s distinctive Billie Holiday-on-helium vocals or her sister’s classically trained soprano – or with their music itself, which combines classical elements with synth-covered hip hop beats and samples a-plenty – samples of babies, animal noises from kids’ toys and on their newest album, The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn, real life farmyard animals. In fact, the album was written and recorded on a dilapidated farm in Southern France.

“My mum lived there for a few years in just a really small old house, maybe it’s not even a house, it’s on top of an old wine cellar where they made wine but it’s falling apart,” Casady says. “The farm isn’t really running that well, there’s a lotta wild pigs, there’s a sick donkey too. It’s really beautiful but it’s also really spooky, you know, there’s big owls that live in the barn that scream at night. We were there in fall and it gets quite windy, it definitely took us on this morbid journey”

And while the eeriness of their surrounds seeped into many of their songs, after they completed recording the sisters upped stumps to Iceland to work with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Will Oldham). “It just seemed an obvious choice for us to go somewhere extremely different from the farm,” Casady explains. “We were in a suburb of [Iceland’s capital] Reykjavik and it was beginning to be winter and starting to get dark. It was a really strange work period, it was like an outer space experiment.”
After from her work in CocoRosie, Casady keeps busy with a raft of other creative ventures. Having run an art space in New York, the Voodoo-EROS Museum Of Nice Things; attending to her record label Voodoo-EROS, which houses artists such as queer rap duo Bunny Rabbit; and also finding time to make her own art. “I have a show coming up in October and that’ll be a lot of everything really; video, a lot of watercolour installations and we’ll perform there as well. We’re trying to focus things a lot more on visual art right now.”

Testament to her interest in the visual, both on the cover of the new album and in the filmclip for lead track, Rainbowarrior, Casady appears decked in drag. “I found this French soldier’s uniform from just after the First World War – it was strange how each part of the outfit really fit me perfectly, the shoes and everything. At that particular time in this outfit I was living the myth of this uniform. It really took over and informed that whole phase.”

While she’s left behind the soldier, Casady has a new character in the works. When prodded for details though, she’s as vague on the matter as she is on her whereabouts: “The new character’s really different than the one before but I couldn’t quite define that right now. I think that’s always happening, in the moment I’m really nowhere or doing nothing definitive.”

The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn is out now on Touch and Go/Rogue Records/Inertia.

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