“We’re going to party like it’s 1699,” sings Nina Persson on Colonia, the second album the Cardigans frontwoman has released under the A Camp name with husband Nathan Larson (Shudder To Think) and Niclas Frisk. As the lyric and album title imply, the ornate Colonia is loosely based on the theme of love in the time of colonialism and is inspired by cabaret and musicals from the ’40s. Larson and Persson—king and queen of Colonia—are guest editing magnetmagazine.com all this week. Read our Q&A with them.
Nathan And Nina: Fortunate as we are to live with one foot in New York City and the other in Europe, we have many, many wonderful and brilliant friends doing great work in all corners of the globe. One such posse of people is cabaret group the Citizen’s Band, based in NYC, of which Nina is proudly a performing member. The Citizen’s Band is more or less the brainchild of our pal Sarah Sophie Flicker, a filmmaker/artist/law-school grad/all-around renaissance lady who happens to be married to Nathan’s very, very excellent (and longstanding) pal, Jesse Peretz. The four of us lived together for a time in a gigantor loft on Canal Street, way over on the West Side of Manhattan near the Holland Tunnel. It was a kooky time in our lives (this would’ve been between 1999 and 2002 or so), we were all doing a lot of traveling, and both couples were just settling into what would become marriages. So although we were all engaged in our own artistic endeavors, our focus at that time was on our relationships and the decisions that go along with that.
In 2005 or so, Nina joined up with the then in-full-swing Citizen’s Band, which can only be described as a avant-garde cabaret happening, in the tradition of Weimar Berlin, with a modern political focus and a cinematic approach with art direction that leaves you with the sense that you have just fallen into the dark heart of the blackest Tom Waits nightmare, sometimes approaching the Boschian, while still maintaining a healthy level of frilly underwear and good old singing and dancing. The Citizen’s Band’s most recent show, The Panic Is On, had a playbill sporting a ’30s-looking showgirl sticking out her ass and wearing a gas mask. Maybe this gives you a sense. Anyhow, the Citizen’s Band has some heavy-hitting artists in its rotating lineup, including Karen Elson, Rain Phoenix, Angela McCluskey, Amy Miles, ex-Shudder To Think frontman Craig Wedren, Jorjee Douglass, Paul Cantelon, the brilliant Rachelle Garniez, Ronin and amazing aerial artist Chelsea Bacon. The Citizen’s Band has also seen work from the likes of Melissa Auf Der Maur, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Amanda Palmer, Zooey Deschanel and Cyndi Lauper.
Ow, our foot. We think we dropped a huge buncha names on it! Seriously, the Citizen’s Band has to be experienced to be understood. (And seeing it certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to understand it.) We salute Sarah’s vision and can’t express how much we value our relationship with her, her husband Jesse and their daughter Arrow.
