Categories
Arts & Music

Gimme Five! Wendy Spitzer of Felix Obelix

For a time, Wendy Spitzer thought she’d play classical oboe for the rest of her life. The idea of that—symphonies, incessant practice, orchestras, audiences packed with the stilted and elderly—was enough to make her stop playing music pretty much altogether for about two years.

For a time, Wendy Spitzer thought she’d play classical oboe for the rest of her life.  The idea of that—symphonies, incessant practice, orchestras, audiences packed with the stilted and elderly—was enough to make her stop playing music pretty much altogether for about two years.  After taking a little space to think it all over, she reemerged first as a bass player in a friend’s band and then as all out band-leader in her own outfit, Felix Obelix.

With Felix Obelix, Spitzer and her band of musical misfits (Doug Vuncannon [organ], Anuraag Pendyal [keys], Billy Sugarfix [drums], and David Eisenband [xylophone/glockenspiel]) create music that hit that sweet spot between pop and experimental.  The result is something a little playful and off-kilter, but arranged and performed with such great care that the sincerity of the whole endeavor is unmistakable.  Check out Felix Obelix’s first full-length album, The Tick of the Clock, the Beat in the Chest out now, or just wander down to The Nightlight this Saturday, November 20th to hear them live.

Now the five most furious questions in faux business:

1. If your band were an abstract art project, what would it be?

It would be this set of instructions: go to Iona Dau’s grave in the Carrboro cemetery at sunset; pick a nostalgic memory from your childhood and wallow in it for forty seconds; tap the lamb on the headstone three times; walk twelve paces forward; bend at the waist and think about how difficult it will be to do this when you’re very old; wallow in that imagined feeling for another forty seconds; go right seventeen paces; look up and pay complete attention to the flight of a single bird; seventeen paces in the south by southwest direction, there’s a nook in that tree. The project that is the band is hidden there, go find it.

2. What’s the strangest show (or venue) you’ve ever played?

My old band Eyes to Space played an alternative prom for a gaggle of fabulous teenagers in an old roller skating rink in Wilkesboro. We played, they skated and fell down, and later, the refreshments. It was the only prom I ever attended.

3. Describe your ambition.

I want to spray-paint thousands of dominoes in glow-in-the-dark colors; section off small squares of floor space for people to work; invite all the audience members attending a Felix Obelix show to work at a square, setting up the dominoes in whatever pattern they choose, but in such a way that their final domino hits the next person’s squares’ worth of dominoes, while we play our set; then during the last moments of the last song, turn off all the lights and set the glow-in-the-dark dominoes knocking each other over, in rapid technicolor motion, timing it, miraculously, so that on the last note of the last song, the last domino falls down. Bonus points if this can happen at the sea organ on the shores of Zadar, Croatia.

4. Who/what might be a few inspirations or influences that would really surprise people?

Old love letters from strangers, stationery from defunct businesses, fancy handkerchiefs embroidered by women who once wept into them until they died of tuberculosis; comedies where neurotic characters set up convoluted situations for their own selfish benefit, and by their own folly everything goes wrong; the can-do spirit of all of my friends’ projects; artwork that seems like someone labored over it, piece by piece, assembling and disassembling, until it’s too enormous to ever fully understand. I also have a complicated relationship with the animated television programme He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Do I love it? Do I hate it? Like everything: a bit of both.

5. What did you dream of being when you were a kid? (how ’d that turn out?)

I wanted to be an adult. Mission accomplished!

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Follow your feet approximately 1,212.5 (give or take about a million) paces down to The Nightlight this Saturday, November 20th to see Felix Obelix. And, by all means, give Wendy a high five when you see her!