You Down With UVP?

Somerville’s UV Protection Makes the Invisible Visible

By C.D. Di Guardia

Photos by JB Galusha

Joanna Muehleisen of UV Protection is standing bolt upright in a small practice room just outside of Boston. Both her back and her eyebrows are arched, under which her brown eyes blaze. Her lips are pursed together in the manner of someone who is very, very serious. Her right hand is held high above her head in a flat wave, having been brought into position via one smooth and sweeping arm movement.

This is the official UV Protection salute. It serves as a symbol of the band and a sign to those around; it means that UV Protection is about to commence.

This is only a test, of course. Muehleisen shrinks down from eight feet to her usual 5’5” frame and the lips part in a smile. This is, after all, their practice room, and there are only three members of the group present — four if you count the table.

“This comes with us everywhere,” explains drummer Deborah Bernard of the table, which is of kitchen-table variety. It serves as extra member and ubiquitous keyboard stand for the group’s collection of small-sized synthesizers — mostly made by Casio. Only one of them has full-sized keys, and all of them are propped up on roles of duct-tape and PVC pipe.

Muehleisen fully exits UV-mode and smiles down upon the table like an old friend. “We like the kitchen set-up. It’s very personal. It’s our size, we even dress it up,” she says, and you get the impression that she would stroke it fondly, if only some surface area were visible amidst the elaborate scheme of gear.

Muehleisen and Karen Tsiakals spend 90% of their UV Protection time at this table; Bernard is usually a few feet away. Video artist/interpreter Sue Murard is the one member absent from this particular session. Muehleisen, Tsiakals and Bernard make all the noise, while Murard focuses on the visuals, both in her own performance as well as her video arrangements that serve as onstage “scenery” for a UV Protection set.

Her performance comes just as inspired as the operatic vocals and punchy drumming that mark each UV Protection song. Murard wanders all around the stage, arranging props, working with the shadows of the others — even at one point leaving the stage, pint glass in hand, to visually “remix” the video being issued from the group’s LCD projector to the rear of a club.

UV Protection has a striking onstage appearance: they wear intense theatrical makeup and matching costumes that change with the theme of each show. Sometimes the themes are as concrete as world politics, sometimes as abstract as jellyfish.

“We’re into the idea of being not of this world,” says Muehleisen, currently dressed in jeans and sneakers rather than jellyfish couture. “We start with something in this world and it becomes something else. We don’t want the audience to get bored, because we’d get bored,” proclaims Tsiakals.

At this time, the audience has no reason to be bored. Not when Tsiakals and Muehleisen are standing face-to-face, sharing operatic vocals. Not when Bernard is behind the drum kit in full flailing costume, and certainly not when the 5’9” Murard is glaring out — not through, not past, but somehow into the audience, illuminating them with a blue LED worn on her neck. If this is not enough trans-media storytelling, then the entire stage is bathed in the light of Murard’s LCD projector.

Then there is the music.

The standard UV Protection song is short by design. There are not many musical hooks in the classic sense of the word; UV Protection utilizes a more subtle brand of hook. Their songs don’t have a specific melody that can be whistled or a catchy chord progression, yet the performance on the whole ends up sticking with the involved listener. The songs are short by design because they leave the listener wanting more.

“For some people it’s a new sound,” says Muehleisen. “And there’s a threshold for ‘new.’“

UV Protection is an amalgamation of live and electronic — a juxtaposition of different sounds over an erratic pallet of textures. Over this sonic scenery are the vocal stylings of both Joanna Muehleisen and Karen Tsiakals. The two rap in unison like old-school MCs, harmonize like women in horned helmets, and manage to throw in any vocal sound effects not included in the Casio libraries. Their wordlessly operatic vocal sections sound almost like a special effect or some old-school synthesizer programmed to a “Gamma-Girls” vocoder patch.

“Not so,” says Tsiakals. “Everything is live.”

Few bands put as much work into their live presentation and even fewer bands have their own salute and theme song. Anyone who has witnessed a UV performance knows that their approach to visual aesthetics is just as important as their music. These two forms do not complete each other; they complement each other. The live show enriches the recording, which in return enhances the live show.

“There’s an intimacy to the recording,” explains Muehleisen. “You can get closer to it,” she explains, gesturing with her hands.

The decision to perform in costume also came early. “At first, we were looking for one good costume,” explains Tsiakals, who is also in charge of wardrobe for the group.

“We decided ‘Let’s just be dorks. Let’s just admit who we are from the beginning,’“ states Muehleisen of this early decision to dress up in homemade costumes complete with face-obscuring helmets.

Playing in costume sounds fun, but isn’t at all easy. Bernard, for example, gets a special drummer’s version of the costume. “I have had some malfunctions, like being stuck to the wall and stuff,” says Bernard. Another early discovery was that “It’s hard to sing with your mouth totally covered,” according to Muehleisen.

“Yes,” sighs Tsiakals. “We did one show at the Middle East Upstairs where we did mic check without our helmets on. Then we put them on for the set [“Idiots!” interjects Muehleisen], and the sound guy was like ‘Oh no!’“

The women prefer to perform early in the night, to allow for costume setup and the creation of scenery. Before the set, Murard inspects the stage and the projection, figuring out where shadows are going to fall on the projections and where the group’s various props are located.

“She puts in as much time into her parts as we do,” says Bernard, twisting a knob on her electronic drum pad. As a performing group, Murard is a named partner, even coming to most practices to work out the new songs with the musicians in the group. “She is part of the band,” avows Muehleisen.

The UV Protection theme is not showing off how smart anyone is or how great a video artist Murard is or even how nice a song the band can write; it is a universal expression, four performers gathered in identical dress to make a statement in unison.

“We all drop our hands at the same times; we’re a team,” states Muehleisen. “It’s not about one person showing off; we’re a team of women and it’s about the unity between us all.”

Whether it’s clothing their bodies in costumes designed by Tsiakals or immersing their entire stage in a visual world created by Murard, the group does everything as a unit.

“It started out for me kind of being the concept of ‘corporate’ — because that word drives a hole into a lot of people’s heart. But the word means together and union,” says Tsiakals of the band’s image, bolstered by a corporate pie-chart theme on the group’s web site. The theme of incorporation was one of the first things that Tsiakals and company wanted to bring to attention; we assume “corporate” is bad, but our friends in UV Protection are willing to explore and then share their observations.

The idea of UV Protection connects directly with the idea of UV rays — invisible, intangible, yet having an effect on the things around us. The protection part, according to the band, is making these invisible aspects of the world visible. The group expresses this task in different ways, but they prefer to draw separate elements together to create a more vivified image. They then “work on” these ideas onstage, yet they do it so artfully that an audience member need not fully understand the chosen “theme” of the set.

“It’s not tangible; it’s similar to art — like what’s going on right now?” asks Muehleisen. According to her, the four women use every available performance resource to express their thoughts on the issue at hand. “If we’re talking about something, we’re working it out in our show or in our set or in our songs, even our clothing,” she explains. “It’s more about the idea of expression. Pushing something.”

Master arranger Tsiakals helps bring these ideas to life via her wildly creative costume designs. “In our songs as well as our fashion, we try to be consistent in doing some things traditionally, and then... the unexpected,” explains Tsiakals. One time, they played a friend’s wedding reception as “wedding warriors,” which involved classic 1950s-design wedding gowns as well as some UV-style augmentation (“Like spears!” exclaims an excited Muehleisen). Another time they used pregnancy as a theme, which Muehleisen remembers fondly.

“It’s like, ‘what do people not do?’ They don’t come onstage as pregnant ladies, that’s for sure.” It’s mostly exhibition, but Muehleisen finds therapeutic value in some of these themes: “We work through our issues — onstage in front of people.”

“We’re not here to judge you; we’re here to help you,” advises Bernard.

They do so with an air of slightly detached benevolence, but realize they too are within the arena. “We critique things but we’re critiquing ourselves within that. It’s never us versus George Bush or versus Technology; it’s us within this and how do we deal with that within ourselves?” asks Muehleisen.

The entire group enjoys casting these lines into the ether to see what they catch, or at least to see who else raises their hand and returns the UV Protection Salute. Sue Murard, Deborah Bernard, Joanna Muehleisen, and Karen Tsiakals stand onstage with their hands upraised, ready for the return signal.

Tsiakals adjusts a few settings on her MicroKorg and makes ready for the next song.

“It’s just that this is happening over here and this is happening over there and ‘do you see this happening?’ because I see it happening.”

www.uvprotectyou.com