Introducing Her Habits and the Electro-pop Gem "Faster Than Sound"

Meet Her Habits a.k.a Joanie Wolkoff. She currently lives in Brooklyn but was born in Toronto and in the interim she's lived in Tokyo, China, and Paris. She used to make music as Foxe Basin—creating a Knife-esque, disco-dazzled pop and last month she also released a song under the name Gemology, with her pal Natasha Chitayat (think DIY Bat for Lashes vibes). But we're all about Wolkoff's premiere project, Her Habits, and it only takes one spin of her new song, "Faster than Sound," to fall (premiering below). It's almost like Purity Ring after a Scandi-pop and Sylvan Esso binge. It's clean, catchy, and sparky, complete with a booming beat and an excellent use of horns as it makes a swishy exit. Plus it's the tip of the iceberg from her, a mere taster of her forthcoming Northerner EP (out on 1.27).

Another thing that piqued our interest was the accompanying booklet we received in the mail: little illustrations by Wolkoff with captions that made us laugh. Below are some excerpts (check out the whole thing here, it's worth it). So we tracked her down for a chat and asked her to tell us more.

Her Habits: That booklet was meant to make you curious! I illustrated this series after asking a lot of folks about habits they felt were specific to women. I got all manner of replies. Humans are a habitual lot to begin with, but pinpointing what constitutes a habit as feminine sparked debate. Some of my friends were able to answer in a heartbeat. Others felt my question was old fashioned and backwards. What struck me was how often people asked how intimately they should go into detail. In the end, it was that degree of intimacy that seemed to most characterize everyone's associations with "her" habits—female friends, lovers, acquaintances, relatives, and rivals turn out to be tough code to crack. Taken out of context, this'll sound like an instructional video for stalkers, but to enjoy privileged access to (or endure the ordeal of) a woman's most telling habits, you have to stay close to her and map them out over time.

What's your bedroom solo dancing song of choice?

The Standell's - "Dirty Water."

But of course. Can you tell me bout the genesis of "Faster Than Sound"? What was the jumping off point for the lyrics?

Let's take a trip back to middle school biology class. As far as science has it figured out, you hear someone's words when sound waves squiggle through the air to your eardrum via your ear hole, right? Then a lot of muscles and bones and tiny hairs run a relay race and pass the vibration all the way to your brain, which may or may not agree with what I'm telling you. But what happens when someone's intent reaches you before their words do? Do words even count at that point?

This is a song about the terrible cat-and-mouse holding pattern a relationship falls into without solid communication. I didn't want it to sound whiny or confrontational so I wrote the vocals sweet'n'flirty. During the saddest breakup of my life, a seasoned onlooker told me, "In love, you can choose to be right, or you can choose to be happy." That sounds like soul-crushing imprisonment to me, but folk wisdom holds that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

You spent some time modeling in Japan. How formative was your time there and has that time informed your sound and style since?
Each time I worked in Tokyo it was rainy season, so my memories there are grey and humid and smell sort of like angelicas. I was met by a moving degree of respect and decency, and the Japanese attention to detail and pop culture was gripping. How could every design component and finishing detail there be so well thought out? How could such a hulking megalopolis feel so personable? Of course, it's easy to sidestep the heavy lifting of trying to integrate for the long haul when you're just a guest, but in a nutshell, Tokyo is an explosion of imagination and possibility.

This excerpt from your bio sounds completely crazy and traumatic: "During this time she lived on a farm where she was put to work with a team of tattoo artists given the task of decorating pigs for a noted Belgian conceptual artist. This harrowing experience concluded with her being drugged by ex-pat acquaintances…." Can you expand on this please? What exactly happened and how did that change your outlook moving forward?

Basically, I took a less-than-educated risk in a middle school next to the highway an hour and a half outside of Beijing because I'd spent two months learning how to decorate pigs from outsourced Chinese tattoo artists for a brilliant and outlandish employer. I felt isolated enough to settle for bad company. I kept mum about this incident for a while after it happened because getting roofied on foreign soil and winding up peeing into a jar while a police lady watches you and thinks you might've taken benzodiazepines for kicks isn't necessarily something you want to broadcast. What's more, I'm not the proudest that I took an inhumane job for the sake of art and travel. But one afternoon, I accepted an invitation from one of the only English speaking ex-pats in a zillion mile radius to co-teach an ESL class (on gender equality, of all things) to a group of 12 year olds. After the class wrapped, this English speaking acquaintance went on at length about his woes as a visible minority in rural China. I felt bad for him, and accepted a fruit juice that his buddy had poured for me out of view. It didn't take long before I became aware of some rave party-like symptoms and excused myself to make a (pretend) phone call, at which point I went stumbling through the school halls like a zombie and barged into a late class like the random, drugged Caucasian I was.

The students handled the situation with more equanimity than any of the teaching staff. While I was waiting in the principal's office with chattering teeth and the spins for the cops to arrive, the school director intimated that I might be a dangerous imported sex worker with substance abuse problems. Why else would a foreign woman show up in the middle of nowhere on a weeknight discombobulated and sobbing about bad guys, right? It was a dark moment for me, and I stayed in the dark for a long while after. It took me ages to trust strangers again, and even more so my own judgment, but endless people have suffered way worse assaults and somewhere along the line, I picked up the idea that the term "victim" can be swapped out with "survivor," which repositioned my world view, big time.

Can you talk a bit about your experience in fashion? How imp are the visuals and how you present yourself in this project? Do you have any guidelines for when you're Her Habits vs when you're Joanie Wolkoff or is there no differentiation?

Fashion is just another language. It can be read in any number of directions, decrypted with veteran eyes or by an eight-year-old who just really loves owning sweatpants in ten different colors. The visuals in a music project are only a supplement to the medium, but having an image to connect with a track, even if it's an abstract graphic blob, helps us to determine where to file it mentally. Think about how you'd react to this music if the press shot attached to it were an Etch-a-Sketch portrait of your weird uncle, or a painting I made with my toes. Visuals sway us.

There was a bit of a push for me to take Her Habits as a performing name, because for better and for worse, branding works and my real name isn't a seductive alliteration. I guess the anonymity and flexibility of such a moniker holds it appeal. But Her Habits is a body of work that I co-created with Sanford Livingston. It's like a team name. Let's make a case for transparency, here: I'm called Joanie Wolkoff. This music is called Her Habits. As it goes with every other emerging musician, it'll only take a few seconds for you to decide whether you want to listen. If you already made it all the way to the end of this interview, you can call me Gozer the Gozarian for all I care. You've earned it.

What's your biggest source of non-musical inspiration?

Real life!

Kim Taylor Bennett is currently obsessed with eating ramen and last danced around her room to "True Blue." She's on Twitter.