Tayisha Busay

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
If you were to have walked into the coffeeshop-bar at Brooklyn Fireproof on a recent wet Saturday evening, you would have noticed a trio quietly playing Jenga in the corner, drinking coffee out of large paper cups. Get closer and you would have noticed that the members of Brooklyn’s Tayisha Busay were also sporting glittery eyelids, huge dollar sign earrings, and finger gloves. Tessa Greenberg, Ariel Sims, and Brandon La La Vek took a break from playing Jenga to talk about their recent NASTYASS party at Glasslands, a propensity for singing about food, and their first moments with spandex.

JM.com: Tell me about your Glasslands show.

Tessa: It was awesome.

Ariel: It was phenomenal.

Brandon: We really had a good turnout, the acts were really fun, and everyone was really supportive of each other.

Tessa: Yeah, it’s cool to go to a dance party where everyone actually dances and lets loose and is completely uninhibited. And it’s not really about the sex and the glamour, and it’s just about the release and enjoyment and having fun. And we were really fortunate to get such a good group of performers and everyone was really talented and dressed in really amazing clothes. Just like entertainment; we like doing shows where it’s good music but it’s also really entertaining. So NASTYASS – it was the first of what we hope to be a series.

JM.com: Glasslands is a pretty small venue. Other venues you’ve performed, like Le Poisson Rouge or Santos Party House, are pretty sizable by comparison. Does that change your dynamic when you perform?

Tessa: We’ve actually adapted our set to work in any venue. So if it’s a bar and they don’t have a backline, we put all our tracks on an ipod and we just sing along, and Brandon will use his Kaossilator. So we’ll use a minimum of equipment electronically. And then if there’s a really good venue with good backline and sound, like Santos Party House, where the sound system wraps around the whole room, we’ll bring our whole set there. We have many controllers, a synthesizer, drums, our computers, it’s all pretty much going through a midi. so when we have the opportunity, we’ll set up completely. But if it’s a mid-sized venue, we have a half-setup. We’ll actually bring half of a keyboard.

JM.com: How does the mood and size of the crowd affect your performance?

Ariel: Tessa and I especially are coming from a background of performing. To me, if the energy is different, I don’t notice, because it’s actually coming from us, each other. If there are five people there, we’re dancing up on the five people and starting a grind train. So it does change, but I’d say the energy is pretty consistent. That’s something we’ve always had. Whether or not the sound happens, the energy is always there.

Tessa: To be honest, when there’s less people there, we work harder to get a reaction out of the crowd. If there’re only three people, we’re not gonna hold back. We’re gonna make sure we communicate with those three people effectively. And in a way, with a large crowd, it’s difficult to make sure everyone is on the same page, because that group is talking, that group is getting a drink at the bar, maybe you have your good group up front that’s really rocking out and dancing. But it’s harder to communicate to different parts of the audience depending on where they are in their night. So if you have a small room, it’s kind of like we’re sitting here now. We can really communicate one on one. So it’s nice to do small shows as well, because you walk away really connected. Like, I really got my ass in that guy’s face.

JM.com: So what’s your first memory of spandex?

Ariel: I was in dance class since I could walk, so that would be where it came from. I remember feeling so comfortable in it. It is the most versatile comfortable – I remember refusing to wear jeans in second grade because I really liked stretch pants.

Brandon: Do you guys remember biking shorts? That was a big fad. Like, you know, from the discount places, with the stripe on them. And you’d wear those to school. We would just wear those with T-shirts.

Tessa: As a child I hated spandex. I took dance class, but I thought they were uncomfortable, and they gave me wedgies. And I was a really big tomboy, and only wore jeans and stuff. But then when I was a teenager and wanted to be on Broadway, and took dance classes, I got really down with the fact that you could move and do really crazy things with your body in them. and that’s a big part of what we do. We use our bodies a lot on stage.

Ariel: That was probably one of the reasons why Tessa and I became friends. We were the two people out of a very small group at our college that would legit wear full spandex outfits to school and around town.

JM.com: What do you do when you get wedgies on stage?

Ariel: Pick ‘em. Right away.

Tessa: And make sure that people see.

JM.com: What are a few favorite adjectives that you have for yourselves?

Tessa: We’re classy and trashy.

Brandon: That’s number one and two.

Ariel: Hand-job. That’s a noun. Hand-jobby.

Tessa: Both our music and our stage persona walk this line – a place in pop culture that has been dumbed down. Not making fun of it, because there’s a lot to be said about a pop star like Britney Spears or Beyonce up there doing their thing. There’s a lot of class. But it’s also trashy, like shoving your tits in someone’s face. And just walking that fine line, teetering more toward the trashy side, because it’s more fun, and you get more entertainment out of it.

JM.com: I suspect that if i were to ask you all to choose between being a performer or being a spectator, you’d say performer. But where do you most like to be a spectator?

Brandon: I really like getting my ass kicked at punk shows. Like at a Japanther show, being right up there, singing and dancing and getting pushed around. I love that energy, with other people just being so into it, being physical.

Ariel: I really like watching plays, as I’m a theater major. I enjoy most when I know the performer is in acknowledgement of me. The customer is always right. So I just love when I see a performer working really hard. And that isn’t so much in music. In theater, that’s my favorite thing in the world. When you can see that spark of how much they love being on that stage in front of you. And it’s because I love it too; it’s totally vain. I like to see myself in that way.

Tessa: Going to shows is sometimes difficult for me because I just want to be up there. You know, there are so many people we work with that I admire and I love going to their shows, but I fully admit, I want to be up there. Or if they’re doing something amazing, I want to go home and I’m inspired and want to work on it. But like Ariel, I really enjoy something 100 percent done, like a full-fledged musical, or sports. I’m not a sports fan, but when I go to a sports event, I like watching how into it they get. It is a performance in a way.

JM.com: How do you figure out your dance routines?

Tessa: Ariel and I have been dancing together for three years now, and a lot of the moves are moves we’ve been doing since we were 9 or 10 years old, so we have certain stock moves. So we just stand in front of a mirror and do stuff until it looks really awesome and really effective and very pose-y. We just like to make really hard impacts on the audience, so we make sure it’s coordinated.

Ariel: We definitely have a coordination fantasy.

Tessa: We watch each other. And we’ve gotten really good at reacting to each other, so if she goes to the right, I know to go to the right, and if she spreads her legs, I’ll crawl under them.

JM.com: You seem neither entirely self-serious nor entirely satirical. Where are you in that performative spectrum?

Tessa: We often think about this, just in terms of ourselves. We take what we do really seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. That would be ridiculous, to go up there with sparkles and glitter and say, this is incredibly deep and existential. We work really hard, but we have fun with everything we do.

JM.com: Max Steele called you his favorite performance artists of the moment. Have you ever go-go danced with him?

Tessa: We never go-go danced with him. We met him almost a year ago. We played a show together, because he has a music project, and we got along famously.

Ariel: We have a shout-out to him in one of our songs.

Tessa: He’s just one of those really awesome characters we’ve been fortunate to meet over the last year and kind of have this nice developing relationship with.

JM.com: What do you do when something goes wrong on stage?

Brandon: Any time you hear us sing the pizza song, you know there’s something wrong with our stage show.

Tessa: We have a lot of technical difficulties because we’re still learning our software and our hardware. Plus we’re dancing so hard we don’t realize what’s going on. So we’ve developed this thing that we do, where if there’s a moment of technical difficulty, we have technical difficulty songs. We could sing one.

All: Have you ever had a pizza? It’s so cheesy and waaarm, it’s so cheesy and waaarm, it’s so cheesy and waaarm…

Ariel: We’re so comfortable now too, that it’s all stage antics.

Tessa: It’s great. I love when shit goes wrong.

JM.com: What’s on your wish list to come?

Ariel: We want to have better equipment. We want to have some insane synthesizers. i want to have our sound more custom, more amped.

Tessa: Yeah, we love what we do and we love our songs, but we know how much potential there could be. We need some money to buy some gear. Though I’m from the school that says you can make awesome music with a paper clip. So we’re just ready to amplify everything we do to a new and amazing level.

JM.com: What’s something that inspires you?

Brandon: Good food.

Tessa: Actually food is very inspiring. we tend to use food a lot in reference. For example, the pizza song. and then we have a line in one of our songs that goes –

Tessa and Ariel: Ain’t your momma pretty? She got meatballs for her titties, she got scrambled eggs between her legs. Ain’t your momma pretty?

Tessa: People relate to food.

Ariel: There’s that new song we wrote today –

Tessa and Ariel: Damn girl, hell no, I don’t wanna look like a Cheeto.

Tessa: Food is funny. People really laugh when you refer to food.

JM.com: So what’s next on your plate?

Tessa: We’ve been doing a lot of songwriting, working on things we already have. We’re slated to do a few tracks on the Damn! mixtape, which is a mixtape that Andrew W. K. is doing. That’ll be in a few months. I’m working on a song with Digit Dealer. It’s a two-man project out of Pratt. Ariel and I are doing some some shows with Cherie Lily, as her backup dancers.

Ariel: More Nastyasses. We’re working with Nite Club.

Brandon: He did a remix of our French Song.

Ariel: And he’s gonna do more mixes of our songs. We’re gonna be producing some music videos for Nite cClub and Cherie Lily, which should be insane.

JM.com: Before we finish up, where do you guys shop?

Ariel: Strawberry.

Tessa: Rainbow. Joyce Leslie. Pay Half. We shop a lot on Graham Avenue here in Bushwick. They have a lot of discount stores that make you look slutty and classy at the same time.

by Jane Kim
photos by Jeremy Sachs-Michaels, www.jeremysachsmichaels.com