BASILEVIC, alice "ally o'soros"

[ally]

Alice “Ally O'Soros” Basilevic

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Every time I look into your eyes
I see the future.

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[/b] Alice “Ally O'Soros” Basilevic
age;; 36
gender;; Female
band you are affiliated with;; Solo Act. Vocally, Ally is similar to Mira Aroyo. With regard to her musical style, however, her remixes and dj sets resemble Tiga and her original electro/house compositions resemble Sleigh Bells, though recently (and on this tour) she has been/is moving more in the direction of a sound reminiscent of something between the Mountain Goats and Broken Social Scene.
position in band;; Solo Act – provides vocals, beat programming, dj-ing, and guitar
sexuality;; Lesbian
play-by;; Sue Denim
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Alice is something of a calm, laidback person. Most of the time. That is, when she is not actively performing or out at a club or concert. In general though, in normal, everyday sort of life, she tends to be relaxed and allow things to flow past without a care or reaction. Of course, it is not as though she is a cold, unfeeling robot (she likes to pretend she is a robot sometimes, however), just that she tends not to react in an overly dramatic fashion. Unless, of course, being overdramatic is more fun in the moment, but then it is just play acting, not real emotion or reaction. But still, on the whole, Alice tends to let the bad go and rewards the good with a simple smile, unless either the good or bad is extreme.

Her calmness, however, rests mainly in her reactions and how she handles troubles and triumphs. When it comes to interpersonal endeavors, Alice is usually quite lively, more than willing to spend time with and meet new people. In fact, her calm demeanor makes it easier to overlook peoples minor foibles and take off their rough edges, it makes her nicer than she would be if she was wound just a little bit tighter. But as it is, she makes acquaintances relatively easily and friends are not too hard either, though her tendency to under-express and let the good pass without a thought make it tough for her to develop close friendships. Most of the people she is close with now are people she has known for over a decade, people from college, high school, and the people she met during her early years as a DJ in Chicago. She does not, in the least, expect to meet any lasting friends in her time on this tour, merely people she will know and like for a few weeks or months.

With all of that said, Alice can be annoyed rather easily but she tries her best not to let it show. If someone is pretending to be smarter than they are, if they’re saying things that she strongly disagrees with, or if they are generally being assholes (whatever strikes her nerves that day), then Alice will quickly get fed up with them. But unless they go too far or cross some indefinable line or unless Alice is just in a mad mood, she will not openly let her irritation show. Instead she will usually become quiet and reserved around that person, treating them with a subtle contempt rather than open condemnation. When that line is crossed, however, Alice can become a monster, being every bit as arrogant and irritating as her target in an attempt to release frustration.
likes;; “Super Frog Saves Tokyo”, Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North, Marinetti
dislikes;; Tristan Tzara, Wuthering Heights (the book, not the game), Eau de vie
quirks and habits;; Only listens to punk while cooking, uses old train tickets as bookmarks
strengths;; Remixing stuff, djing for hours on end, writing symbolist short stories, cynical optimism
weaknesses;; Guitar playing, day-glo colors, Jacobean ruffs, excessive make-up and hair dye
fears;; Amish children
goals;; To die to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot
history;;
Alice Basilevic was born on the seventeenth of April 1976 to Milo and Laura Basilevic in Philadelphia. Other than this little when and where, there is not much to tell about Alice’s early life – she cannot remember any of it except for the stories she has heard throughout her life from her parents and even herself. And so, since she cannot remember it she puts little stock into how important it is to her future developments. In general, though, you probably do not want to hear a long winding story about Alice’s life, so let us limit ourselves to only two topics of conversation – Alice’s sexuality, which is of course an important aspect in anyone’s life, and her development as a musician, which is relevant to her current lifestyle.

We'll start with Alice's sexuality, which is by far less interesting of the two stories. It must have been somewhere around age twelve that she realized, perhaps not precisely that she was a lesbian, but that her romantic interests seemed differently directed than her friends'. Now she likes to say that she knew she was a homosexual at age twelve, but that is more posturing and the bias of hindsight. At the time, she did not even know about such labels as homo-, hetero-, bi-, or a-sexual, much less did she know enough about herself to be able to apply one of these labels, even had she known them. To be quite honest, twelve year old Alice did not much care about the direction of her fledgling romantic feelings and when her young friends would bring up the topic of crushes and which boys were cute, she merely remained quiet and feigned shyness. Some of her friends would make fun of her a bit, but they were still young enough that it was not an overwhelming part of their lives..

In high school. Alice was luckily able to dodge the issue, to a certain extent. She attended an all-girls Catholic school in Philly, Nazareth Academy. And while the topic of boys and romance were by no means off the table, the fact that there was no pressure directly exerted and that everything had a certain level of abstractness, Alice was easily able to deflect the issue or feign an interest with no real threat. It was not an ideal scenario, but she imagined things would have been worse in a mixed environment - she was thankful she was there. Of course, it was also a bit much being around only girls all the time, seeing more and more how her peers acted in the semi-private arena of a "women's only" environment, and, to a certain extent, it lead Alice to conclude that she might "like" girls, but that she did not really like them all that much. It was really just overexposure, spending too much time with the same sorts of people who kept behaving the same way with few other outlets, which bred a certain resentment inside of her - but to this day she remains convinced that fourteen to eighteen year old girls are the worst sort of people in the world. THe fact that a guy she met in university went to an all-boys school argued that boys of the same age are the worst sort of people did, however, slightly open her eyes to the fact that the environment is probably just a bit poisonous.

There was, however, one milestone that bears mention in her time at high school, which was at age sixteen, after she learned to drive and was given a car. It might have been a beaten-up thing that was as old as she was, but it ended up being the ferry that could transport her between quiet suburbia and the magical world of Philadelphia's night-life. This had two profound effects on how she spent her evenings: it gave her access to Philly's underground dance clubs and raves (about which we will talk later) and to Phily's lackluster gay scene, which we will discuss now, bering in mind that when Alice Basilevic was sixteen it was 1991. It was not the best time for gay culture, but also far from the worst - by no means were things as bad as the Sixties or Seventies, but at the same time it had not the openness and freedom that the Oughts and Tens. Things were progressive enough that she could find out the names of a few clubs by talking with some of the more liberal, hip girls at school - it was not still not yet mainstream hip for breeders to go clubbing at gay bars, but it was certainly on the horizon, more so in bigger cities like NYC, LA, and San Fran, but Philly was not completely backwards, it was better than Baltimore or Detroit. Not unexpectedly, the girls had led her to bars and clubs for gay males that played great techno music (a reason they were hip to the hippest of straight girls), but it was, fortunately, enough for her to ask around to find out where bars for homosexual women were (and to find out whether or nto there were any at all, since they were something whose existence Alice had only postulated).

Well, they did exist and Alice was able to start going to clubs with the help of a massively fake ID (though not having a job, she had to keep her drink expenses to a minimum). To be honest, it was a bit overwhelming the first time she went - it was too much for the teenage girl, way too much. But she rode out the night by sticking to the shadows, afraid to really do anything aside from watch. The second and third times she went out to one, she chose the same bar and her night was spent much the same way, though she moved out into the light a bit. It was not until her fifth time going back to the same bar that anything ahppened, though she still did not take the initiative. When she was approached by a woman, who called herself Jackie and looked to be around forty, Alice wanted to run away -maybe she was wrong to be here, maybe she was really just too young. But either way, she ended up staying with Jackie that night for a while, talking quietly to her in a booth, drinking drinks that were bought for her. It was strange talking to a woman who was old enough to be her mother in a bar, feeling that woman move closer to you, having that woman rub your thigh, kissing the stranger when she kissed you, going out to her car when she asked, and spending the night at her home. Alice started what could loosely be called dating Jackie not too long after (mostly on weekend trips to Philly from the 'burbs) and they remained together for the better part of a year. Looking back, Alice likes to think of it more as the older woman introducing her to the scene and mentoring her in the lifestyle. She feels like without that relationship, she would have blundered into the scene in university and would have went from zero to sixty in a few days, but here she was brought up. She also realizes that Jacki was taking advantage of her, but she has far more good memories of the older woman than bad and has never felt bitter about the ordeal, always looking back on it with a strange sense of fondness.

But enough about Alice's sexuality. Suffice it to say that her coming out to her parents was more of a non-event than an event (though the lead-up took an emotional toll) and that since she's had a number of more age appropriate relationships, none of which were particularly fantastic or terrible, tragic or sublime. There is not much really worthy of recount there.

Much more importantly, at least in Alice’s eyes, than her introduction to the gay scene was her introduction to the house and rave scene in Philly. Sure, it was shit compared to Paris and Chicago, but what isn’t shit compared to those two cities? When not spending her weekend nights with Jackie or at lesbian bars, Alice would spend them dancing until four in the morning in dark, crowded rooms. It was mind blowing that people did things like this, the exact sort of thing that Alice had always wanted to do – to turn your mind to mush for a few hours with throbbing bass, hi-hat and snare beats, and so much movement that it eventually became hard to stand still. And as much as she loved the dancing and the anonymous intimacy of dancing alone and with every single person in a club at the same time, the music was what really did it for her. Sure, the beats were not as high tech or as clean as they are now and the rhythms were fairly simplistic compared to the late Nineties and early Oughts, but it was something completely new, completely different. Again, sure, this sort of music had its origins, like the Krautrock of Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu! and its oddly close relationship with certain sorts of hip-hop, but there was a revolutionary feel to it, especially in the face of pop music. Ultimately, Alice felt like the alt-rock that was usually hailed as the artistic counterpoint to bubblegum pop was too closely related to it, as were things like metal, goth, and hip-hop, which were some of the other main counter-cultural genres that were held up as superior. In the club music she would dance all night to, there was no singing, no instrumentation, no reality. It was a programmer’s efforts at a computer or synth that made everything out of nothing.

Of course, that was only the beginning. It was during her senior year at high school that Alice began to experiment with remixing herself, though at that point, it was still mostly for personal use. It was also at this point that she got her first deck, buying it second hand from a club she frequented. She put out her own mixtape at this point, but it never left her personal walkman. College, however, brought further change and development. She went to Northwestern, in Chicago, for her undergraduate degree in 1993, taking her deck with her. Chicago exposed her to House full on. It was here that she realized that her ideals about it as a complete revolution from music was naïve and misguided and it was here that she was exposed to the great pioneers of the genre. It was here, in college, that she could spend four nights a week dancing her brain away in various clubs and private get-togethers. It was here that she could just soak in the genre as well as the other great club music, like electro and techno and their developing subgenres. It was here that she felt more at home than she ever had in Philly and its suburbs.

College also got her started on her dj-ing career. It started off with her dj-ing friends’ house parties and quickly moved on to her providing music at frat and sorority parties, which was sort of the pinnacle of what she could do within the university. Breaking out of the university crowd, though, was hard, but something she was determined to do. The summers between her first and second and second and third years were both spent in Chicago, at the decks, remixing almost non-stop. Her parents paid for her housing (since she moved off-campus right after first year, this was just part of the overall money that loans would dish out), but she also made a paltry living spinning for other students who were there over the summer and wanted to throw parties. Her big break came in the winter of her third year, when she managed to get a job as a sort of back-up at a small time club. If their DJ couldn’t show and they did not have a guest lined up, she could spin. And she span and span as much and as hard as she could. It occurred to her that maybe she should be trying to poison the guy whose alternate she was, but in the end she decided against it.

After maybe half a dozen nights spinning, the club offered her a part time position and she jumped at the chance, dj-ing on weeknights. Over the next year and a half, the time she was still in college, Alice, who now used Ally O’Soros as her nom d’DJ, did not really progress too much. She did get a chance, which she took, to move to a more popular (though still sort of shitty) club where she worked weeknights and Fridays (a big step up), but nothing much happened. Ultimately, as much as she loved her music, she wanted to finish her studies before throwing herself completely into music and she felt like anymore time spent remixing and dj-ing would adversely affect her grades. Or rather, adversely affect them far more than they already were.

So, in the spring of 1997, Alice Basilevic graduated from Northwestern with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literature (she had been fluent in Serbian before going to college due to her father’s family). The influence of Slavic magical realism (as well as Japanese magical realism and post-modern literature and Italian futurism) would be seen on her musical career, but that can be left until a bit later. After graduating, Ally stayed in Chicago as a DJ, at first just starting full time (Wednesday through Saturday night) at the same club she had been working with for some time. So, she now had less time for going out clubbing, dancing, and writing music, but she was making a lot of money (well, with her low rent it felt like a lot) and getting some good exposure. After a few months there, Ally got an offer to move to another club: this time, though, it was one at which she was actually excited about working, since it was one of the better clubs in the city – it was less popular, but more popular with the right sorts of people.

Aside from the fact that she was enjoying her job more, Ally also now had Saturday nights off, since that was always a night for guest DJs. While at first she used the free time to go out and enjoy herself, but after a few Sundays spent sleeping off hangovers and recovering from near exhaustion she started to use her free evenings more productively. She began performing guest spots at other underground venues and even a few live concerts with her shoddy book of original songs. The former went over brilliantly, the latter went poorly. This is essentially how her career went for the next year and a half, until she was signed to Thrill Jockey Records in 1999. Shortly thereafter, Ally released two albums of remixes she had been spinning for years, the first being called Roadmap to Philly was released November of 1999, the second Roadmap to Chitown February 2000. Both compilations sold moderately well and were well received critically, but neither took off in any significant way outside of the house scene.

After the second release, Ally took off some time from her job as a DJ to work on her original compositions. She was heavily influenced by both the nascent electroclash movement, acts like I-F, Peaches, Chicks on Speed, and Felix da Housecat (who she knew personally from her time in the Chicago house scene), and The Art of Noises, a musical treatise by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo. Her first studio album, Noise Machine, was released in July 2001. It was, generally speaking, a failure, only being well received by critics and other artists. Because of it she was compared to Captain Beefheart, an artist’s artist, something she both loved and hated. Furthermore, it was something her label was not particularly fond of, though they did not drop her, mainly because the majority of the labels electronic artists petitioned for her to be kept on.

Not long after, in late 2002, she left her job dj-ing for two reasons: to briefly perform as Ladytron’s opening act during their Light & Magic tour as they moved through the Midwest USA and to work on her next two releases. The tour gave her enough exposure to bring her some more money from record sales of her back catalogue. It also helped her book more guest DJ spots at various clubs in Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, and Indianapolis, which was enough for her to support herself. Meanwhile, she also began working on new material, playing it semi-experimentally during her DJ sets. Both of her next two releases were in 2003, the first on another label, 8bitpeoples, was a DJ mix compilation called Gameboy Color and was a mix of music influenced by Gameboy games with lyrics from various hip-hop artists. It was well received, both popularly and critically, but was far too expensive (because of all the licensing fees) to be profitable to either the label or herself. The other was another album of original compositions on her main label titled The Battle of Adrianople. Like Ally’s first studio album, this second one was also a large failure commercially while being well received critically and by other musicians, especially within electro, house, and indie circles. Again, though, after this failure, Thrill Jockey did not drop her because, again, some of her fellow musicians in the label petitioned for her to be kept on.

However, this time, Ally left the label. Well, she did not technically leave, but for the next five years she did not put out a single album. And when she did release her next album, 2008’s Roadmap to Paname, it was on another label, Kitsuné, (though the album was eventually released on Thrill Jockey for the American release). Of course, that had more to do with the fact that when it was released Ally was in Paris and the album was being released to a European market. Well, that skips about five years of her life. Let us go back. After a second major commercial failure, Alice slunk into a bit of a depression and taking a cue from artists such as Chilly Gonzales, Peaches, and Chicks on Speed (and on the advice of Felix Stallings Jr.) moved to Europe, in an attempt to reach an audience that might better appreciate her music. She chose Paris, since she had a friend from university, Sara Hastings, who was doing graduate research there. It only took a few weeks to find a DJ job in a middling sort of club, book a number of guest spots at other locals, and lease an apartment of her own. In a few months, after a number of “live” sets and DJ spots, Ally had a small following in the city, enough to guarantee a decent crowd at concerts and support her DJ sets.

After two years in Paris, in January of 2006, Ally went on tour to a number of different European cities, Rome, Milan, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Brest, Lyon, and Marseilles before returning to Paris, lasting just over a year, consisting of a combination of “live” shows and DJ sets at clubs. It was largely funded by Kitsuné, a French record label, and was a moderate success – actually, compared to what she had done in the US, it was a resounding success of the highest caliber. In fact, when she returned to Paris, Ally found herself relatively wealthy due to record sales generated by her tour. It was like a new day. Well, not really, but it felt that way. The next year in Paris, from February 2007 to July 2008, Ally kept a lower profile, writing music, dj-ing in Paris, and occasional live shows in Paris and Milan (her favorite of the cities she had went to, aside from Berlin but that city was far too elite in the electro scenes to have plenty of open venues for her). She released Roadmap to Paname through Kitsuné in March 2008 (it was not until January 2009 that it was released in the US) and a few months later returned to Chicago, with a number of new songs ready to be recorded.

Returning to Chicago was somewhat bittersweet. It was comforting being back home after five years, to see old friends again, to be able to buy peanut butter easily, and to use the US common system instead of metric, but Paris also felt like home. And in many ways, Chicago could not compare to Paris. But it was home now. And it was where work was. Right away she got to work on her third studio album, Boleros for Karel Capek, which was released in November of 2009. In many ways it was a milestone in her career. While her first two albums of purely original music primarily fit under the mixed genre headings of electroclash and dance-punk, but with this one, Ally began incorporating elements of baroque pop and, on a few tracks, namely “The Bolero for Rossum” and “The Bolero for the Newts”, indie rock, though more in lyrical composition than instrumentation. Boleros for Karel Capek was by far Ally’s most successful studio album of her career (Gameboy Color was her bestselling album overall), selling well in both electro/house and indie circles and being hailed as her magnum opus, which it probably was.

Ally followed up on Boleros with her mix compilation Roadmap to Skokie, released March 2010, which was poorly received critically as it failed to capture the same sort of innovation and spirit that her previous album contained, but it was a fairly solid collection of dance house remixes. Ultimately, though, it was not something she worked particularly hard on, being made up entirely out of songs she had mixed for clubs in Paris. But more importantly than her most recent remix album, Ally O’Soros’s entire outlook shifted after her moderate success with Boleros. She took the lesson that trying to force together pounding bass, harsh guitar, and shrieking synthesizers with introspective, semi-dreamscape, semi-violent, avant-garde lyrics was not as enjoyed as more melodic, emotional instrumentation combined with the same sort of lyrics. Although she lost a bit of her reputation among the most avant-garde of critics with Boleros, most realized that it was a maturation and settling of many of the same themes of her earlier works, merely slightly less aggressive. Though tracks on the album such as “The Bolero for Namuel” and “The Bolero for Prokop” are suitably harsh and abrasive, never does the violence of the music overshadow the lyrical themes of the songs, but rather they underscored them. It showed that Ally O’Soros had finally mastered the interplay of lyrics and music in a way she had not before.

It was two years after Boleros for Karel Capek that Ally released another studio album, The Old Man in the Cave, in March 2011. It was generally well received, though it was often compared unfavorably to Boleros. This album showed a general trend away from electronic instrumentation towards a more acoustic sound, generally favoring acoustic guitar to electric, a simply three-piece snare, bass, and cymbal drum kit to a bass heavy electronic kit, and piano to synthesizer. It was more stripped down and less electric, largely due to the influence of the indie rock scene on Ally, primarily from artists like the Mountain Goats, Bon Iver, and Tegan and Sara. Within the electro/house community, the album proved quite a surprise, but it was not so much derided as ignored, while it was well received in the indie community. Old Man also marked Ally’s first taste of mainstream success as the album topped at number 99 on the Billboard Charts and the single “Mr. French in ‘What Used to Be Chicago’” climbed to number 83 on the charts. Granted, this was not much, but it provided a slight amount of exposure outside of the more insular community that Ally had been working in up to this point and it is largely on account of this that she was invited on the tour she currently is on.

She must admit that she did and still does have quite a large amount of reservations about touring with the sorts of artists that she is currently touring with, but the money is good and the work is small. Currently, she is working on her upcoming album I Shot an Arrow into the Air, which keeps many of the same themes of her previous album, but does not lean so heavily upon acoustic instrumentation and returns, at least in part, to her electronic roots. Ally very much enjoyed writing and performing something radically different in The Old Man in the Cave and still enjoys performing those songs very much, but she is eager to return to the cold, steel embrace of machines.[/ul][/size]

[/b] Keiran
age;; 22
what makes the world go 'round?;; ;D admin'd
roleplay sample;;

He waved his wand around erratically, not saying a word. Nothing happened. He did it again, this time his wand taking a different path, though not with any discernible pattern. Again, nothing happened. Once more, this time he shouted out “Protego,” but still nothing happened. Damn, he would need to get the motion down right before he could learn to do it silently. But he thought he had the motion down – he had done this spell on his OWLs last year, but now he could not remember it for the life of him. That was what he got for spending the entire summer laying on the grassy knolls of Ireland, every now and then helping with the agricultural work, and spending a month traveling back and forth between Paris and the beaches in the south of France. During a short stay in Monaco, he swore, he swore that he had met Princess Grace, not that his friends back home believed him or the ones here knew that that mean.
But what was important was that this sort of life was extremely unproductive if one wants to keep up their magical abilities and skills. Auguste did not open a single book the entire time he was on break. Well, he opened books, but none of them had to do with magic and sorcery… at least not as they actually exist – a couple had magic but it was muggle fiction, which was way more exciting than the truth of wizarding. It was more than just ask this devil or that for help and all of a sudden you are summoning a storm of fire, you actually had to learn motions and words and even then you had to just be able to do it. And it was all just so arcane and bizarre. And the teachers did not really seem to have any idea how to actually teach the movements. What they expected was for the students to just pick it up from a quick demonstration – it rarely worked for Auguste.

And so here he was, waving his wand around like an idiot, trying to get an ethereal shield to pop up in front of him to protect him from something that was not there. He was failing miserably at it. He did the motion for a fourth time, producing a unique wand pattern for the fourth time, while shouting “Protego” before shouting “Fuck it” and throwing his wand across the room. It hit against the couch, at least he had not lost his aim, and fell down into a chair. It was completely hopeless, there was no way that he would get this, at least not now, not in this sort of mood. This entire process had driven him to the point of insanity and if he kept trying now he would just keep failing and end up even more mad. At least the common room was empty and he did not have to show off this embarrassing display to any of his fellow students. He just sighed, if things kept up like this, he would have to resort to arguing to his teachers that practical education was useless compared to theory – looked like he was about to get a lot of detention.

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