At the turn of the millennium, an 18-year-old Geneva Garvin was excommunicated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and moved to Los Angeles without knowing a single person there. 25 years later, she knows everyone. Triple Fire, her third studio album as Geneva Jacuzzi, is a celebration of the friends she’s made and the life she’s carved out for herself over the past quarter century.
It’s 11 a.m. on the west coast, and Geneva has just woken up. She’s wrapped in a white bathrobe on a swanky off-white couch, a bit hoarse but enthusiastic to discuss her new record and the goths who shaped it.
Geneva’s musical education began by happenstance when she was 16, living in Encinitas near Lou’s Records, an institution that will celebrate its 45th birthday next year. One day while browsing, she was struck by the cover of a Bauhaus box set. She bought it and was immediately blown away by Peter Murphy & Co.’s piercingly bleak sound.
If the next two years were an incomplete orientation in the sounds of Geneva’s birth decade, her first months in L.A. were an accelerated course in synth-pop, darkwave, disco, and house. “I started going to clubs alone and meeting people who [introduced me to] the Smiths and the Cure,” she says, “and they would take me to parties where I’d meet some of the most incredible record collectors, who would open the door to Throbbing Gristle and Art Zoyd — weird art rock and early electronic. I basically got a Matrix download of everything that was good.”
Geneva gravitated toward the minimal electronic tracks she heard, primarily because she knew they’d be the most accessible for her to emulate. She bought a microKORG and a 4-track recorder and got to work, mastering these tools out of necessity — she was too broke to afford anything more sophisticated. What she lacked in gear, she more than made up for with wily songcraft and brash, hilarious lyrics.
She’s come a long way since then, but she still embraces that DIY ethos. She’s taken her enthralling live sets — spectacles that verge on performance art — from tiny rooms to established venues like the Lodge Room, where she’s currently planning Triple Fire’s garish release show. Her sound has blossomed from the bedroom recordings she started out making into lushly layered productions. Over the years, she moved from 4-track to 8-track to GarageBand to Ableton, but she still does most of her own production alongside a few trusted friends.
Triple Fire, which follows the 2021 reissue of her breakout cult classic (2010’s Lamaze), is Geneva Jacuzzi’s first new full-length since 2016’s Technophelia. Days before its release, we discussed her hometown’s vibrant witchcraft/tarot/astrology scene, the threat of an AI apocalypse, and getting ghosted by Mike Judge.
The FADER: The only time I’ve seen you live was in 2018 at the Mudlark in New Orleans — a puppet theater with a capacity of maybe 40. You’re playing much bigger spaces now. What’s the ideal venue for a Geneva Jacuzzi show?
Geneva JacuzzI: Honestly, a museum. I’ve done shows at MOCA, the Broad, and the Getty. In those spaces, you walk in knowing it’s gonna be something arty. The sound is always shitty, but they give you space to play with. You can fill up a whole room and have the audience be part of the show. It’s an immersive experience. When people go to a show at a club, they’re drinking; they wanna party. I love that, too, and I bring an element of celebration. I like to bring the club to the museum, or the museum to the club.
“Art Is Dangerous” asks the age-old question, “What is art?” Its video expands on that commentary with a crazy ensemble cast of artists. How did that come together?
I wanted it to be a celebratory group experience with all the different types of artists I’m friends with: painters, filmmakers, photographers, super-famous friends and not-so-famous friends. I knew I couldn’t get them all in the same room at once because it’s impossible to schedule that many divas, so I’d ask them to come over and swim, and then I’d shoot a few seconds of footage of them for the video. I got so sneaky.
I love the video for “Dry,” too. Tell me more about the symbolism in that one.
I have a lot of witchy friends in L.A. who are always drawing tarot cards, and I always get the Hanged Man. There’s a lot of beauty to that card — the suspension in limbo, not knowing what to do. It’s a moment of self-reflection.
The lyrics for that one… I went on a date with Mike Judge — so random — and the song isn’t about him at all, but I was working on the music around that time, and I was going through a breakup from another relationship and had started to date a little. I was a fan, obviously, and we had a nice time, and he was like, “I’ll call you,” and he never did.
I’d been in a relationship for six years before that, so I’d heard about the term ghosting, but this was my first experience with it, and it felt weird. Like, “God, this is such a bizarre emotion to experience.” I was working on the song, thinking about [the phrase] “hang me out to dry.”
Trust me: I wasn’t devastated, but I tapped into that ick for the writing process. If Judge ever reads this, he’s gonna laugh. He’s a sweet guy — no shade at all. It was purely a coincidence that this happened in the week or night I wrote the song.
“I’m never trying to make ’80s music; it’s just the best music I know.”
“Scene Ballerina” — the phrase itself, as well as the song and video — captures an archetype perfectly. Finding a very specific personality or social concept and stripping it down to its silliest form is something you do as well as anyone.
When I write lyrics, I rarely come from my own experience. With a lot of my older tracks, my friend Casey [Obelisk] and I would write a play and come up with characters, and the songs would be from those characters’ perspectives. “Nu2U,” from the new record, is about a primordial entity that has sex with a caveman and explains what humans will do over the centuries, the pain we’ll experience. Each song has a different archetype, a different character, because I like to bring that dynamic range to a record. It’s not just body music that you feel; it’s heady, cerebral.
There’s a lot of ’80s on this record — Pet Shop Boys, Factory Records. What appeals to you most about that era of music?
I have a theory that the ’80s was the top of the mountain. It’s not that it was the best music ever made, but you had people like Bowie, who’d worked on incredible records and knew everything about songwriting, got their hands on all this new technology — [digital] synthesizers and MIDI — and they were referencing the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. After that, everyone’s just referencing the ’80s, and the mountain slopes down.
Think of Devo: You hear their record from ’78 versus ’84. Time is marked, and every year, you’re like, “Oh, this sounds like ’86 because technology was different then.” The ’90s were great, too, because they were just a little below the top of the mountain. But from the 2000s on, you don’t know what time it is. Someone who made a song in 2010 could put it out now, and it could sound totally modern.
When I was a kid, they’d have a Human League record on the radio. And still today, you go to the grocery store and hear “Don’t You Want Me.” Why? Because it’s fucking amazing. I’m never trying to make ’80s music; it’s just the best music I know.
“I like to bring the club to the museum or the museum to the club.”
You’ve stuck with a pre-internet creative process, from what I understand. How has your relationship with technology changed as you’ve moved from the super-lo-fi tracks you started out making to larger-scale productions??
I approach the concept of technology in almost a Philip K. Dick way. As technology evolves, we lose the idea of what is human. I do think there are a lot of really interesting things being done with AI. It’s in and outside our minds, connecting us in a way that’s almost unconscious. But it’s terrifying because humanity can be swept away if we’re not paying attention.
What’s the difference between AI listening to a bunch of music and making a song and us [doing the same]? That’s the big question, and I tend to have a very optimistic way of approaching it: I’m a believer in humanity. I think you can subconsciously hear a genetic code in music [that allows us to] hear the difference between something made by a human and something made by AI. At least for now, until we start putting it into our brains and biohacking ourselves.
“Laps of Luxury” is concerned with a less apocalyptic, more classical kind of horror. It reminds me of the opening scene in Mulholland Drive: a starlet fleeing her Hollywood captors — in this case, perhaps successfully.
That and a bit of Eyes Wide Shut. It’s a scene in a movie where [our protagonist] flees the scene and starts reflecting, like, “Wow, it was terrifying but beautiful at the same time.” When you reach the top, you have access to anything you want, and that can get a little creepy.
I guess it’s heavily implied that she’s part of the 1%, which didn’t click for me until now. She’s escaping that world, but she’s got a chauffeur.
Exactly. She’s in the back of a Bentley or something — “Driver, window down! I have a tale to tell.” I had to really tap into that character, in the lyrics but also the music.
I was listening to “Love Comes Quickly” by Pet Shop Boys. There’s something about that song that gives you the chills and transports you to another place; you’re somewhere in Europe, and there are castles all around, and you’re riding a horse, and someone’s getting killed. They’re talking about something super banal, which is what Pet Shop Boys do: They have these really simple lyrics about the most superficial things. It goes to the top of the surface, but underneath that there’s a world of depth and humor and art. I was trying to go for that with “Laps.”
The video for that song is a direct reference to the album cover. Tell me about the symbolism of the triple flame.
Not to reference astrology — I know I’ve already referenced tarot — but I do live in Los Angeles, and it’s all around me. I’m not a true believer, but I find it all fascinating; there’s a lot of wisdom there because it comes from these archetypal, ancient myths.
I thought I was a Cancer my whole life, but then I did my chart, and it turns out I’m actually a Leo, which is a fire sign. And my rising is Sagittarius, which is a fire sign. And my moon is Aries, another fire sign. They’re all different types — cardinal, fixed, and mutable — but apparently, the essence of who I am is fire.
I’m a dramatic person and I’ve had a lot of trauma, and whatever makes me up, I embrace it. Fire is creativity, it’s passion, but it burned me up inside for so many years.
