LGBT sound system

AFRO-AMERICAN Hersch gets wiggy with it.

Photo: Nevin Hersch

At 3am on a Saturday, when you’re sweating it out on the dance floor at some club in an alcohol-induced haze (your hands invariably in places they shouldn’t be), it’s easy to forget there might actually be good music playing. But that’s what happens when the music segues into something from electronic musician Voxbox.

The man behind the music is Nevin Hersch, an out Chicago-based musician whose latest project, Superstition—a one-man stage show featuring dancing, freak-show visuals, remixed tracks from his eponymous debut album and some  mannequins—will debut at Berlin this weekend.

But first and foremost, Hersch is a musician and songwriter, and has been for 25 years. “I started piano when I was four,” he says. “I started writing piano music, modern and classical stuff, when I was 11 or 12.”

Now 30, Hersch came of age in the ’80s and early ’90s during the golden age of alternative rock. Influenced by bands like Depeche Mode, the Eurythmics and the Creatures, he started tinkering with synthesizers, which led him into an experimental phase that eventually evolved into the more accessible Voxbox.

“I began writing electronic-dance music in 2004, which stemmed from my interest in electro, techno and industrial-dance music, yet it didn’t quite fit into any particular category,” he says. “I wrote, mixed and mastered my first album, Voxbox, and released it on my own label…in 2005.”

The album—a delightfully disturbing mixture of heavily altered synthramental vocals (some sexually explicit) wrapped around intense electro beats, experimental and otherwise—is a marriage made in late-night clubdom. And if the music doesn’t quite fit in at more traditional clubs, it has found a home in the DJ booth at the most nonconformist gay venue in the city, Berlin Nightclub.

“Berlin is the perfect club for my music with its circuslike atmosphere,” he says. “It was the first [club] I ever went to in Chicago and it’s still my favorite.”

But Berlin isn’t the only place to get a Voxbox fix. The album is available in record stores locally and on iTunes, and information can be found at his website (tonecardsounds.com) and his MySpace page (myspace.com/freakshow). Still, Hersch admits he hasn’t attracted any labels yet, and he’s too busy to take his show beyond city limits.

But if the lucre from album sales is limited, Hersch has found it elsewhere, namely in licensing his music to adult films. “The first one was through [Edgewater adult toy store] Early to Bed,” he says. “My neighbor told me that they needed music for this lesbian porno down the street. I went down [there], gave them my CD and got an e-mail a couple weeks later. They licensed my track ‘Digital Love’ and that was that.”

A short while later, Hersch got in touch with a gay-porn studio called Fierce Dog Entertainment. It licensed the Voxbox track “Disco Porno” for the film The Bottoming Desire, which led to another track, “Vicebox,” being licensed for Vancouver Nights.

“It’s not music that comes from my heart, it’s fun music, so when he asked me [to use my song in his porn movie], I had no problem with it,” Hersch says. “I was really happy about the lesbian porn because I know there’s not a lot out there and it’s such an unknown.”

But the biggest compliment came when his CD landed in the hands of Lady Kier, the former lead singer of Deee-Lite, whom he met at Sound-Bar. “I gave her and [electroclash god] Larry Tee my CDs. He wrote me and said that she was enjoying it, and that meant a lot to me. She was one of my high-school idols.”

But until Kier asks him to remix her next album, he’ll schlep his wigs and mannequins to midnight gigs at Berlin for a hungry club crowd. Lucky us.

Voxbox’s Superstition plays this weekend at Berlin.