LouFest 2014: Holychild
Who are you excited to see at LouFest?“OutKast has always been a huge inspiration to us. It’s creatively validating when you have the opportunity to see your heroes do their thing. It’ll be inspiring to be in such great company at the festival.” - Louie
Holychild has a message. This message and its emotional vivacity transcend the triviality of a singular medium.
What’s Holychild’s mission? A complete deviation—a rebellion, if you will—from the preconceived structure of the musical channel.
For duo Liz Nistico and Louie Diller, who comprise the sarcastically experimental brat pop venture that is Holychild, this band is just one project, using one medium, in the grand scheme of their creative voyage.
The duo is artistic, not just musical, and they express this through the platforms of painting, dancing, drawing, writing, video directing and more. It makes sense, then, why their influences span from Wes Anderson to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It all started as a school project at George Washington University, when Nistico approached Diller to help with because of his rendition of Radiohead’s top hits that he rocked on a piano in her dance class. From then on, they knew that they could create something together that would fulfill their individual artistic ambitions.
Nistico says what makes them work so well is their ability to give one another space. This means that they can create apart and then come together to complement and build off of the others’ imagination.
Much of Holychild’s music is blunt social commentary, challenging its audience to question why they are the way they are, why they believe the way they do and why they feel the way they feel.
Much of this challenging invitation to introspection is how Nistico lives in her own skin, in her own mind. She says that the reason she is the way she is derived from her quiet observations of the human condition throughout her entire life. These observations culminated in the form of men mistreating her, in the people she’s traveled with and in the interactions she has strived to understand and unriddle for her entire life.
“There are so many hypocritical aspects to being a human,” Nistico says. “I spend almost all of my time analyzing everything. It’s always been a question to me if other people feel the same way or think the same things I do. These questions are what I am trying to figure out creatively, and that process never stops.”
Diller thinks his life has been a bit more privileged with positive experiences than Nistico, and he’s humbled by that when they share their souls musically. His introspective nature began at about age 25 when he starting spending the majority of his time evaluating the kind of impact he wanted to have on the world and studying Afro-Cuban music, much of which is incorporated into Holychild’s sound.
Holychild’s new, currently unnamed album will debut in 2015 and covers the limbo between connecting to people and the vulnerability of doing so. But Nistico and Diller have more on their artistic horizon than just the album.
Diller has a craving to be in the studio constantly and make sense of random noise, while also desiring to encounter his next major artistic challenge that will utilize his producing skill set.
Nistico has a wistful wanderlust to write more, interact with more people, direct videography more, play the drums more and create more.
After all, when you’re part of a band like Holychild, why limit yourself to just one medium?
