STAGES A/LIVE presents cumgirl8 on the Onassis Channel on YouTube
Digital premiere: Monday, February 19, 2024, at 21:00, on the Onassis Channel on YouTube.
punk / fashion / sensuality / New York / indie / gender stereotypes / " alien amoeba entity"
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
The New York post-punk quartet, named for the sex chat that brought its four members together, is passionate about fashion, the color pink, and boldly satirizing capitalism, the objectification of women, the patriarchy, and the manipulation of reality on social media. Director Christos Sarris captured their surprisingly seductive and wild live performance on camera at Stegi-1.
"Meet cumgirl8, the coolest band you haven't heard of" V magazine, 5 September 2022
Lida Fox (bass), Veronika Vilim (guitar), Chase Lombardo (drums), and Avishag Rodrigues (guitar) make up cumgirl8, a female, sex-positive, multi-media collective that has created their own unclassifiable sound, a "sensual alien amoeba" that aims to silence those who believe that punk is no longer relevant. With influences ranging from Madonna and the Cocteau Twins to Nina Hagen and Strawberry Switch Blade, Chris & Cosey, Delta 5 and others, cumgirl8 already has more than 16 thousand Spotify followers.
Their performances continue the legacy of New York performance art, creating an anarchic pink pandemonium filled with intelligence, humor, and freedom both on and off stage. Never flaunting their sex positivity, cumgirl8 provoke by taking their music seriously but not themselves. cumgirl8 have carved their own niche in the international music scene as an eccentric, female, contemporary, indie, queer punk band, beginning with their well-received first EP "cumgirl8" (2020), followed by "RIPcumgirl8" (2021), the standalone single "dumb bitch" and their most recent electro-punk EP "phantasea pharm" (2023), which was released on 4AD, one of the most important record labels of all time. At the same time, they've established a presence in the fashion industry via collaborations with designers and appearances in Vogue magazine.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
"Their stage performances are like a proverbial exclamation point, pogoing non-stop from one track to the next."
The first song they released after signing with 4AD, "Cicciolina," may be the best point of entry to their universe because of its seductive music video honoring Hungarian-Italian porn star Ilona Stoller. As they themselves state: "Cicciolina is an Italian icon, porn star and former politician who was elected to parliament in the 90s. She supported human rights and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Cicciolina said "have sex, not war" and used the divine power of her femininity to troll the status quo while subverting it from within. We believe her ideals are fundamental to cumgirl8's philosophy of subversive change, peace, and the power of vulnerability. We hope she likes our song; we love her very much. Cicciolina is cumgirl1".
“Brooklyn quartet cumgirl8 placed themselves at odds with the powers that be the second they gave their group its salacious name. It gets them booted from social media platforms and largely precluded from the pages of music’s major broadsheets, but their story doesn’t end with shock value. They may be provocateurs, but they also make a fiery brand of post-punk that would sound just as good under a tamer moniker.”
—The Fader
“Listening to NYC quartet cumgirl8 feels like going back in time and catapulting to the year 2040 all at once. It’s a heady, latex-clad future-nostalgia that’s part dial-up chatroom, part pioneering punk, and three parts sex-positive dreamgirl from outer space.”
— Hero
“Their stage performances are a proverbial exclamation point, one that pogos from one act to the next. An incendiary noise romp that growls at and then humors its audience.”
—i–D
“cumgirl8 is a rising punk band from NYC known for their raucous live shows. Blast the bombastic quartet’s spazzy spacey (and very solid) self-titled debut album below. And then go see them play. That’s the key. The key to everything.”
— OMR
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Chase Lombardo: drums/vox
Lida Fox: bass/vox
Veronika Vilim: guitar/vox
Avishag Rodrigues: guitar/synthesizer/vox
STAGES A/LIVE began in January 2021 as an initiative of the Onassis Foundation for the support of independent music venues in Greece, wherein a series of filmed live performances directed by Christos Sarris raised the volume of the digital stage of the Onassis Channel on YouTube. Three years and 3,321,744 online views later, major names from all the genres of the contemporary Greek and international music scene are online.
From the traditional sounds of Psarantonis and the pop tunes of Marina Satti to the Planet of Zeus’ heavy rock and Saske’s rap; from the alternative rock of Pavlos Pavlidis and Bazooka and the raw rock’n’roll of Nightstalker to Michalis Siganidis and Larry Gus’ experimental music, Constantine Skourlis’ noise, and Mikros Kleftis’ and ATH Kids’ hip-hop sounds; and from the Afrobeats of Pongo and the punk energy of Laura Jane Grace and Thrax Punks to Naxatras’ psychedelic rock, STAGES A/LIVE knows no boundaries. For the 2023–24 season, STAGES A/LIVE is attended by a live audience and is a female affair, presenting four unique and exciting femininities of the present.
