Ashley Huizenga on Sex, Starvation, and Art

Drew Denny

Our music feature this week focuses on Ashley Huizenga, an L.A. musician and performance artist known for her academic-minded -- and also quite filthy -- shows under the guise of her alter ego Actually Huizenga.

Trained as a classical pianist, she creates epic '80s inspired dance scores that feature wailing guitar solos, shimmering synth sounds, and sexy lyrics like "You're top's off/Mine's coming off/You're giving it/I'm taking it/Who's driving this car?" Having recently shot the latest installment of her video series "Soft Rock" - in which she is literally boffed on camera -- she spoke with us about her monthly show at Cheetahs strip club in Hollywood, her upcoming solo album, and much more.

On her Kickstarter campaign:
I asked all my YouTube subscribers to donate to my Kickstarter. I tried to make each message personal but their name is a screen name so it's like "dear big cock xoxo help me make my dream come true."

On her last Craigslist ad:
I was trying to find a guitar shredder: "Master Guitar Shredder Wanted." Eight people responded, two said they were gonna come, and one showed up. My cousin escorted him -- he was over 50 -- and he came down into the basement. I had Traces of Death playing and a fog machine. Me and my friend Ryan were wearing black hoods and drinking. He came in and we were like 'hook up to the amp' -- this shitty little amp. And he hooked in and started shredding really seriously to Traces to Death. He wasn't weirded out by the fog. He liked it. He did it for like an hour. Afterwards, I had this honeydew melon with a knife in it and I opened it and fed it to him while he was playing like 'ding an ning a ding a ning'.

On British holding cells:
I got held at customs three different times for six to ten hours in prison. In the women's and kids section.

On why the Pompidou museum in Paris didn't put up a video she submitted:
I don't know what offended them so much. We cut out all the full on sex. There's one part where he's going down on me, and we just zoomed in. If there was a nipple, we zoomed into something else. Maybe it was the part where Renata got pushed against the tree. She and Peter were in the room in Arrowhead that has a tree in it. We lit it from above. Blue and white light. She had drank a little too much and we had been up all night the day before. That day we tied the boys to the trees, and we were whipping them. I had a rifle. No one was offended by that.The next day I shot Renata and Peter in the room with the tree. I told Peter to pretend like he was raping her. He didn't really have any clothes on exactly. He pushed her head into the tree. She was so drunk she started crying for real. She looked so sad. There's no nudity. Peter's body looks like a sculpture. He's blue.

On Big Foot:
It's really curious but it knows it has to hide.

On her first pornographic video and the Spartans:
I went to Greece for the first time to visit [my love interest] Socrates. His parents are from Greece. He was born in New York but he's 100% Spartan. They lived in caves for three hundred years because the Turks ruled Greece until the 1800's so the Spartans had all these caves -- they still have them. They preferred to live in caves than be ruled. I think that's why some Spartans look different.

I wanted to make a video for "Don't" so I'm lip synching while we're having sex. I thought it would be fun to lip synch during a sex scene. But it became something different than the music video. I was in New York -- New York is hard. I was living in this hippie house, this gigantic Victorian house in Prospect Park. I lived in the doctor's old office. It had a giant fireplace. There was a sex swing above the bed. Some crazy lesbians lived there before me.

I got kicked out of London because I had gotten stuck in the snowstorm last Christmas and overstayed my visa. So I decided to stay in New York cause I didn't want to come back to L.A. defeated. I edited Soft Rock then. It saved me.