Pet Wife

Charlie Markbreiter talks with Noelle and Pet—partners in life and music—about their new album, foam set.

“I can now state my main contention, and it turns out to be very simple,” wrote analyst D.W. Winnicott in 1974. “Clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.” The thing you’re scared of has happened already.

You could say that foam set by Pet Wife is about regret, but that’s not quite it. foam set is less about making mistakes and more about finally getting it right—and the isolation and suffering that come with that. Transitioning late. Leaving a bad relationship. Cutting off a hateful relative. You knew it was bad. What changed was admitting that to yourself. What you regret was not that you left, but how long it took.

Show no mercy cause the angel only sees / A thousand eyes

Pet Wife is a couple; they’re in love. Their names are Noelle and Pet. Noelle does the vocals. Pet does “synthesizers/electric and acoustic guitars/bass guitar/piano/sampler/drum machine/drum set/banjo/percussion/backing vocals.” They sound like T4T Portishead.

The album cover shows Pet and Noelle sitting like cherubs, legs intertwined; the background is a void. Their angel wings are made of foam. You could say it’s pathos: soap wings don’t fly. Foam barely covers your nakedness. You could say: it was only through the breakdown I feared that I found—you.

—Charlie Markbreiter

Charlie Markbreiter: I don't know anything about music.

Pet: That makes three of us.

CM: Great. So what were foam set’s musical influences?

Pet: Ryuchi Sakamoto. I like the way he makes synthesizers sound organic. I was also listening to ABBA. Their music has a lot of pathos. It’s just hidden behind beautiful melodies and bright production.

Noelle Sakowitz: But that vulnerability is in there. 

CM: The music is very disco Eurovision, but then the lyrics are like, “Money, money, money / It’s a rich man's World.”

Pet: “Super Trouper” is such a desperately lonely song. But it has that sheen. And it’s a song about needing to be seen by others to prove your own existence, which resonates with my experience as a trans woman.

CM: On the one hand, gender validation is a process of individuation: you help me feel like me. But it’s also mutualistic; someone else is giving you that feeling.

NS: It's building off each other.

Pet: Yes.

NS: But you have to really be in alignment with each other to do that. We—

CM: RIP. The audio is cutting out.

NS: Maybe I need to be closer to Pet?

They are sharing a single pair of AirPods, and move closer together so that each pod is within range. The sound suddenly works.

NS: That’s dramatically appropriate. You have to fuse your heads together as you give this answer.

CM: What does foam mean to you?

Pet: It's delicious… Sorry. I'm just being stupid.

NS: You're being very smart.

Pet: Thank you.

NS: I started thinking about foam as something new that's ephemeral and magical. And then it just disappears.

Pet: We were tortured for a long time. And Noelle would say, “We need to make a song.” We have a little electric piano in the living room. We'd sit down at the piano and I would start playing.

CM: Who is the angel in “Mercy”? That song reminds me of the poem that's like…

NS: Can you [inaudible]...? Or only if I speak like this? [Noelle is now speaking directly into Pet’s ear] Anyway. I meant the biblically accurate angel. It’s so graceful. But then also there’s “a thousand eyes”—the panoptic levels of awareness.

CM: How long have you been together?

Pet: Six years this past April. We met on her dot com. We're the only couple in history that met on her dot com.

CM: Is it ever challenging to be working and dating at the same time?

Pet: No.

CM: Wow. Really?

Pet: Uhh… [visibly straining to come up with something] Okay. You would need a team of five people to catch everything that comes out of Noelle. So like, foam set, that's nine songs, but there's 10 to 12 other demos chopped up in the background of each song. We generate a ton of material. I have to be very fastidious in how I go through it. So my challenge is that Noelle is too brilliant.

NS: But also I'm a baby, right?

Pet: Exactly. If I try to put a bridge in a song, it's not happening. 

CM: Wow. It seems like you both achieved perfect symbiotic harmony. I'm wishing you even more years of bliss and mutually enlightening collaboration, and many more years of sharing AirPods. 

Pet: AirPods…That's what this whole interview has been about.

NS: Exactly.

Pet: What else can be said after that?