SARAH SHERMAN: : It’s not so much that you listen to The Residents as it is the total experience of it. I’ve never seen them live, it’s one of my life’s biggest failings, but I’ve watched those shows on tape and it’s awesome.

In college when I was 18, I started working at the college radio station, WNUR in Chicago And the music curators for the radio station – Max Allison, and Doug Kaplan – run Hausu Mountain, a noise label and meeting those dudes completely changed my life. When I started working at the radio station we weren't allowed to play popular music on the radio station – we had to comb through stacks of old records to find stuff. The rule was: you can't play anything as popular as David Bowie – even though David Bowie is weird. I mean if you play a Station to Station song on the radio, people aren't gonna be singing along are they? Well, maybe to "Golden Years".

So that was the rule: you couldn't play any mainstream music and you had to play from records and so Max and Doug curated this insane music collection, and taught me about The Residents. I was 18, I knew that I wanted to be a comedian and had an interest in noise music – and I found out about The Residents. And I totally identified with them: it's comedy, you know? I’m a visual artist and a lot of my stuff is body horror stuff, and I saw that album that has the eyeball guys standing with the hats (1977’s Eskimo) in the record stacks. And I got into all their stuff - making making fun of the Beatles, and they have that record where there’s 40 songs making fun of commercial music (1980’s Commercial Album). I just liked it because they were being comedians with music. I don't understand music, but I can understand when someone's being funny.

I picked “Constantinople” because it's a demented nightmare song even though it’s actually one of their poppiest songs. It’s funny to make a nightmare-carnival-poppy song about seemingly throttling towards the gates of hell. And the music video is crazy too: There’s a big crazy lumpy 3D-animated giant-blob guy falling from the sky and crazy video art of a severed head with a talking mouth.

SARAH SHERMAN: He is my god. He is my everything. I had to put a Prince song in here. I’m a comedian and I think about performance a lot and he’s the best performer of all time and I wish I was Prince.

“When You Were Mine” is my favourite Prince song because I grew up worshipping Cyndi Lauper and when I found out that she was actually covering Prince off of a fucking crazy record, Dirty Mind – which, is just songs about him like fucking his sister – I was like, fucking respect to you Cyndi Lauper! I don’t know anything about music but that sounds like he recorded it in his bedroom or something!

I never got to see him live but I did go to Paisley Park and I remember being stood there waiting for the tour to start, and I just begin to sob hysterically. The tour guide comes over to me and she whispers in my ear: "I know why you're crying."

"Look up," she says. "You’re standing under his urn right. You’re feeling his presence right now." And I look up and his urn is literally a mini replica of Paisley Park!

SARAH SHERMAN: I knew that I was in love with my boyfriend because I was listening to Fleetwood Mac and realised their lyrics are the only language that makes sense to me when talking about love and hurt and chaos. So Tusk is my favourite Fleetwood Mac, album – whatever, I know, like every girl – and “Angel” is the song that I listen to before I perform. For lack of better term, it's my pump-up jam.

I was on tour with my best friend Ruby McCollister, who's also a psychotic Fleetwood Mac fan and she saw me getting warmed up for the show to "Angel" and she said, “You're fucking crazy that this is your pump up jam,” because this is about Stevie seeing Mick Fleetwood from across the room after they broke up and being like, “We're not together anymore, but I still love you and it’s so sad that every time you walk into the room, I still look up and we have to pretend that we didn't love each other once, but I'm not a good pretender.”

Sometimes comedy can be so literal and that's what makes it great: you're like, “how do I make a roomful of people laugh in the middle of like the fucking Midwest? You just have to be as literal and funny as possible, maybe. But something that Fleetwood Mac does is to deliver morally, life-shattering, destroying information with a spoonful of sugar, basically. It is crazy that I still listen to that song every time before I perform, when it's the most devastating piece of information you could ever metabolise.

SARAH SHERMAN: I have a very cluttered mind and a lot of chatter going on. I desperately have wanted to meditate my entire life but can't because I’m too Jewish and neurotic, basically. And if I try meditating, you know, it's like all of a sudden, I feel my blood in my face or something but Laurie Spiegel’s music is the only thing that helps and “Patchwork” is medicinal to me. Music has always been a vehicle where I can find meditation. If I'm on an aeroplane that's turbulent and I just want to meditate and clean my mind, I'll put on “Patchwork”.

Everyone needs to meditate, and especially on a show like SNL, it's a really crazy schedule, and you have to write a million things every week really fast. Your mind always has to be operating and it has to be like a clean machine and your neurons can't be all rusty and gunked up. So I use music as meditation and I love Laurie Spiegel because she's cool and she’s this electronic music pioneer woman.But you know, I listen to all the Iasos stuff too, that corny, new age music, I love all of it.

BEST FIT: Doing SNL must have changed a lot about the way you relate to live performance?

Yeh, I mean SNL is all live performance, which is so rare – it’s like old-timey showbiz. With stand up, you're performing every single night, and you don't think about it in the same way: you're just like” oh, I have a show at this place at 8pm, and I have to get to the comedy cellar at 10.. but being in a cool institution like that really makes you cherish live performances more. These people are in a room, they paid money to be there. They're teachers and nurses and they have to be at work tomorrow. Give them a good show, you know?

I read somewhere how surprised you were that the performing cast were also all contributing to the writing?

I had no idea at the start and it’s crazy because it just blows your mind: all these people are funny performers and they're geniuses at writing too? Like I never knew Molly, Shannon wrote the Superstar character? It makes you fucking step your shit up because you're you gotta pay respects to the people who came before you and do a good job.

SARAH SHERMAN: Neu! and Kraftwerk and Gary Numan and The Residents were my gateway into, weird and weirder music until I found harsh noise and I was like: oh my god, this is so crazy. It should be illegal, basically.

The best way to explain Aaron Dilloway to you is that I did a podcast recently with the comedian Whitney Cummings. I’d just done some tour dates before then and Whitney asked me how the tour was going. Then the sound engineer pops out from behind the little sound thing and says, "Oh my God, I saw you do a show in Ohio with Aaron Dilloway, like what the fuck!!!!”

And Whitney was like, “Who's Aaron Diloway?” And he just answers “THE BEATLES OF NOISE!” and that’s like the best way to describe him.

When I was working at the college radio station, I was obsessed with all the noise records they had there, like Merzbow, Kevin Drumm, all that stuff. But then they had all these records from Hanson Records in Ohio which is run by Aaron Dilloway and it was just the craziest shit I've ever heard in my entire life. My mind was fucking blown.

You know that with performance, the body is an instrument blah blah blah…and when I'm on stage, I'm screaming and I'm trying to make the worst sounds… and I like to stretch the boundaries of that, or break the limits of what's possible in comedy. Is it comedy to play a video on screen in front of stage full of people and have me spreading my ass cheeks open and you see a superimposed mouth, vomiting fake shit? Is that comedy? Should I have done that at Central Park Summer Stage in front of 1000 teenagers opening for Black Midi? Probably not but okay, whatever.

So Aaron Dilloway was my first exposure to the most extreme harsh noise electronic music that defies sound and brakes your ears. Live, it’s like totally crazy, totally unleashed, unbridled chaos. He has a contact mic in his mouth and he's rocking back and forth and screaming. When I did a show with him, I'd never met him before and I was like: “Oh my God, I’m your biggest fan!” And he said, “I'm so excited to play with you, I brought my violin,” and I'm looking around and I don’t see a violin, just a bunch of crazy tape loops, and weird machines. And he points to a metal rod and a dented, metal rusty box, and says, “that’s my violin.”

And he just scrapes his metal rod against the box – and that is the world I want to live in and make stuff in – where there's no rules and everything's totally crazy.

You know that Scott Walker + Sunn O))) album? That changed my life. Scott Walker – literally the god, with David Bowie and Prince – he gets it dude, he fucking gets it! His whole life he was tortured: I don’t wanna make pop music! I’m a freak, I’m crazy! I”m gonna sing demonic opera over harsh noise music.

That’s it man, all the freaks find their way to noise. It’s total entropy and chaos and everyone finds their way there, eventually!