 By Dara Hakimzadeh Holy Fuck: "Batteries And A Half Broken Casio"Holy Fuck says they're all about doing it live (...and we're not trying to force a sexual innuendo on you.) We caught up with three of the band's four members before their show at the new Capital Music Hall in Ottawa. "It's much more fun doing it live without the preset samples and sequences all laid out," says Graham Walsh, who during their shows singings into vocal manipulators while Brian Borcherdt scratches film through a synchronizer which makes sounds similar to a needle against vinyl. They both whiz around twisting knobs and tapping keypads, sometimes even dancing when the mood strikes.
"It tends to get really chaotic and exciting. Sometimes it falls apart and sometimes it gets really loud and heavy or really light and silly. You can't do that if you have the same show every night," says Lynn. "That's why we do it, to try and push it as far as we can."
What started out as an electronic side-project for Borcherdt has now turned into appearances including supporting Brooklyn rapper Beans at the Cochella festival in California and Canadian tour dates with Metric. Borcherdt played guitar with By Divine Right and formed Holy Fuck with Kevin Lynn, of King Cobb Steelie, who plays bass. Glenn Milchem (Blue Rodeo, The Swallows) plays drums.
Live jams sometimes take a life of their own, probably the reason why the band has been called everything from "blip-hoppers", "Toronto's evil super group" and "a shabbily dressed Kraftwerk."
Holy Fuck's self-titled debut album faired pretty well on college radio stations across Canada this year.
"I think we're pretty aware of where things are at in terms of what people are doing and what people find exciting and we all want to do something that is timeless and therefore trendless," says Borcherdt.
He breaks off into a long discussion about the live aspect of the album which was recorded on the studio floor without fiddling with sound programs to filter and equalize the audio. "It's a release of musical frequencies that are only captured in that environment. We wanted it to be a spontaneous energy in which everyone can bring their own interpretations to it," he says.
Borcherdt says this interest in low-fi began in his teenage years. He recorded experimental demos on a four track player.
"I started recording around the house, it was fun to find things inside your house to make music. You don't have a drum set so you start banging on a box of tapes. You do anything that sounds cool and then that just keeps changing and morphing," says Borcherdt. "I found the film synchronizer, little Casio keyboards and then tried to make loops on delay pedals because it's all that I had. At some point along the way, I suppose I could have thrown it all out and saved up my money for something high-tech but, it seemed more interesting and creative to try to use non-traditional elements."
Later this year, Texans and music industry representatives will experience Holy Fuck at the South By Southwest music conference in Austin. Shortly after they'll be touring with Wolf Parade in the rest of the United States, followed by a European tour with Metric in May or June, says Walsh.
"We'd love to record our live shows but, the truth is there's only four of us and we've got handle all our own driving, setting up, sound checks and it's expensive to bring technology that can record stuff and you need a third party that can help out with that," says Borcherdt who understands first-hand how labels work.
He founded Dependent Music, an indie record label/artist collective that started out in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in the mid 90s. Other bands on their roster are Wintersleep, Jill Barber, Extra Virgin and Junior Blue.
Unfortunately, we learned that someone in Ottawa pushed that dream a little further away by stealing their equipment.
"I just lost my laptop the other night, it was a brand new, a really nice one, and that was one thing closer to allowing us to record. I just found stuff we could use in collaboration with that laptop that would have worked. We though 'yeah, we can do this now' and a day later it was gone so," he pauses.
"It is fate," interrupts Lynn.
"We really want to do it, you know, but the timing just isn't right," continues Borcherdt, "it's a matter of getting somebody you can hire to go on tour with you to set up the microphones every night, record it into some kind of hard drive and to be responsible for that, it's a lot of responsibility."
Borcherdt says making and recording music is often a matter of not doing necessarily what you always want but, really figuring out what's the most important thing to do at that given time. It's a touch decision, he says, it's not always easy.
The band breaks the somber mood summing up the reason why they play together.
"The truth is we have no idea what the hell we're doing," says Walsh.
"We just make it up as we go along in every sense," adds Borcherdt.
"It's kind of like the Wizard of Oz, look behind the curtain and there's nothing there" jokes Lynn.
"Just a couple of batteries and a half broken Casio keyboard, that's the wizard behind the curtain," concludes Borcherdt. They dash off to do a last minute sound check before we can ask who the lion, the tin man and the scarecrow were. Another time perhaps.
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