HOLY FUCK TOUR
By Sophie in News | 0 comments
3RRR, FBi and Mistletone present for the first time in Australia and direct from Toronto, Holy Fuck.
Known for their interstellar live performances and chaotic yet precise recordings, Holy Fuck don’t hide behind laptop computers and walls of synthesisers – think of them as a celebration of lo-fi noise and weirdo casio-driven rock. One might say that if modern electronic music is a highly sophisticated robot operated by hi-tech computers, Holy Fuck are the evil counterpart. They are less of a modern indie rock band than they are an exploded diagram of an indie rock band, splitting open to reveal their organic guts, tangled wires and broken bits of drumsticks. Their reputation as a must-see live band is TOTALLY deserved.
HOLY FUCK NATIONAL TOUR DATES
Melbourne – Wednesday December 10: 3RRR Presents Holy Fuck @ The Corner w/ Love Of Diagrams + Mountains In The Sky.
Tickets $38+BF on sale from The Corner.
Sydney – Thursday December 11: FBi Presents Holy Fuck @ The Annandale Hotel w/ Mountains In The Sky + WOW.
Tickets $38+BF on sale from The Annandale.
Meredith – Friday December 12 @ Meredith Music Festival.
Holy Fuck onstage around 2am, Friday night/Saturday morning.
Brisbane – Saturday December 13 @ The Zoo w/ Taste Of Teeth + Toy Balloon.
Tickets $38+BF on sale from The Zoo.
From The Age: The sound of now
There’s a buzz around this band, writes Kylie Northover.
FOR a band whose name can’t be printed in most publications, Holy F— manage to garner a lot of positive publicity.
The Canadian four-piece are variously described as “experimental” and “electronic” but rather than creating their chaotic sounds from high-end equipment and state-of-the-art laptops, Holy F— instead wring their music from retro toy radar guns, cheap keyboards and film synchronisers.
Despite the fact they rarely have a set list, improvise shows by feeding off their crowd and never rehearse, they’re famed for their live performances, and for the past year have been a fixture on the biggest festival bills around the world.
And unlike most buzz bands who coolly downplay sudden success, Holy F—‘s frontman Brian Borcherdt is endearingly enthusiastic about the band’s fortunes.
“We’ve been around for four years now, so it’s not that new, but it does feel sudden and it’s great,” he says.
“The band has felt constantly new to us because we didn’t have any expectations in the beginning for it, so it feels sudden constantly — if that makes sense?”
And they’re more than happy being a hyped “act of the moment”.
“Hey, if it takes us to Australia, then that’s cool,” Borcherdt says. “We’re just happy with all these opportunities to tour places we’ve never been. I mean, we’ve played Glastonbury. It’s amazing!”
Holy F— — Borcherdt, Graham Walsh, Matt McQuaid and Matt Schulz — were formed, says Borcherdt, with a view to experimenting with organic sounds.
“Initially we were thinking about the way we inevitably date our styles the more we embrace a synthetic sound; there’s always a subconscious aesthetic to what’s going on at certain times and whether someone’s reacting against it or adhering to it, I think, therefore things get a little bit dated,” he explains of the band’s lo-fi musical approach.
“You listen five years back and you can pinpoint certain stylised things. I think that happens more and more as things become more man-made, as opposed to organic; an acoustic guitar is always going to sound like an acoustic guitar, or a piano is always going to sound like a piano. But when you start using synths and digital effects, then those things become dated.”
Borcherdt and his bandmates instead strip things back, leaving them less options with which to be creative.
“We had to embrace compromise so that you can’t, ultimately, ever do what you want to do; you can’t do what you want to do if you’re playing a Casio. Suddenly you don’t have a laptop with a million and one options. Instead, you’re reduced to having a battery-operated kids’ toy that’s not meant to be a proper instrument, but it’s fun and creative to try and make it sound dope.
“Hopefully, in the end, not only are you not using laptops, but more interestingly, you end up with a compromised sound that’s different and that will be out of phase with what other people are doing.”
Holy F—‘s sound is certainly different from what other people are doing now — but what if it’s their sound that “dates” and subsequently launches a hundred other bands?
“Exactly — it will probably sound in five years like it’s squarely out of the mid 2000s. We might actually just end up defining the sound of the era instead,” Borcherdt says
So how does Borcherdt describe the Holy F— sound?
“I usually describe it by just making noises with my mouth — but I’ll spare you the guttural, lewd sounds. I like to say noisy, fun, cathartic and all those things … I don’t have one snappy answer though,” he says, before making a guttural, blurpy noise with his mouth down the phone.
HOLY FUCK BIOGRAPHY
Formed in Toronto a little over three years ago and consisting of two full time members Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh (effects/synths), Holy Fuck have graced the stages at some of the largest music festivals in the world including Glastonbury (NME named them in the Top Three new bands at this year’s festival), Coachella, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Vegoose, and are balanced somewhere between an experimental noise-out and a free-for-all dance party. They have also been invited to perform and tour with some of the most innovative artists around including Mouse On Mars, Wolf Parade, and !!!
Afraid that electronic presets and affectations will inevitably date the sound of today’s dance and rock music, Holy Fuck decided to strip away hi-tech gear in favour of the nearly unmanageable lo-tech battery operated keyboards. The often cheesy beats, like rhumba, disco and techno emitted by these half-broken kid’s toys are then manipulated with guitar peddles and distorting cheapo mixers. Holy Fuck‘s drummer and bassist then kick in, accompanied by other outlandish sounds such as 35 mm film being scratched over tape heads. The end result is not childish like the keyboard beats might have originally suggested. Holy Fuck, hailing from a more punk rock background, steer the songs into an epic, kraut-rockish climax, something stirring and infectious, yet danceable and fun.
Without rehearsing or arranging parts prior to hitting the stage, Holy Fuck wrote the songs for their debut album live on tour. Each time they’d return from tour they’d check into a studio and cathartically capture the energy of the live show, recording the songs that had now taken shape. Drawing from different recording sessions the album maintains a unique feel from song to song. While the material was recorded for the most part in a studio environment, Holy Fuck recorded it live, as if on stage. Therefore the songs still breathe a live frenetic energy. It’s a mass of tribal drums sounds and hypnotic, pulsing synth lines and shows the full force that Holy Fuck possess as a live band. A subtle introduction to the band this ain’t – it’s not the Holy Fuck way.
“Holy Fuck blasted out opulent streams of saturated melody, clouds of glitter and confetti, nitrous-boosted dance dynamics…Holy Fuck set the bar awfully high.”
– PITCHFORK
“This Canadian mega-group ply an interesting trade of organic electronica where they shun all usage of laptops, pre-programmed backing tracks in favour of Real Instruments with Real Soul creating experimental improvised songs where not even they know what will happen.”
– DROWNED IN SOUND
From Beat magazine:
Issue: Beat #1140
“We planned on it being something fun for ourselves and the audience, but beyond that we really didn’t have a lot of expectations for it,” he shrugs, “we didn’t have anything to lose.” That’s the beauty of the band and specifically of their wildly improvisational live show from whence everything launches: they go anywhere and pull the audience with them.
“There’s an energy onstage that’s really contagious,” he enthuses, “that’s what every band hopes for.” Holy Fuck were merely trying to make electronic music with battery-operated toys, screwed up instruments, film projectors, banks of distortion pedals, “do all these things that were hopefully unique.” But in trying to be different Borchedt feared they’d become a novelty act. “So hopefully we’ll outlive the novelty, but never outlive the spontaneity and fun.”
In having a manifesto of freedom, they have to outdo themselves over and over. Borcherdt doesn’t feel like they’re limiting themselves by not limiting themselves. They have side projects; Borcherdt as an acoustic guitar warbler, fellow keyboard and effects terrorist Graham Walsh writes advertising jingles. “It could be limiting if we didn’t enjoy it so much,” he demurs, “it feels like there’s a limitless opportunity for us to play with the sounds that we steal off these Casios, or garage sale things, or kid’s toys. There’s so much out there to make music with that it feels infinite.”
The inherent strictures of electronic music of the ’90s were perverse, since the point of the digital revolution was to be able to turn any sound into music. Borcherdt adds, “Or it got so broken up by genre that if there was a variation from one artist to the next, it was dictated by which genre was adhering to.”
Now groups like Holy Fuck and New York’s Ratatat are loose enough to pull from the entire palette of observable sound. “I’m sure all along there were people who were fed up with [the genre system] and were trying to rebel in that context, but they got overshadowed by the heroes of the genre,” he muses. “It is a bit intimidating for someone like myself at the periphery of it. I like to think I have an eclectic taste in music. Then you think there’s genre upon genre of electronic music that I don’t understand and rather than get involved in it, I almost felt intimidated by it. What’s jungle? What’s drum n’ bass?” He cackles that BPM means nothing to him as a guitarist, “I don’t understand!”
“I guess in a way Holy Fuck is my naïve tribute to any of that,” he laughs, “as done in my own pathetic kind of way. From my own rock point of view I’m trying to do something like that; I just don’t know how.”
The trouble with nailing Holy Fuck’s jello to the wall in a recording studio is that it may poison future performances – the focus of the band. Borcherdt concedes that their first, self-titled effort was merely a moment in time, and sketchy into the bargain. Their second, 2007’s LP, is a more focused affair, inasmuch as cascading loops and a jumble of found sounds with surging beats can be.
“Even though it was born of an improvisational process, there were highlights we felt were necessary to capture on a record,” he admits. “It was tricky all of a sudden. Like, how do we do this because we’re so used to playing it on a stage to sweaty people who are responding and here we are in a studio with headphones on trying to recreate that.”
The only way to meet that challenge was to record scads of music. “For the most part we ignored a lot of the sessions because we knew we didn’t nail it,” Borcherdt says. Eventually they chose to lead the album off with a live track, and mixed it up enough to have the electricity of a performance with the polish of the studio.
Horror of horrors, they’ve actually been working at XL Studios in London. But Borcherdt assures me that it adheres to the aesthetic of the band: one small room with a mixer. And he concedes that they could only nail down more demos, “but hopefully for us it’s a way to continue making new songs. We don’t really want to write them in our heads and teach them to the rest of the band. We want them to be spontaneous, exciting moments. I guess the way to do that is to continue playing live as much as possible.”
Holy Fuckola, Batman, an electronic band who love live chaos and are creeped out by the studio. Forget the album and feel it live.
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