Holy Fuck plays ‘organic’ electro
March 4, 2008
(Click graphic to enlarge)
(Click graphic to enlarge)
If there’s something strange about an adult male playing a Fisher-Price keyboard, Graham Walsh can’t see it. But he’s not fooling anyone. For the past four years, the effects man’s band Holy Fuck has built its career as one of electronica’s illegitimate children on doing everything out of proportion: Their music is too loud, their band name is too offensive, their instruments are too strange and the results are just too good. Sound wise, these guys are huge.
On the road, they’re just loud. From the backseat of the van he hopes will one day be a bus, it was all Walsh could do to make himself heard above the Patton Oswalt comedy album sending his vanmates into a fit.
“Can you guys turn it down just a bit?” Walsh said. He uncovered the phone. “That sounds so weird for me to say.”
It’s a question he won’t be repeating onstage. The five Torontonians who make up Holy Fuck are strong supporters of spontaneity in electronica, of improvisation in a subgenre dominated by synths and samples. The media has somewhat romanticized what Walsh calls the band’s “organic” approach to contemporary electro — they forego samples because they enjoy the choice, he insists, not because they oppose the alternative.
“I wouldn’t really say we’re going that bold with it, but I don’t see any time when we’ll be bringing a laptop onstage and sequencing things and pre-programming backing tracks and using effects,” Walsh said. “I just don’t think that’s particularly fun. I hope the audience is coming out to see us because they like our music and not because they want to see the spectacle of these dudes making that music on particular pieces of gear, because then you become like the Blue Man Group.”
The approach is not without its problems. In Vancouver last week a mixer’s power supply exploded “literally, there was smoke coming out of it,” Walsh said. “When a piece of equipment goes down or when a keyboard breaks, then we’re screwed. It’s not like you can go ask the opening band to borrow their guitar because you broke a string.”
Walsh has an unsettling habit of measuring his answers before releasing them over the line. In a job he admits still doesn’t fully support him, his focus is split between the music — though he stresses the “sound” — and the fun.
“Here’s where I’m trying to think of a hilariously witty answer, but I can’t,” Walsh said. “My favorite sound is really silence. That’s my ironic answer for you: the guy from Holy Fuck says silence is his favorite sound.”
The keyboardist’s reference to himself in terms of his band’s name comes hand-in-hand with one as dichotomous as theirs has become. Fans expecting parties and drugs might be disappointed by Walsh, who recently bought a PSP but is “trying not to get sucked into that world.” The same goes for fellow keyboardist Brian Borcherdt, who Walsh makes out to have a “superfluous nipple.”
“I often worry that people think we’re trying to make a bold statement with it, but we really just named the band that as in, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we were in a band called Holy Fuck?’” Walsh said. “I think in some ways we’re breaking ground with it. The fact that (the Juno Awards) nominated a band called Holy Fuck for Alternative Album of the Year, that’s got to be a step somehow.”
But he doesn’t condone it.
“It’s not good to swear,” Walsh said, laughing. “We don’t use that kind of language.”
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