Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh on two decades of accidental decisions and deliberate noise

Transmission 335: Interview with Holy Fuck

Holy Fuck is a Canadian band from Toronto, active since 2004, built around a practical refusal: making music with electronic sounds without using laptops, programmed backing tracks, or the standard techniques of electronic production. Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, who form the band’s core, developed this approach separately before meeting; both were working with Casios, modified record players, and guitar pedals, looking for situations where controlling every parameter of the result was not possible.

The band performs live and records live off-the-floor, meaning ideas are accepted or discarded on the spot. Materials have included four-track recorders, 35 mm film synchronizers, samplers, lap steel, an Indian sarangi, magnetic tape, and field recordings; the sixth album, Event Beat, contains among other things a recording of a school orchestra warming up before a recital. It is their first record since 2020.

Featured image: Colin Medley

How did the band start? What were you doing before making music together?

Brian: In my early twenties I was experimenting a lot with my four tracks, manipulating record players, casio’s etc. I was loving the idea of not being able to will every aspect of music, to have to commit to random unexpected results. I thought it’d be fun to fit that approach into an actual collaboration. Around this time I got a job in the film editing room, assisting both Walter Murch and Dede Allen. I already knew I wanted to approach music in a sort of synesthetic way and being in the cutting room, I found a world of ideas. Still, I didn’t know how to put it all together. I booked my first few Holy Fuck shows as solo performances and they were complete disasters, stressful and no fun. It learned it was only going to work as a joyful expression passed back and forth with other hands.

By then, I was touring in my friend’s indie rock band, By Divine Right. My personal downtime was compartmentalized into pursuing this more experimental project. And through that band I was introduced to a great community of musicians including Graham who was close friend’s with our bass player. Plus I had connections to a pool of amazing musicians in Nova Scotia, like Loel Campbell, one of our first drummers. The band sort of congealed together, and by 2004/ 2005 we were able to tour.

Graham: I was playing guitar and keyboards in a couple bands and was relatively fresh from recording engineering school and full of inspiration so I dove into recording as much as I could. I was messing around with my own ideas and sounds at home. I was really into electronic and experimental music and found fun running things through my guitar pedals like toys, synths, drum machines, whatever.  At school I’d been introduced to mixer-feedback and zero-input mixing, and I took that even further by routing my guitar pedals back upon themselves, and whatnot. When I started getting into samplers, that’s when my world started opening up.  My first was the Casio SK1, and I quickly got a more expensive Roland sampler, but with those it was like working with a blank canvas and I started digging for any sounds to sample and play with.   Still, this was all music I saved and closed on my computer and never really had an outlet for, as it never fit with the bands I was playing in at the time.  I then met Brian through one of my oldest friends Dylan (who played in a band with Brian at the time), and Brian was one of the first musicians I met who felt like was coming from the same place as me. We both messed around with Casios, obscure record players, and listened to some of the same weird music.  I started playing guitar supporting  his solo singer-songwriter stuff, but he had also been making noise music with toy instruments as “holy fuck”, which our mutual friend Dylan encouraged us to do that together and I was so on board with. When I first brought my Casio SK1 and guitar pedals to jam I immediately saw so much potential in that to be even more than what it was. It was like we’d discovered a secret language, and it felt like this was the outlet I was looking for!

Holy Fuck built their sixth album in a Nova Scotia village hall with ice trays, an Indian sarangi, and a school orchestra recorded on a phone, and engineered it to loop back on itself when no one is looking.

What was the specific “anti-laptop” moment that sparked the band’s creation?

Brian: I caught some live experimental artists around that time. But they left me feeling kind of disappointed. The artist would inevitably focus half their attention on their laptop. It looked like aggro bookkeeping. The limitations I was looking for seemed more of an afterthought in that setting. Noisy and obtuse choices were still delivered in way that felt safe. I wanted a ‘blindfolded/ no net’ type of high wire act. I wanted songs to sound wrong. To me it seemed that the laptop, by design, would tempt the user with ‘better’ sounds, ‘perfect’ ideas. I wanted something inherently awkward.

Graham: To me it seemed natural that laptops wouldn’t even be a consideration for this.  I’d been to raves before where the DJ isn’t necessarily the main visual focus and those were fun because it’s all about the music, and everyone is dancing, but once electronic music started to move in to the main-stream,  shows started happening at proper concert venues and that’s where I felt things were kind of mis-aligned. In 2000 I went to see an electronic artist I loved, perform at one of the larger concert venues here in town.  The music was great, but the environment was 750 people all staring motionless at one guy on his laptop smoking a cigarette. It was very surreal.  He very well could’ve been checking his emails as far as I was concerned. So there was a bit of a disconnect there and I wasn’t sure what the point was. To me, it’s exciting that Holy Fuck is a living and breathing entity.  Still to this day, as the tools to perform and write music get even more powerful, I firmly believe that technology is something I like to carefully reckon with.

How do you decide if a toy or non-instrument is “musical” enough for a track?

Brian: We found it easy to commit to ‘toy’ or ‘non instruments’ so long as we used them as the foundation of the song, as opposed to a fun layer added on top. We started out experimenting with whatever texture we could find, like the ‘preset’ of a casio or a ‘yoga’ record pitched down to 16 speed on my suitcase Califone record player. If it didn’t work as the backbone, the song just didn’t develop. We still record live off-the-floor; so ideas are often committed on the spot. It’s either cool or it isn’t. Hopefully most of the crap is cast aside.

Graham: To me, music can be found in anything, it’s just a matter of harnessing the musicality out of it, either rhythmically, harmonically, or tonally.  Kids toys are fun go-to’s because they often have music and loops programmed into them, and  it can be fruitful to harness those sounds, and manipulate them.  

That said, I find samplers to be the most powerful and important instrument because you can literally put anything into them and find your own voice making music out of any sounds. Droning air-conditioner motors, heart beats, breaths, birds, whatever.

How did the Nova Scotia collective scene shape your DIY ethic?

Brian: Those early days of four track recording began in Nova Scotia. And honestly, it started from complete naivety; I literally didn’t know how to make ‘sample based’ hip hop kind of tracks. So I was using pitch control, delay peddles, whatever I could think of. Nova Scotia can be pretty remote. So it forces a sort of ‘outsider’ art whether you intend it or not. I didn’t have connections to other musicians to learn from or emulate. And all my first releases were on my own label- because there weren’t alternatives. Naturally, I was a complete bozo when I moved to Toronto. But at that point I had spent so much time arriving at my own conclusions that I just sort of leaned into them. With this project we were able to lean into that obstacle and find a way to make it work. 

Graham: Once I started playing with Brian, and getting introduced to the Nova Scotia scene It was very inspiring to me to see that DIY ethic.  I grew up in a suburban town just outside of Toronto and went to a high school that was very sports-centric. Life felt like this weird middle-ground where it was just small enough that there wasn’t much inspiration going on, but just big enough that we had access to stuff and were spoon-fed  pop culture, malls and the mainstream.. To me it felt like there wasn’t much need to fight, or drive to do or discover anything.  It felt like there was a depressing apathy to life there. I did find circles of people to make music with, but the “gate keepers” of the places to put on shows and release music, were difficult to crack into, and if I started anything on my own, not many people would care.  It wasn’t until I started going to Nova Scotia with Brian, I saw they were all driven to start labels, book their own shows at halls and homes, and there was a real drive to find their own ways to connect with each other. I loved it and have tried my best to adopt those sensibilities myself.

How does it feel to see your music used in “dark” shows like Breaking Bad and Mr. Robot?

Brian: I haven’t actually watched those shows. Seems appropriate though based on what I know.

Graham: I love it when our music gets used in any tv shows or films. In those two shows, our songs are featured more too, as opposed to being background music, and it always feels really great when your music can be utilized in a show or movie in a more direct way.

Do you look to visual art or cinema for rhythmic inspiration?

Brian: Like so many people my age, I was obsessed with music videos as a teenager. So I was always inspired to make scenes, build narratives around songs. Then I discovered the films of Norman McLaren. Synesthesia was already part of my experience. But I learned more of an understanding of it. With my process, as I work on Holy Fuck songs, narrative ideas morph over time, only to end up as a personal, secret subtext upon completion- it’s not really something I have the means to share with anyone else. We probably all have our secret soundtrack vibes in our head.

Graham: I definitely think visually and synesthetically when writing music. Most music I write myself doesn’t start from any poetry, so I’m always thinking sonically, trying to put the listener in a “space” and conjure feelings through sound and intensity.

I’ve been scoring films over the last few years, which is an entirely different approach to writing that I enjoy quite a lot, so I’ve been finding it creatively fulfilling to merge those sensibilities when bringing songs and ideas in this context.

What does the title Event Beat represent for this era of the band?

Brian: It’s open enough to read differently for all of us. It was Graham’s temp title for the opening and final song. Matt, our drummer, highlighted it as a potential keeper. Maybe it’s a party record for the event horizon. 

Graham: Difficult to say! It was the name of the session File I’d put in after Brian and I jammed on a loop I’d made that eventually turned in to Evie.  I was running beats through my Eventide Harmonizer, and voila!

That said,  for each of us it’ll have a different meaning. There’s always been creative growth with this band, and for myself, it feels like I’m constantly chasing something musically with this project, and almost, but never quite reaching it!

Does Event Beat follow a single narrative, or is it a collection of distinct sonic episodes?

Brian: I like how an album grows its own skin once it’s done and out in the world. Even the final artwork changes who or what it is. It’s hard to hang a narrative arc early in the process when it’s still a collection of ideas- a communication between four unique people. But this album does have a little trick to it- specifically how the album loops. The first and final songs originally came from one long jam between Graham and I. When I brought it home to work on further, I split it into two distinct songs. However, when those two pieces became our final band versions, they no longer felt compatible back to back. So we book-ended the record with them. Now the final song cues the opening song, as a loop- hopefully it adds a bit of an ‘easter egg’ to this record. 

Graham: It’s a single narrative of distinct sonic episodes! haha.  We often don’t have a  grand concept going in, and our albums often reveal themselves after much recording, and fleshing out of songs.

How did recording in a rural Nova Scotia village hall change the “room sound” of these tracks?

Brian: We always record in an open space, facing each other. But this was more open than many other studios. It’s a real room, a real place. So hopefully that translates.

Graham: Recording in the Hall meant we got to live there for weeks at a time, and only focus on music together, which is something we rarely get to do because we don’t all live in the same city.  Because of this, I felt like we were able to push ourselves a bit more with regards to how we capture ideas live off the floor.. One of which was trying to capture ideas as quietly as possible. That was a great way to open up our songwriting and let things breathe more.  We had a few long sessions there working on this record, as well another session in Winnipeg and working on the songs ourselves at our own home studios. Regardless, the room itself definitely adds to the vibe of a record, also, a drum sound will have a huge influence on how a record sounds over all, so for that reason,  the Great Village hall definitely felt like it played a major character on this record.

Was the writing process more collaborative or individual this time around?

Brian: There are ‘individual contributions’ that shaped the early stage of this record in so far as the pandemic forced us to sequester from each other and focus on unfinished pieces or new demo ideas, things we could work on alone. When we finally met in the studio again, we already had these ‘conversations’ started between us, files we were sending back and forth. That’s when the real fun started, resulting in more new original ideas. The final album is as much a band effort as any before it; this one just has roots in a more disparate time.

Graham: This one was very collaborative like the others.  Some songs are more than others, but often our music starts with an idea from one of us and we flesh it out together.

Were there any specific field recordings or new “found objects” used on the new album?

Brian: Ice trays, lap steels, 35 mm magnetic tape, a harp, an Indian Sarangi….

Graham: I was at my daughter’s elementary school for the music recital.  When I walked in, every grade had an orchestra all set up and they were all making noise “warming up” at the same time. It was musical chaos. With my phone, I recorded a long snippet of that and used it as an element to swell in and out during the bridge of “Gold Flakes”.  

I’ve also been exploring by slowing audio  down as slow VERY slow, (either with an old record player I have, or with one of my samplers), and discovering new sounds and textures within. One song that didn’t make the record has a drone underneath it made out of “Love Buzz” by Nirvana! It’s so mangled though, that you’d never know. 

Photos courtesy of Holy Fuck

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others