by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Once upon a time,” says Brian Borcherdt, founder of Toronto’s Holy Fuck, “jazz artists were saying there’s no wrong note. No one’s ever said that about beats. Beats are very trendy—BPMs go in and out of style, which blows my mind! There’s no wrong beat, it’s just what you do to it. So it’s a challenge. We start with the goofiest child’s-keyboard beat and try to turn it into the dopest dance beat and get the room moving to it.”

If you caught Holy Fuck at the Jazz Fest or Pop Montreal earlier this year, you know they’re up to the challenge (so much so that they played backup for Beans, the former Anti-Pop Consortium MC, on a two-week U.S. tour earlier this year). It doesn’t hurt that, while they have no fixed drummer, they do have Kevin Lynn on bass. Fans of King Cobb Steelie, a Canadian band well ahead of the curve in bringing a dancefloor groove to indie rock, will recognize Lynn’s fluid, snaking low end.

Up front are Borcherdt and his partner in duelling dinky-tronics, Graham Walsh, with their “tabletops of gimmicks and weird devices.” Borcherdt explains the band’s unrehearsed, off-the-cuff approach this way: “We were going to mimic some electronic music, but without laptops or anything pre-recorded, and using kids’ keyboards, like the samba beat on the Casio you had as a child. You really can’t rehearse around that—if you do, you ruin the concept.”

The intuitive, let’s-see-where-this-goes approach extended to the recording of their just-out, self-titled debut CD. “We could have put out a very self-indulgent box set, but no one would have wanted that. It’s very freeform still—you can hear us talking, laughing and having a good time in the room.”

That litmus test—if something has them cracking up and high-fiving each other, use it—starts with their selection of instruments. “Really, we just look for anything that makes a sound. We go to truck stops or pawn shops and find little laser guns and things. We start remixing it in the car—det-det-di-det-det-duh-det—and we all crack up about that. Then that night at the show, we’ll bust it out.

“We just found one at the venue we were at last night. Looking at the beats on it—what are they called? Cosmic panther! Safari! We couldn’t wait to put some batteries in this thing and plug it in, see what we come up with.”

Emulating turntablist scratching by running audio tape through a 35mm film synchronizer is another number in Borcherdt’s bag of tricks, but the best has to be something called a Hair Computer.

“We found it in the garbage in the Little Korea area in Toronto, while walking along one night, drunk. It’s a Revlon MS-2000 Hair Computer (laughs)! And it has a probe jack—it even calls it that—and you’re apparently supposed to clip this thing into someone’s hair, hit some buttons and it will systematically read their hair type to recommend various Revlon products.

“It’s total bullshit! There’s no way in hell this thing actually worked! It’s just a farce. And now it’s broken, so every time you hit it, it just goes to random.”

With Land of Talk and The Unireverse at
Main Hall on Friday, Nov. 18, 9 p.m., $10

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