Cumming undun

>> Peaches busts out with her electro-punk, sex-type thing

by CHRIS YURKIW

"The dance people gotta get down with rock, and the rock people gotta get down with the dance," says Peaches, juicy Toronto Peaches, who got down to freeing up herself last year when she got an MC 505 beatbox/synth and proceeded to scratch off the name until it read "MC 5."

Casting off earlier exploratory endeavours in music as a girlie folkie and a would-be-avant-jazz singer, Peach first found focus in trying to write punk songs on a Roland and then multimedia Babylon in supplementing her primal live show with Super-8 films, overhead projections and a posse of performance "hype people." And despite a fixation on fucking as metaphor for both engagement with and detachment from the world ("Cum Undun," "Fuck the Pain," "Suck & Let Go,") Peaches says that it's all just her version of self-actualization.

"It is about music, but it's more about bustin' out. It's just, like, steppin' up--for anybody."

Into her thirties, Peaches calls herself a late bloomer, but that don't mean she's not phresh as hell--and tougher than leather. Her self-titled six-songer on the Teenage USA label merges the minimalism of both garage punk and old-school electro to sound like, I dunno, Suicide backing the Cramps with Wendy Carlos Williams as MC.

A kind of confident naivete is the name of the game, like when Peaches gelled last year during an improvised Euro tour with T.O. cohort Chilly Gonzales (ex-Montrealer Jason Beck), now based in Berlin and signed to the same Kitty-Yo label that will soon release Peaches on the continent. Peach was utterly unschooled on her days-old 505; Gonzales chose CD players as his instrument; but it went down well--especially on Friedrichstrasse.

"We just went to Europe," says Peaches, "arrived in cities and did spontaneous gigs in clubs. We were confident. We knew we had something really wicked, and they were willing to let us do it."

Peaches is headed for a stay in art-damaged Berlin herself--east side apartment with coal-burning furnace and electric shower already rented--and she threatens to move to Montreal upon arrival back in Canada. And in the meantime? What's her Montreal debut gonna be like?

"The shows in Toronto have become pretty crazy," she boasts, "people coming up and doing the weirdest crap. Like, they want to show you that they want to do something crazy--friends, people in the audience. I've had people come up in the middle of a song and just start grinding me. I had another guy in Hamilton who was just burying his face in... like, he wanted me to go dominatrix on him. And at the Exclaim! party we just did, these two guys got up and took off all their clothes and started simulating ass fucking on stage--it was crazy."

Unfortunately, Peaches probably won't have her backing films and hype posse in tow here, "But, you know," she says, "I'm definitely entertaining enough." :

At Barfly on Monday, April 17 and with Lois at Jailhouse Rock on Tuesday, April 18, 9pm