Blood on the tracks

>> A rough ride with Da Bloody Gashes

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

It's not easy to stay on the fence when faced with Da Bloody Gashes. On one hand, they're a hardened sleaze-punk act fronted by the screeching, spastic stage beast Chloë Lum, who's no longer getting her tits out on stage or doing part-time Internet chat sex (sorry, guys). They're also avant-rock film school nerds who aspire to Sonic Youth grandeur. In fact, they're set to cut a record with Japanese noise artist Gerogerigegege and Sonic Youth's engineer Tim Glasgow, as well as record their next album at Sonic Youth's studio. Above all, they're constantly evolving--the album Pedal to the Metal, released last spring, is already dated--and hyper-conscious of their dynamics and the dynamics of "the scene." Love them or hate them? All the Mirror could do was cling to that fence and let the flood of contradictions flow freely.



Mirror: From your letter to the editor last winter, I gather you weren't too pleased about being a Mirror Noisemaker. You don't want to be singled out?

Chloë Lum (vocals): We kinda see everything from an early '80s, DIY, hardcore perspective where, as musicians and fans of music, we really want our city to be a happening place. I just feel that the media works towards having local rock stars, mostly bands that just play with out-of-town bands and three or four bands who are their friends. That doesn't foster any sort of community.

Suhrid Manchanda (guitar, bass): Most bands don't talk about other bands in their interviews [names dropped during this interview: their drummer's band Les Georges Leningrads, Crackpot, A Vertical Mosaic, Unireverse]. We're always spreading the word, we're always looking for cool, hip bands to play with, and we're always helping them spread their jizz.

Yannick Desranleau (guitar): I think the Montreal scene is known for its cliques. I mean, think about the punk scene, rock scene--

SM: Metal scene.

CL: Post-rock scene. And where does avant-garde rock fit into it? We can't be part of the punk clique because we're too arty, we can't be part of the post-rock clique because we're too loud, we can't be part of the rock 'n' roll clique because we don't fuckin' wear eyeliner. When we first started playing, there were, pretty much, no bands in town who would do shows with us. I guess if you don't fit into any scene, you just find people who are like-minded and build your own. That's what we're attempting to do and I think that, more and more, there's experimental rock bands emerging in Montreal and we're hooking up with them.

SM: Yeah, we're totally attempting to build, whereas most other bands come on the scene and they're just about taking, they're just about, "Come to my show, just this, we're the hottest shit, me me me me me me me me me!"

Fighting the power

M: Your show is a benefit for CLAC, the anti-capitalist convergence of Montreal. What's their story?

SM: They were formed as an organizing group for the demonstrations in Quebec City, but since things went really well and there were a lot of advancements made in the world of activism, they decided to stick with it. If you wanna do something good for the world, this is what you do. You come to see a rock show and you save the world.

CL: What I really like about CLAC as an activist group is that they hold a lot of conferences on the effects of globalization that actually speak to a wide variety of people, rather than just spewing rhetoric to the converted. If we can play shows and give a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars to a group that does that, I think that's pretty satisfying as a band. I mean, there's different ways that people can help out. Not everybody has to be fighting on the front lines.

M: Speaking of fighting, I heard you stopped performing your "Berri UQÀM" song last year because of an incident at the station?

[Miss Lum proceeds to tell a detailed story about being beaten up by two female metro cops at Berri. Apparently she had her feet up on the seats.]

CL: We actually have a "Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality" information table at the show as well. I used to be really involved in political activism in my teens, like any suburban punk kid, but then I kinda fell away from it. I was doing volunteer work in Chiapas for a while and I got so burnt out on activism, but [the beating] really made me open my eyes and realize that any normal person isn't really safe in our supposedly democratic country. Compared to other places, we have it really well, but that doesn't mean that we should be happy because we only get beat up instead of tortured and mutilated.

No shirt, no shoes

M: Okay, so what was the deal with your stage antics, the topless bit and all?

CL: It wasn't meant to be anything. I thought, since we already went through riot grrrl in the early '90s, that women playing in bands, especially punk bands, had a lot more freedom, but I was sadly deluded. It turns out that things are just as sexist and unfree as they were 10 or 15 years ago.

YD: We were also into that thing of doing rock pastiche. If you refer to the record, it's kinda obvious, we really switch from style to style and that was part of it, somehow. I was dressing up in drag, too.

CL: It was kind of a postmodern comment on the theatrics of rock.

YD: We dropped it lately, the naked spectacle, we got sick of it because we finally discovered that people didn't get it.

SM: Yeah, people never get it.

M: And people started expecting it?

YD: Oh yeah, especially when we did our launch, people actually asked us, "Hey, will your singer show her breasts?" Or even people outside of the city. An Internet zine from France reviewed a show we did in Quebec City and said, "Apparently the singer is getting off her top on stage, that's why I went." What?

SM: Yer lame, buddy. You can't see titties unless you go to a rock show, yer lame!

CL: Henry Rollins gets to play without a shirt on, and he's got bigger tits than me!

Revenge of the nerds

M: So what's your show like now?

CL: Aesthetically, we're looking as bland as possible. For a while we felt that we had to hide our dorky nerdiness.

YD: I guess we've just raised up our normal nerd attitude. That's what we are, that's what our music is all about. We always had with us these intellectual concepts. The Gashes are like the end of a research project that we all have been doing on an individual basis and we just put it together.

CL: And we look at the bands we like and, for the most part, there's no false glamour there. We're not glamorous people, we're not cool people, we're not stylish people and it felt at odds to be trying that on stage. And our new songs are a drastic departure from what we were doing before.

YD: Our idea of being a Gash has expanded. It was like chemistry at the beginning, it was really hard to get our moods together. I think, in any group project, it's always good to brainstorm and bring in stuff that's not even related. We need diversified ideas, and we're all from different backgrounds. I've always played in garage bands, while Chloë was in noise bands and Suhrid did improv. We added Arthur Sincaire to our crew lately, and he's from another space. [Giggling breaks out all around. Arthur blows in later, announcing his presence by yelling "Motherfucker!" into the intercom, then smelling up the room with a tin of mackerel, which he devours with frightening enthusiasm.]

SM: He's a monkey from outer space.

CL: He's added a real Zen to the band. We've been together for a year and a half and he's already our fourth drummer, but it's working out really well. We feel liberated playing with him.

SM: These two are filmmakers, primarily, and I'm just a musician, but Arthur comes in as a writer and a poet, and I find that that's sparked creativity in many different ways and it's crystallized the way I look at the band. Now we fit together really well.

CL: We're having a lot of fun with different time signatures and starts and stops.

SM: It's like playing with toys with friends. And all that stuff comes out in our improvs.

CL: Which are a really big part of the set now.

SM: I've always been into creating a pop song on the spot that is creative-experimental, but hits all the right notes with people. That's kind of my mentality with my old band Detroit Metal, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it solidify here.

CL: I consider what we've been doing from the get-go has always been experimental punk. How many punk bands do improv? It's usually so limited to older, more intellectual types, and I just think that if we can really translate that, then we're somehow doing a good job and should get our little hamster treat at the end of the day.

With Goa Gajah and Maggot Breeder at l'X on Saturday, Sept. 29, 8:30pm, $6