Holy Fuck

CHRIS BRYSON

PHOTO: CHAN-YANG KIM

Over five full-length albums Holy Fuck have been mining the fields between improvisation and structure with rewarding results. On their new album, Deleter, Holy Fuck have continued to evolve their inventive and ever-shifting electronics from their exploratory jam band origins into something more refined and cohesive while maintaining their improvisational roots.

The band’s dynamic and infectious sound, crafted with the intent of creating electronic music with live instrumentation, has enabled them to play some major festivals and tour with a range of artists including Wolf Parade, M.I.A., and Hot Chip, and they keep things weird in the process.

Holy Fuck’s Brian Borcherdt says Deleter came together in an interesting way from patterns that Graham Walsh, who is also in the band, had made at home and then during soundchecks while they were on tour for their previous album, Congrats. He would throw them out there and the band would build onto it. “I don’t know to what extent they were finished ideas,” says Borcherdt. “I think sometimes they were just simple; a drum beat or something. But when we were in those soundcheck moments those were the things that we were able to just dive onto.”

“After touring the Congrats record, when we were done touring and going through our phones, I think all four of us had heaps of funny jams and stuff from various soundchecks, and one song came from an encore that we played in Luxembourg,” explains Borcherdt. “We had little different things and some of the notes were just like the name of the city we were in and we compiled all that stuff together and realized well if we just successfully record these ideas, we’ll have a record.”

For the recording of Deleter the band brought on Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, Angus Andrew of Liars, and Nicholas Allbrook of Pond as featured artists to contribute vocals to three tracks. These three add their own unique creative elements to the album that Borcherdt says plays to each of their strengths.

Over the years the band has created a lot of its music from found sounds. Borcherdt recalls one time in Winnipeg when they went to a pawn shop on their way to the gig and picked up something that they tried at the show that night, brought it home with them, and it ended up contributing to a song on their next album.

“That’s just an example of how you find something, press play on it. You start with that kernel of the idea, that seed that grows into the final thing. So that’s always been the way we do it,” explains Borcherdt. “There’s some exceptions to it, but for the most part that’s where we get excited is starting with a sound.”

Borcherdt says that with this process “sometimes it’s not the matter of finding the coolest sounding thing. Sometimes it’s finding something that sounds terrible, but it gives you a goal. Like I want to make this the most it can be. It’s sort of like playing with restrictions, and seeing how far you can break those open. As opposed to the other way around where you start with limitless technology, limitless ideas, limitless sound banks. Those kinds of parameters are far too wide for me. I really enjoy making the most of something.”