Abstraction may be the best approach to Brian Borcherdt's music. Its acoustic-electric sounds resonate against the roof of your mouth, and reverberate through the caverns of your brain, while Brian recounts his memories or dreams, and makes you feel that you may have lived them. Borcherdt's music is like a vibrating screen between earth reality and memory/ imagination, and it may be best to listen and lay back and let dream logic take over. Already under suspicion of being a hippie, Demian spoke with Brian in streams of consciousness, and was pleasantly surprised when the results mostly made sense.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY? JOURNAL? CONFESSION? FICTION?
Autobiographical journal confessions that border on fiction. Or sometimes fiction that borders on autobiographical journal confessions.

ARE YOU ALONE IN YOUR THOUGHTS WHEN YOU PLAY? ARE THERE GHOSTS IN YOUR MUSIC? APPARITIONS OR VAPOURS/ HIDING IN, RIDING ON/ AUDIO WAVES VIBRATIONS REVERBERATIONS?
Usually alone in my thoughts when I play, sometimes friends are there: a jury I trust. Sometimes ghosts of the past, not just lost people but also places I will never return to and events that can never be relived.

ARE YOU WRITING/PLAYING FROM A CERTAIN KIND OF SPACE? VERY CLOSE, OR FAR AWAY? A MOTEL ON THE WAY TO NOWHERE? VERY NEAR THE EAR LIKE A MOSQUITO?
I think about sound, what the colors are, and what the waves would look like if we could see them as well as hear them. I think about the room and the angles in the corners. I wonder where sound lingers and where it reflects. I try to sing far away from the microphone so that the room becomes the medium. Never near in distance, but hopefully the waves still reach their destination, hopefully someone's ear other than my own. Motels are strange in that they are familiar. It doesn't matter where you are when you're inside them. Like airplanes, ten thousand feet in the dark, band vans driving endless highways Photographs from inside moving windows seem fraudulent.

ARE YOU OBSESSED WITH SLEEPING? LYING? DYING? ARE YOU LYING THROUGH YOUR TEETH? ARE YOU TALKING IN YOUR SLEEP? SLEEPWALKING? A WOLF, COUNTING SHEEP?
I don't care much for sleep. I try to get as little of it as possible. I sometimes drink till i can't remember anything. I wake up after having many very realistic and slightly boring dreams. I can't tell what was real and imagined. I have distinct memories of lying on my back, in my room, which for some reason had no ceiling. Me and a friend were watching a lightning storm illuminating the clouds in rose pink bursts. But ironically I have no idea how I got home or where I even was the night before.

ARE YOU A WANDERING STAR? A RESTLESS PERSON? WHAT MOVES YOU? WHAT MAKES YOU STAND STILL?
Restless of course. Not a wandering star; an admirer of them. I stand still to watch stars, either shooting or simply blinking out, swallowed by clouds.

ARE YOU A CITY MOUSE OR A COUNTRY MOUSE? ARE YOU A HUMAN BEING? ARE YOU MADE OF MILLIONS OF INSECTS?
I'm a country rat. I'm a city squirrel, displaced, but my lungs are adapting. I'm probably made of many, many vibrating particles, just like everything that surrounds me. But honestly I feel pretty much like a dumb human.

ARE WE WALKING OR DRIVING? HITCHHIKING? ALONG THE SIDES OF THE ROAD ARE THERE LANDMARKS? WEIRD LARGE FOLK ART SCULPTURES?
I drive all the time. My body is evolving into some sort of sitting, steering, staring creature. One time I got so sick of driving that I pulled over at the side of the I-94, somewhere in Wisconsin. I ripped my clothes climbing a fence. I cut my hands and face on the sharp leaves as I ran into the heart of a giant cornfield. I barely left a path. I lived in the tall stalks, naked and bleeding, eating nothing but corn for three whole weeks. Finally I climbed back over the fence, got in my van, which was still running. I even made it to the gig on time.

By Demian Carynnyk