When Ryan Kamstra calls me he is out of breath. He's just made a mad sprint to a phone booth after his band Tomboyfriend has just finished jamming.

How was your jam tonight?

It was amazing. We're really new, so we're still coming together. It's like a discovery process right now. I intentionally mixed real musicians with amateurs, so it's really interesting to see what's happening to the amateurs. They are getting a lot tighter, but they retain a freshness and innocence that two practiced musicians just can't have.

The press release was almost like a collage. Is that something you're interested in?

Collage is a huge part of it. You haven't had the advantage of hearing the songs.

Well I've heard a couple. They're pretty eclectic.

The copies that you heard are pretty muddy. We did a really quick recording and some of those amateurs had only jammed with me three times at that point. For all of that, they are pretty good, but they are pretty muddy. You'll hear the songs clearer at Wavelength. As with my poetry, there are lines taken from almost everywhere. In context you almost can't hear it. But the one song, 'œThe End of Poverty'? for example, there's quotes from Elvis, Guns n' Roses, The Velvet Underground and Hair the Musical. And you don't grasp it at first because it's just a bunch of words. Rock and folk music have a tradition of this. Definitely my songwriting amps that up a fair degree, in that I'm pulling from as many references as possible so you almost don't notice it, it almost seems an original but it is more like sampling than it is to something new that's never been done before.

You guys preformed at Nuit Blanche. How did that go?

It went amazing actually. It was Marlena and myself: I had my keyboard and Marlena was singing. We got in our costumes, we put on the blood. Part of the performance was my painter-friend Margo organized a bunch of people dressed as pigeons that were dancing behind us in a window; and we had a professional photographer taking constant pictures; Margo came out with a video camera. I've seen it on Queen West before, I don't know who it was, but some corporate band, they arrived on a flatbed truck, the street was pyloned-off. They were clearly shooting a music video and people just began to gather because of spectacle. So that's basically what we were aping on a very DYI level. And it worked. We had a crowd that was backed out into the street and all we were doing was playing 'œThe End of Poverty'? over and over again. And it just got increasingly chaotic. People didn't know what to make of it, but at the same time didn't sway from it.

So you guys do a lot of outdoor performances. Why?

There's a real sense that we want to do non-traditional spaces. Bars are kind of stale at this point. Well, it depends on the bar. It's a weird economy to interact with because basically you're there to sell the drinks. Which I don't have a problem with, but when you realize as a musician that your major job in life has become to sell drinks for bar owners you begin to question what your art means. That being said, and if you're going to write that down, I still want to play in bars.

You mentioned the blood. It's incorporated in your shows, and in your band pictures: why blood?

The story of the blood begins with Marlena, we were practicing 'œThe End of Poverty'? and she disclosed, in confidence, a dream she had about the song. There was blood all over the place and pigeons: these are the two details I picked up and I thought 'œwe have to do this as a stage show.'? So I immediately told Margo Williamson, who is also doing a lot of our set designs and dancing, and we decided not only to take the pigeons and the blood, but also to model it, more or less, after the video for Thriller. So the pigeons become the zombies, the blood becomes Michael Jackson slowly disintegrating. In our heads the metaphor is for globalization. Globalization has fallen off the radar because there is this theory that globalization went as far as 9/11, and then it disappeared off the spectrum and wasn't an issue anymore. But there are a lot of us who see that as the high-water mark of globalism. That it went from economic control, where you couldn't really move unless you were a part of the G7 or G8, into this totally reactionary space where everyone is basically killing each other and it's a bloodbath. So our little dance around the pigeons is meant to symbolize that but it's so overblown I know no one will get it, but at the same time you can't say that anymore because we are so oversaturated with media it almost doesn't register. Even saying 9/11 at this point doesn't even mean anything to anyone. It's been said so much and it justifies everything. It's just a blank phrase. So dancing in blood with pigeons is the only way we could do it.

What should people expect at the Wavelength show?

One thing to expect is the spraying of all sorts of manufactured bodily fluids. That includes blood, pus, cum '“ I've actually gotten the recipes from Gwar's website. These are all things you can make out of common household goods. For probably the first four or five rows you are going to be sprayed. So people should know that if they are slightly squeamish it does wash out. To get the full experience, to be completely covered in globalism as we all should be, you have to come up front, but otherwise you might stand back a bit. But there is going to be a lot of dancing, there's going to dancing on stage, we hope to get everyone dancing in the audience, parts where everyone can sing together, there's going to be a lot of costumes changes, and there's going to be a lot props and multimedia up on the stage. So it's going to be a big, fucking spectacle.

By Miles Baker