Bruce Peninsula
WL 356 - Sunday, March 25 — 11pm
Purveyors of: Indie music is folk music forged in parking lots and stairwells.

Bruce Peninsula is a unique, strange band, with rich histories running through it. BP began with Matt Cully and Misha Bower adapting old folk songs for their friends’ variety show. Neil Haverty joined them for the Bummer in the Summer fest and an old song called “Rosie” proved a revelation. They taught it to friends in the parking lot and found a whole new angle for the band. It’s still inside-out, experimental folk, but now they’re bringing nine singers and musicians to the Wavelength stage, friends finding strength and meaning in each other and the world around them. Using MP3 technology to record the human voice in a public house, Demian talked to Matt Cully and Neil Haverty.

Bruce Peninsula has been a band very much shaped by circumstance, by friends and events and environment. What were the most influential moments in your development?

Neil Haverty: Bruce Peninsula to me started New Years 2005, 15 minutes before midnight. We went into the stairwell and just sang. When you hear “Po’ Lazarus, put him in his grave” get screamed, and you have 15 of your friends at New Year’s, banging on things, banging on the staircase, singing this song…

Matt Cully: I’d always been passionate about music, but I guess there was just this opportunity, because our friend Isla was making this talent night [the Concrete Arts Collective]. We wrote one song and did two covers.

Misha up and moved to New Brunswick this winter, although by then you had already arrived at the whole group chorus concept. How has that affected your collective/ creative process?

Matt: Misha leaving has been the next stage in us trying to figure out how we are going to play live, and how we are going to record. She is completely a non-musician. She does a lot of theatre, so certain ideas she was bringing to the table were like, “We’re gonna stand in this corner, and we’re gonna lift our hands at this moment,” or, “We’re gonna weave this into this.”

Neil: I think that’s something we’re gonna try and uphold in the “new” Bruce Peninsula. It’s something that Misha taught us, or it’s just intrinsically part of our group of friends. It’s actually easier with more people, ‘cuz you can vote democratically.

Alan Lomax’s folk archives have been a major inspiration – what about them struck you or appealed to you?

Matt: Well you could use a word like authenticity, which is a really difficult word to use when you’re talking about music. There is a romanticized view we have of old ways of living… It’s important try to break through the romanticism, for me anyways. I just really loved the voices, the way people were singing: untrained, really direct, with emotional conviction.

So how do you adapt old songs for a new century, and bring in an experimental or technological element?

Matt: Essentially we go to the recording… you go to the source and take it all in. You take what you want from it. What we’re doing essentially is creating a musical context for that [idea]. It’s based on the performance, based on who’s there, who’s playing… shifting ways of presenting the music, of using an electric guitar instead of an acoustic guitar or whatever. All of these things add to the reinterpretation. Recontextualization for me means never ending.

Neil: It’s applying all these other things that we hear and want to hear, experimental music or not, to the folk tradition

Matt: It relies on the fact that we have all these other interests, things we know about or like, or are drawn to, that pour through us…. Visual art that happens, and books that I read, all this stuff works its way in some weird dream-construct way. It all just comes up, bubbles up, and all of a sudden you’re having this really weird dream, and that’s where it comes from.

It’s like an idea or a song can float around, across history and geography, and you nail it down using available means, and that’s authentic to that moment.

Matt: Folk means people making music out of their own means. All we’re doing really is providing one moment in time where people can experience whatever they experience, and I really value the live experience for that.

How have the old songs shaped your original material? Do you use old idioms to sing about the present? Do you look for the transcendent, timeless qualities?

Matt: A lot of the lyrical content can be said to be archaic in terms of its relevance to us now. But there is a lot of opportunity to look at the way people were singing, and flip it back to the current climate, the political climate, how people are feeling now. It always comes down to talking about people our age, living in this community.

Neil: It’s just folk from our perspective, and our perspective happens to be downtown Toronto. I don’t think it could be authentic if we were talking about anything else. Even if it’s cloaked in metaphor it still has some relevance to our world.

If you’re creating “postmodern folk music” then it makes sense to use second-hand instruments, and tape loops as opposed to, say, a digital sampler.

Neil: Bruce Peninsula originally was a guitar and tape recorder band. And then I got a metallophone and that became a central part of the band. I bought a dulcimer as well, and a lot of stringed instruments, so that to me is like an avenue to explore. As far as I’m concerned, Bruce Peninsula will go in the direction of the instruments and the resources that we have.

Matt: We considered the sampler route, sampling found sounds, environment sounds that would add a percussion element to the music. Up to now we’ve always had sounds that we’ve recorded ourselves and brought to play live, whether with a tape recorder or a loop pedal. Aesthetically it’s very important, to me anyways, to have that there to mirror my relationship with the reproduction that Alan Lomax did with the field recordings.

Does your openness of instrumentation and contribution put you on a wide open road? Are there boundaries around Bruce Peninsula?

Neil: I don’t think it’s important in Bruce Peninsula who plays what, it’s a matter of, how do we utilize these nine people the best we can? To me the next stage of Bruce Peninsula is exploring what everyone can do. There are nine people in this band that are all remarkably talented; we haven’t even touched on their talents yet.

by Demian Carynnyk