Purveyors of: Wistful mist
File next to:Dan Mangan, Bright Eyes, Okkervil River
Playing #WL13 Sunday, February 17 @ The Garrison

We’re happy to announced that Dusted has been added as special guests to close this year’s Wavelength Music Fest at The Garrison! Our own Adam Bradley got a chance to catch up with Dusted’s main man and bosom Wavelength chum Brian Borcherdt about contrast, perspective, and how some new music is just Toronto music with better hats.

In a video interview for City Sonic TV you very graciously credited Wavelength for having given you a place early on to try out your weird electronic experiments, experiments that eventually became the Holy Fuck of today. How does it feel to be playing as part of the Wavelength anniversary festival maybe a decade later?

Wavelength was the first night I attended in Toronto that made me feel like there was something out there for me. I was a young, single, recently displaced Nova Scotian. I wasn't a good dancer and I didn't own Pulp records. I was sort of floating around feeling out of place. It was a small event then, mostly dudes in a dark bar. But the music was cool. So I began immediately to plan my contribution. Continuing to contribute after all these years feels good. The success of the weekly event and of the bands involved reinforce that initial gut feeling I had, that there was something underneath Toronto's ever nauseating mod nights.

The shift from ecstatic, electronic dance music to wistful, bedroom rock makes for a pretty huge contrast. Do the songs you write for Dusted come from a different place than those of Holy Fuck? 

Holy Fuck was more of an idea. Put into effect, it becomes a more spontaneous and joyful expression. It comes from the minds of four people working together at once. Pull all of that away and then there is just myself, in a more contemplative place. So they come from the same part of me, but in different states.

As a producer, the band's drummer man, Leon Taheny is generally known for his lush and crisp production technique. Total Dust was recorded in a re-purposed garage, the songs mostly first takes. What made you decide on taking this approach?

I had the songs and the sound pretty much planned. But I had no interest in going about it alone. I wanted someone who could capture it intact and help it breathe. I guess someone to put it in a jar without smothering it. I wanted a thinktank more so than a studio. Leon turned out to be the right guy. It’s an ongoing relationship.  

Seems like you've been all over the place in Toronto's independent music scene over the years, and I'm sure you've seen lots of things arrive, grow and change. What do you find to be the most exciting musical phenomenon coming out of Toronto currently?

Toronto is growing in good ways, if you ask me. On one hand I see how drawn we are to trends and other cities’ examples. But on the other hand, the secretly stronger hand (the fake-out left hook), it is actually doing something of its own. We shouldn't underestimate Toronto's originality. I noticed upon my first tours of the UK, that kids there were bringing to light things Toronto had done years or at least months earlier. They just dressed it up better, gave it better hats and stuff... and then sold it back.

In hindsight, it feels like most decades of the past century have had at least a few defining styles of music, but that kind of distinct designation doesn't seem to hold as easily when looking at the past 10 years or so. Bands are splicing and mutating genres all over the place, making this huge, hyphenated collage. What do you think is at the root of this? Can you imagine that we'll just look back on this time as more easily categorized once we've moved far enough beyond it?    

There's bound to be a perspective gained from distance. We'll stand back from the magic eye puzzle and realize, oh, it was a dolphin all along. But right now it's just a bunch of squares and shapes. That is probably how it always was, in decades past. I can only guess. But I think the image has become more dense. There are more pixels. We have more influence coming from more stimuli. And again, I think Torontonians are capable of receiving and regurgitating and recreating and creating all anew.

The cover of your record has that big inkblot on it. For fun, I tried interpreting it like a Rorschach test and ended up seeing a man and a woman dancing weirdly upside down. Sort of. What do you see when you look?

I see hell fires threatening to consume us all... I mean, what you said.