Spazzoid transmissions from Satan's Brill Building, the Wolfcow hit factory has produced a truly remarkable body of work. Ahead of WL 580's face-melting session at The White House, Joe Strutt exchanged some words with proprietor Greydyn Wolfcow.

Wavelength: So, I looked on wikipedia, flipped through a biology textbook I stole from a kid on the bus, and listened between stations on the radio for hours but I didn’t find out anything about the wolfcow. Is this mysterious lupus bovinae vicious or placid? How did Wolfcow come to exist?

Greydyn Wolfcow: Oh, it's quite vicious isn't it?? I’ve always been recording things, weird noises and conversations and stuff on tape decks, making up silly songs with my sister since I was a kid, growing up all my friends had bands that really inspired me so sometime in high school, on a rainy summer night in 1998, I decided I was gonna do a split tape with my friend John Arnold's band Uncle Fun… so I made that up and used that name for my side of the tape, and for my next tape I’m In It For The Marshmallows, Sometimes. Then the age of burned CDRs hit a year or so later so I just did that for a long time. Now I’m back to just tapes.

WL: The current cassette mini-revival seems to have come just in time! What is it about cassettes that works for you? Are you finding people are actually more willing to buy tapes again right now?

GW: It’s weird, I’ve noticed it kind of separates people into two crowds, the people who scoff and say ‘I don’t have a tape player anymore’ and the people who never got rid of them in the first place. Then there’s also the people who laugh at you like you’re trying to hand them some relic from the stone age, which I find kinda ridiculous. For me tapes never stopped being a thing, I always try to make a tape of my stuff even when it was just going on CDR. They seem more physical, more tangible and personal and less disposable than a CDR does. Anyone can crap out a CDR on their Macbook and throw their shit up on Bandcamp, and there ya go. But when someone drops a tape on you, and it looks all neat and the paper’s folded right, you know they put some extra thought into it. I just got sick of the way CDRs look, the way they sound, the cases, the whole deal. This tape revival thing is cool though. Sonic Boom has a local tape wall now, which is awesome: you’ll be able to score some Wolfcow tapes there soon.

WL: Fact-check time: I had my lab team attempt to reverse-engineer the music back to its component parts, and preliminary results indicate zines, broken synthesisers, n-th generation samizdat videotapes of weird shit, cheap cruddy hash, Devo. Are they on the right track?

GW: Yes that sounds about right. I am inspired by a lot of stuff, maybe throw in a few more things: 60’s Dr. Who, H.P. Lovecraft, Anton LaVey, Kate Bush, Beefheart, Burroughs, broken 4 tracks, Barrie, Ontario, bats, dogs, 1986. The list goes on…

WL: Does this contemporary world, with all this social media hoo-haw and instant access to so much information make it more difficult for a person to maintain their individuality? Another version of the same question: can “underground culture” survive in the face of the blandifying power that seems to shine on everything? Or are there more ways now to slip between the digital cracks?

GW: Underground culture will always be there, that’s where the cool stuff of tomorrow’s gonna come from. There’s always gonna be people making cool, interesting art or strange stuff. Regardless of how rabidly exploitive the internet gets to jump on the next thing and ditch it every five minutes. It’s always been easy to slip through the cracks, even in the pre-internet age. Being an individual is in you though, and everyone has something to offer. Seems these days we’re really oversaturated, everyone's yelling so hard and nobody’s really getting through… it’s always been that way, it’s just more noticeable now.

I think bands lose their individuality when they see someone else doing something and they just rip it off shamelessly for whatever reason. But there's always been a million clone bands of whatever’s currently cool. I like bands that just play, and that’s how it sounds because that’s the sound that's made when those people get together, with no “o.k., we're gonna sound like this guy and this thing” thought beforehand. In any band I’ve been in, I never had any ideas in mind of how I wanted things to sound: always just picked up and played and did it, and that’s a quality I look for in other groups.

WL: Given the numbers of releases on your awesome Bandcamp page, it seems clear this is the product of either constant inspiration and/or fevered delirium. There’s also no real “core sound” so much as some recurrent methodologies. How does the creative process work for you? I’m guess it’s more “get an idea down quick” more than endless fussing over the details.

GW: It kind of alternates between inspiration and delirium. the stuff on the Bandcamp is just a few of the albums that I had the time to put up there. I do fuss over the details a lot, more now than before. but I usually find that the first takes are the best and I can never recreate things as well a second time. The band recreates my songs better than I ever could myself. I just have a lot of ideas and very little time to get them out there and I always figured I wouldn't be this productive and inspired forever and one day I'd slow down or just stop or run out of ideas, so it’s kind of like beat the clock… but I haven't slowed down yet.

WL: What are the differences between Wolfcow as a recording project and as a live band?

GW: The home recording thing has been ongoing since the late 90’s, its always just been a habit for me to sit and record songs, sometimes I get my friends to sing on things, I love hearing other people’s ideas of how my songs should go and I know so many good people. The live band plays the strongest material. We usually try to be pretty faithful to the recordings, but it’s like an interpretation of them, because those guys play way better than I can, and add a lot. I had so much trouble for a long time trying to figure out how to translate the live recordings into the band situation, but I've finally got some sort of process going that makes it smoother. Also Matt, Ian and Chris really have their shit together so that makes it easier.

WL: Some of the stuff is way out there, but a lot of the material is like pop hits from a slightly weirder parallel universe. Do you consider yourself to be working in (or against) the pop idiom?

GW: I always strive for pop hits, I just wanna write catchy songs that get stuck your head. They just get buried under all this weirdness. I always try very hard not to repeat myself too much but I think that happens naturally. Sometimes things just get weird. When I started I didn't know how to write a song or anything, Its been a gradual learning process. Some people are born with that songwriting gift, I really had to work for it, I still don't know what I’m doing but I’ve learned something by now I hope.

WL: Stranger things have happened, so I’m wondering: how would you feel if you did have a pop hit? What would you do if a car company or pizza chain got in touch and said, “maaaan, we really wanna use ‘Binge Pisser’ in our ad campaign?

GW: I’d love that!! I actually thought ‘Binge Pisser’ was gonna be the elusive pop hit I was looking for. In this day and age, everything’s everywhere, and chances are whoever wants to use your shit will just steal it anyways, or produce a bad imitation of it. So if they wanna pay you and be legit that’s kind of a bonus. Money’s hard to come by, music is hard work. Having principles and all that is great but you can't really eat principles, they don't taste very good! That whole “sell out” cry thing died in the 90s, didn't it? Now nobody cares, now the world is way more messed up and everyone is desperate and nobody has the luxury to afford to pass up an opportunity like that or take some stance. But it was a pointless argument in the first place. Just take the money if you can.

WL: You also play alongside Randy from Man Made Hill in Toddler Body, and there’s some similarities in your musical approach. Who else would you consider to be your musical peers?

GW: When I met Randy we were both really into that song “San Francisco Hustle” by Silver Convention, it was like magic, so we started that band.

Crump, Shapiro, Hainey, Moskos, Bile Sister, Gravitons, Pink Noise, Soupcans, Healing Power Crew. These are just a few who are making exciting and original work all the time and I have a lot of respect for all those folks. It feels like a very exciting time for music in Canada, and I’m excited to be a part of that.

WL: Thanks for your time! Looking forward to the show. Anything else of note coming from the Wolfcow fortress?

GW: The band is recording for a seven inch I hope to do, and we are trying to find a new keyboard player! Also two new tape releases before the end of the year, this November were doing a split tape with Kapali Karsi, which is Kevin Hainey’s dark bass nightmare project. Hainey runs one of the top Toronto labels Inyrdisk but he doesn’t do tapes so I’m putting it out on my own label Colonel Cinnamon’s Tape Zone. Then in December a new full length tape called Satanic Vacation which I’m pretty excited about.