> Sam: so, tell me about the new EP you're releasing.
> >
> > Bryn (Jennings, vox): It’s called Wilde.
> >
> > Jan Krouzil (drummer) History is made!
> >
> > Ben (VanBurskirk, guitarist): With an “e.”
>
> >
> > Bryn: With an “e.”
> >
> > Ben: And an “i.”
> >
> > Bryn: And an “i” also. There are two vowels... we recorded a couple of the songs (soon) after Jan and Suzanne started playing with us... kinda crazy but came out really well.
>
> >
> > Sam:
> > It did come out well, and aching of tasty shoegaze art rock of my personally preferred vintage, the Nasty Nineties, when all bassists played a grooving pulse, the culturally appropriate way to swing in the space between European folk and no wave futurism.
> >
> > Bryn ... it feels like a really cool time for us to be recording and putting some songs together.
> >
> > Ben: We’re capturing some fresh energy with some of the songs.
> >
> >Sam:
>
> What is the aura of punk? Is it the experience of otherness in high school, of pure countercultural self awareness? Is it to mosh, to be unpretentious? How can one be humble when Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Glenn Branca and Kim Deal are your grandparents?
> >
> > Bryn: Ben and I knew each other when we were teenagers.
> >
> > Ben: So, when this is transcribed, you want it to say “Spice Girls and other (influences).” That’s what you’re saying, right?
> >
> > Bryn: I dunno, who else was big back then? Aqua? Does anyone remember Aqua?
> >
> > Ben: Vaguely.
> >
> > Bryn: I dunno, we were in junior high. It was a bleak time.
> >
> > Bryn: So I tracked him down, about 15 years after we had played together the first time, and he said yes! That’s how the band started . . .
> >
> > Jan: I guess I joined next. Bryn and I did a school program together and became friends and she invited me.
> >
> > Bryn: Jan was a fan first!
> >
> > Jan: Yes, I was a fan. I attended the show and then I ended up temporarily filling in for the drummer and then it just became permanent.
> >
> > Sam:
> > Going Going Gone, the EP's closer,
> > evokes live Portishead sans clutter or bloat, riffs on Granddad Lou...
> > But the music escapes many sinkholes of early punk, primarily through gender balance. Apollonian shatters of sound exist beside the intimate vulnerability of the Maenad's lullabye...
> >
> > Suzanne Alyssa Andrew_ plays bass and sings backup
>
> >
> > Bryn: I was really determined to find a female bass player.
> >
> > Suzanne: And...it seemed pretty awesome. Then I was like “I don’t know about this.” But...you convinced me!
> >
> > Bryn: It was so stressful! I fell in love with Suzanne immediately, like the first email she wrote. I felt like I had conjured her up in my mind.
> >
> > And then when she was like “oh, I don’t know...", I had to really fight for her to come to a rehearsal.
> >
> > Ben: I didn’t even know about this!
> >
> > Suzanne: I was at work on the day of the first rehearsal and I was kinda nervous and I told my co-workers about it and they were like “you’re going to get ax murdered! You answered an ad from people you don’t know on Craigslist!”
> >
> > Bryn: And it was like, specifically “female bass player”
> >
> > Jan: Yes, come to the end of a long street!
> >
> > Bryn: Totally.
> >
> > Ben: Meet at the big white van.
> >
> > Jan: Big warehouse! Many rooms!
> >
> > Suzanne: I actually saw Bryn at the front door and I was like “aw, she’s cool.” And then it turned out she was in the band. It was a decent first practice.
> >
> > Bryn: I feel like the band really came together really quickly once Jan and Suzanne joined... this great moment where it’s like we're “a band” and yet everything is still really fresh and new.
> >
> > Suzanne: Yeah, we’re trying to keep it raw and real and not too polished.
> >
> > Bryn: Yes, we are all nodding enthusiastically.
> >
> > Ben: For us...this is a record of these four people playing music in a room together.
> >
> > Suzanne: And it’s going to be awesome!
> >
> >
> > Bryn: Pretty much all the songs we have, and definitely all the songs on the EP, are about this period in my life in my late teens, and about some specific people and yeah, they’re thematically connected.
> >
> > Ben: What is it about this time in your life that you felt the need to capture through art? Was it a very transformative time? Was it a very dark time?
> >
> > Bryn: I guess it was a very dark time. I think it’s a lot of things. I used to play in a bunch of bands and then I had this really shitty time for a while and I stopped playing music, and I think a lot if that stuff is really connected. And then it’s weird, because now like ten years later I’m writing all these songs about this shit and I think it just took me all that time to be able to process it in this way.
> >
> > Suzanne: I definitely think that usually there is about a ten-year lag time in terms of writing.You can look at it more objectively, like in a different light with more life experience behind you to actually understand it better.
>
> >
> >
> > Ben: Well...there was a period of time where I was in a bunch of bands and then I just stopped playing. Those bands broke up and I wasn’t really interested in making music again. I was playing occasionally with some bands in a non-serious fashion. It was when I lost my dad that I started The Dearly Bereft and that’s around the time that you came back to Toronto and I find myself, through that time, continuing into now, realizing how seriously I take this... and it makes me excited and I don’t take for granted that I get to play music with people and in front of people and all that stuff. So, the right time for this project to come about because . . . I’m ready for it! I want it. I want to make music with good people.
> >
> > Jan: I guess I also stepped away from playing music with others for about ten years or so Coming back into the experience of playing in a band, there is definitely a new appreciation for playing with other people and making something together that I didn’t have playing in bands when I was sixteen or seventeen. Seems like we’re in the process of growing and creating all the time, so it’s a great experience right now.
> >
> > Suzanne: I would say, in terms of music... I always felt like, growing up with (my oldest brother) in the household, that I didn’t really have the license to play music because he was so fucking good, that I didn’t feel like I was ever going to be as good as him so there was no point. But it’s taken me a really really long time to overcome that and realize that if you have the passion for music and you just want to play, it doesn’t matter. If you want to play music you should and that’s the bottom line.
> >
> >
> > Sam: What would you play if you ran your own radio show?
> >
> > Bryn: Oh! I want to tell a story. Maybe everyone did this, but I went to bandcamp with this girl when we were like sixth grade to eighth grade, and we both played saxophone and we were best buds and she was the coolest—that was our game we would play, for hours. We would spend hours having our radio show. We’d play a song and we’d have banter between songs and we really stayed in character. We played all the hits of the mid to late 90s, like Spice Girls and others. It was the most fun and also so incredibly nerdy. We were so into it and took it so seriously. It was some pretty fun playacting as radio hosts.
> >
> > Suzanne: I like to be the iPhone DJ on a road trip. I’ll just curate a whole playlist on the fly of whatever’s on the particular iPhone I have in my hands of good driving music.
> >
> > Bryn: Not even your iPhone? You’ll do that on other people’s?
> >
> > Suzanne: Yeah. Whatever iPhone is there.
> >
> > Bryn: People are weird on road trips, they’re like “I want to play my music.” And it’s like, that’s way cooler. That’s the best. You’re like “I’ll take your music and make it awesome.”
> >
> > Suzanne: It’s super fun. Driving music has to have a certain beat... You don’t want to get too down in the car.
> >
> > Ben: I’ve always had a dream of owning a bar that no one comes to. It’s kinda dingy, and it only plays Tom Waits.
> >
> > Suzanne: I would go there.
> >
> > Ben: I’d go there a lot. I’d get my heart broken every week just so I could go to this bar.
> >
> > Jan: Reminds me of (the) bar from Firewalk With Me. The sad one.
> >
> > Ben: So that’s what you’d play on your radio station? The Twin Peaks soundtrack?
> >
> > Bryn: We’d play all the best music.
> >
> > Ben: You know what I’d play? I’d play random independent bands from Toronto. Because between Honey Beard and Selfoss... I’m just like wow.
> >
> > Bryn: It’s tough because the scene is so big and diffuse right now you could never know all the amazing bands that are happening.
> >
> > Jan: Someone should create a website tracking Toronto bands
> >
> >
> > Suzanne: I would be doing so many cool things if I didn’t have to do paying work. I’d just play all the time.
> >
> Sam:>This all puts me in mind of a 2009 compilation i helped release called Spacerock One, featuring Abstract Random, Dream of Distance, Retro Radio
> and Ima Nim, perhaps a Sylvia Plath/Dilla mashup of mine as well. Heavy on the sapphic strands, discursive, chanty and relentless without need to recourse to any excessive tone of aggression or games of power. Could you call that one Blob ten? Wasn't there a Christmas album? Chris tells me there's lots still to come, the archives are physically intact, apparently you can't break a contract that was never written.
> >
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