With Wolf Parade behind him, Dan Boeckner now has more time for Handsome Furs, the synth-zapped duo with his writer wife Alexei Perry. Across three albums – 2007’s Plague Park, 2009’s Face Control, and the new Sound Kapital – the Canadian couple layers humid synth melodies and clapping beats while Boeckner lets loose with his distinctive howl. The pair play grinding rock grit against a detached electro cool in a way that’s easily on par with The Kills.
Sound Kapital is all about the band’s far-flung touring and the sights and experiences along the way. The sleeve features photos from Asia and beyond, while Boeckner at one point sings, “When I get back home, I won’t be the same no more.” And on ‘Cheap Music’ he envisions “a thousand lonely kids making noise in a basement” in the same breath as rattling off global destinations. Handsome Furs’ travels have inspired not just their songs but the web TV series Indie Asia for U.S. cable-news giant CNN, which documented their maverick touring.
Below, Boeckner talks about dislocation, synthesisers old and new, the trap of irony and nostalgia, and hopefully returning to Australia around year’s end.
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I’m really interested in how touring and travelling works its way into the band’s lyrics, especially on the new record.
On this record it entirely informs the songs. Probably if you could break down the lyrical content and the impetus for writing them, 75% would be touring and 25% maybe like Alexei and I’s individual backgrounds and growing up. We really made a conscious decision on this record—and it sounds really simple and stupid—just to write what we know. And what we did for the last two years was tour and play in some pretty different places than people usually do. At least, North American bands usually don’t travel to the places we went to. I don’t know about Australia, because it’s a lot closer to Southeast Asia. But we wanted to write about that, as opposed to writing a gauzy, metaphor-laden fiction and setting it to music. It was a real creative kick for us to go on tour and document the stuff musically and lyrically. And then bring it back and put it together in the studio.
The sleeve photos also have that travelogue feel to them.
Absolutely. Especially a lot of the photos that are Chinese men with tattoos in a giant pool: those are from this waterpark in Beijing that’s in the centre of the city. You can see from the photos that they have these huge, pixelated, wallpaper/billboard things of tropical oasis photos. The whole thing is very artificial, but it’s enormous and it’s in the middle of one of world’s busiest, biggest, most oppressive cities. That just made a huge impression on me. That sums up a big part of my experience in Beijing. I think the juxtaposition is so totally insane that we needed to put it in the record (laughs).
How did you start touring these more remote destinations?
It really started with the first tour we ever did. The first show Handsome Furs ever played was in Oslo, Norway. That was through a booking agent in Europe I’d become friends with. I told him I had a new project and he said, “Look, I’ll book you a tour in Scandinavia. You won’t go to London or Paris or anything.” That set the tone for the band, basically. On successive tours we poked our way east into Europe and made it all the way to Russia and started going back to those [initial] places. These are viable touring markets, and they’re really interesting places to go. They’re really creatively inspiring. So we just kept doing it.
Now that Wolf Parade is done, I was wondering if you’re away from Alexei less and whether that changes that theme of dislocation in the lyrics.
I don’t know. I mean, we still spend a lot of time apart. That’s always been one of the fundamental things in our relationship. She’s a writer, and we need to have time to be alone and work on things. So I don’t think that informed the lyrics that much. The touring obligations of Wolf Parade were admittedly not much: that band did not tour as much as it could’ve or should’ve. Without that, we’ve had more time to go further with the places we want to travel to and spend more time there and on the road. So that’s helped, definitely.
I watched some of Indie Asia. What was that experience like for you guys?
It was really random and strange the way it worked out. We booked a tour of Australia, actually, and from that tour in 2009 we were set to go to China and Southeast Asia. We had just confirmed the Australian dates and we were playing a show in Vienna, Austria. This man was talking to us afterwards and we exchanged emails. A week later he wrote and said, “I work for CNN and I’m really interested in sending you guys some cameras.” Which he sent to Perth, because that was our last stop before Beijing. He said, “Just film your tour and we’re going to edit it and make a web series.” We talked about the political ramifications of doing something with CNN [but] in North America CNN is pretty much as good as it gets. We decided we would do it. Part of it was difficult because we handed in 30 hours’ worth of footage and basically had to cede creative control for the editing.
Were you happy with how it came out?
I was mostly happy. I think it was pretty accurate. I mean, it’s very light. I think they needed to keep it light because they were trying this thing out that they had never done before, and they wanted to appeal to as many people as possible. So the scene where we’re chain-smoking with a bunch of political band members who moonlight as anti-government poets in Beijing, that never made it on there. But I understand that because that’s a very narrow appeal. But when we went back to Asia, we actually did a web series for an independent Chinese website that supports indie music and punk rock in China. Even though we weren’t unhappy with the CNN thing, we felt like it was a good balance to have both of those things out in the universe, balancing each other out.
I read that this album was written on keyboards instead of guitar.
Yeah. That was a big mistake, putting that in the bio. That was a tactical error, man. That’s become the pull quote. And “written on keyboards” somehow translates to “no guitars.” Every song has guitar except ‘Memories of the Future’. The last song [‘No Feelings’] has like a two-minute Sonic Youth guitar meltdown. To be fair, the guitars are arranged a lot differently than on the last record. There’s a lot of guitar, but it’s less present. It’s more blended into the mix in certain places. But then again, ‘Bury Me Standing’ ends with the very recognisable sound of a guitar feeding back on itself. We just let it slide in the bio that it was written on keyboards. Which is true!
Do you mostly use older or newer keyboards?
Well, we were using a lot of old keyboards when we started the band. Which just became completely useless for touring, because they were too big and bulky. So we switched to the sort of default indie rock keyboard of the 2000s and 2010s, which is a little microKORG. It’s one of the cheapest commercially available keyboards, and it sounds just perfectly adequate. It’s a solidly adequate keyboard. But this guy Dave Smith, who invented this synthesiser in the ’70s called The Prophet, has made these modules that are just analogue synths in a box. We plugged our microKORGs into that and started programming everything on these analogue synths. It really opened up the sound for us. Then when we were recording, we did a lot of overdubs with disco-era synthesisers, which was really fun.
Handsome Furs - 'I'm Confused'
The bio mentions the influence of older European electronic music, but on ‘Memories of the Future’ there’s that lyric “Nostalgia never meant much to me.” How serious is that line?
I was pretty serious about it when I wrote that. I think there’s a difference between being influenced by something and putting together a music project that’s focus is some kind of ironic nostalgia. When I was singing about nostalgia in that song, I was actually pretty pissed off (laughs). I was thinking more of the chillwave movement...not that all of it is terrible. Just the idea you could start a band and throw a chorus pedal on your guitar and play it like an ’80s guitar and then do a video like “Can you believe it looks like VHS? Can you fucking believe that we did this? It’s so not cool, but it’s super cool.” Y’know, that kind of ironic—or post-ironic, I guess—nostalgia. I think there’s an entire generation of people making music in North America specifically that are just stuck in that. And I don’t understand why. All the stuff I like is obviously informed by earlier bands, but it’s just part of this ongoing dialogue with rock music or electronic music or hip-hop or whatever. But the bands I love are trying to turn that into something new, and they’re not trying to be ironic about it. That’s what I meant in that song.
Do you know when you’re going to tour here again?
We haven’t confirmed anything, but we have Southeast Asian dates in December, so that makes sense. I had a blast the last time I came down to Australia, man (laughs). It was great.
Source: The Vine
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