Although Graham Walsh plays in one of the most hypnotically adventurous acts currently toiling under the banner of electronic music, he’ll cop to being something of a latecomer to the genre.

“I was a rock guy,” confesses the keyboardist for Toronto-based improvisationalists Holy Fuck, reached at a tour stop in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I think I consider myself to be a guitar player more than anything. I never actually did go to a rave or get that far into electronic music as I did rock albums and alt-rock stuff.”

Walsh notes that, more often than not, Holy Fuck is labelled an electronica act, even though the band—which includes keyboardist Brian Borcherdt and a rotating rhythm section—doesn’t rely on laptops when it plays live.

“I think we get that because what we’re doing is instrumental with no guitars,” he offers. “When people see all the effects and keyboards and stuff, they immediately think ‘electronic’. And I guess that we kind of sound electronic, even though we have drums and bass.”

Holy Fuck’s musical arsenal doesn’t stop with standard instruments, which explains why the band’s two albums to date—Holy Fuck (2005) and last year’s LP—sound like little else currently available on iTunes, eMusic, or LimeWire. Check out the group’s MySpace page and you’ll see a mission statement that reads “find something in the trash…plug it in.” Thanks to various reclamation projects, songs are powered by an array of weapons that includes toy keyboards, ray guns, and a battery of effects pedals. The band’s most awesome trick? Scratching Kid Koala–style, but with film stock and a film synchronizer instead of a turntable and vinyl.

Holy Fuck’s chaotic debut sounds like the band was throwing everything short of the landfill-bound kitchen sink into its sonic barrage. LP is more focused but no less adventurous. “Milkshake” drags synth-infused drum ’n’ bass back to its microchip-jungle roots, “Lovely Allen” imagines string-swept robo-pop for deep-space stations, and “The Pulse” sounds like a collision between Trans Am and a malfunctioning Commodore 64. Proving that repetition isn’t always a bad thing, the results are—in the tradition of the Velvet Underground’s 17-minute
opus “Sister Ray”—nothing less than weirdly transfixing.

“When we made the first record, we basically would go into the studio, jam for hours and hours, and then sort it all out afterwards,” Walsh remembers. “It wasn’t until we started editing that we realized what kind of album we had. With LP, we’d been on tour a lot, where we’d found we couldn’t play the songs from the first record because we didn’t remember how we’d made them. So we were forced to come up with new stuff. It was a process of trying things out on-stage, which then led to us amassing songs.”

Walsh admits that creating on the fly made for some painful nights, not so much for the group as for fans who came expecting to hear cuts from Holy Fuck and instead got the electronic-music equivalent of a freeform jazz exploration.

“There were nights—and I’m sure there still are nights—where people saw us play and were like, ‘What in the hell was that?’ ” he says with a laugh. “But we’re getting better—we’ve realized that you want to put on a good show for people, so we try not to go up willy-nilly. And it’s not like we’re four guys going up on-stage who don’t know each other and just start spewing out stuff. We know how to create peaks and valleys, how to make it heavy, and to watch for signals so we know when to end stuff.”

That telepathy comes with experience, of which the members of Holy Fuck have plenty. Back in the day, Borcherdt spent time in Toronto’s By Divine Right, which also featured a future alt-rock chanteuse named Leslie Feist on guitar. LP collaborators Mike Bigelow (bass) and Loel Campbell (drums) both hold down regular jobs as members of Maritimes postrockers Wintersleep.

Walsh’s guitar-bass-and-drums glory years were in the mid to late ’90s, a time when—apart from the Chemical Brothers and Noel Gallagher—superstar DJs and rock stars didn’t really meet. Students of ancient history might recall that the hallucination generation had almost zero tolerance for anyone not standing in front of a laptop or turntable. For the most part the disdain was mutual, although that eventually changed thanks to bridge-building acts like the Chemicals, Death in Vegas, and Portishead. Walsh remembers two records in particular acting as his gateway to a world beyond rock ’n’ roll.

“One of the first electronic-music albums I listened to was Boards of Canada—Music Has the Right to Children,” he says. “That really opened my mind up, mostly because I’d never heard anything like it before. Also about 10 years ago, Mixmag put out a CD by Richie Hawtin that was a live performance of his. It was really minimal stuff, like 808 and 303 kind of beats. I loved the minimalism of it.”

Minimalism isn’t a word you hear much in conjunction with Holy Fuck’s barrage-of-synthetic-sound records. Walsh has come up with his own description and, not surprisingly, it’s not electronica.

“I think the best way I could describe our approach to things is like an improv-jazz band that’s out to capture a particular version of a song,” he offers. “We’re only after what sounds and feels the best.”

Holy Fuck plays Richard’s on Richards on Monday (February 25).

In + out

Graham Walsh sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On the benefits of touring: “We’re working on kicking it up a notch, trying to add some sort of visual element to our shows. We learned a lot from Cornelius when we toured with them. They have fantastic visuals. That’s the beautiful thing about travelling the world and playing with great bands—you get inspired by seeing all the cool ideas they have.”

On scratching with the film synchronizer: “The whole Holy Fuck concept started with the film thing. Brian had a job for a couple of years working as a film editor, and that was one of the pieces of equipment he would use. He would scrub the film back and forth, and it would make the crazy sounds that it does. Right there, he always wanted to incorporate that in a band. When you run it through the effects that we do, it sounds even more incredible. That spawned the idea that you can find anything and use it to make tones, rhythms, and songs.”

On his favourite Holy Fuck instruments: “I used to have a ray gun which was a lot of fun, but that broke. I also have a Buddha Box that I love. It’s a meditation device that you turn on and it creates ambient loops. But I haven’t used it lately for some reason. I should really bring it back.”