Dusted by Anna Edwards Borcherdt
You can almost get the sense of Brian Borcherdt’s two main musical projects simply by their names. Holy Fuck is chaotic, hedonistic, a party in sonic form. Dusted, which Borcherdt will be bringing to Bumblefest in early September, is quieter, prettier, cleaner and more introspective.
Borcherdt grew up in Nova Scotia and was obsessed with sounds ranging from Led Zeppelin to birds chirping. “My Mom would play piano and Neil Young records. I started guitar at 12 and played all the time,” he tells PureHoney over the phone in the midst of a family vacation. “I was passionate about guitar, but I never learned anything. I still can’t play my scales. I’ll try to do a guitar solo and I’ll just back myself in a corner.”
Dusted by Anna Edwards Borcherdt
After playing with plenty of metal and grunge bands, he found his first taste of success with Holy Fuck. “That became my main band because it was the most successful,” Borcherdt says. “Even though that was more electronic music, I’d always bring a guitar with me on tour. My ambition has always been to write music; I love making up stories and realities in my head. The guitar for me is all about daydreaming. I’d make some quieter music, so I could use two very different parts of my brain.”
That quieter music eventually became Dusted, a lo-fi indie project, more recently with echoes of Nick Drake or Elliot Smith. Dusted’s third record, “III,” came out a couple years ago, but the songs still feel new to Borcherdt since he never had a chance to really play them live.
Those tracks go back almost a decade, to right after he recorded “Total Dust,” his first album as Dusted. ”I’d plugged in an old laptop and found sketches of all these songs I wrote in 2011 that I totally forgot about. I heard my old songs new, like it wasn’t myself. I couldn’t even remember how the chords went. I rerecorded them again right away like I was at an open mic night. I’d do three takes at the most.”
Borcherdt is going to take these songs down to Florida where he’ll perform a few of them along with a few of his biggest hits with his good friend and drummer Loel Campbell. He says they’ll also play some unreleased tunes. “It’s a waste of Loel’s time if we only do the old stuff,” Borcherdt says. “We want to take advantage of this show to learn some new songs, so maybe we can turn it into a studio session.”
They’re also scheming to bring another artist playing at Bumblefest on stage with them: “I’d like to have someone sing harmonies with me, so we’ll see if I can pull an unlucky bystander on to the stage. We’re going to make it a heavy, louder set to compete with the drunks in the room. This definitely won’t be a broody, somber show.”
In conversation, Borcherdt sounds like an artist who looks for inspiration wherever he can even from the small 600-person town his family resides in.”After being in Toronto for 20 years we moved to this small town in Nova Scotia. It’s cool but we question our choices every day. It’s not really a place with a vibrant music scene.”
He’s not letting the lack of population for having a productive remainder of 2023. “Holy Fuck has a new record that we’re almost done with,” he says. “We’re not hungry teenagers so we take our time. I have another project, Quilting, which is spooky acoustic music.”
As a father of a youngster he can also brag about becoming a viral kids’ music sensation. In 2015 he dropped “Chipmunkson16speed,” which was exactly as described. ”I always enjoyed taking records and putting them on antique record players on the wrong speed. I did that with Smurfs records and a friend suggested Alvin and the Chipmunks. It worked great. The music turns into doom metal, but Alvin’s voice all of a sudden sounded normal. It made kid’s music sound normal and it was all over the internet. I wish I could have made some money off of it,” he laughs.
Bumblefest is Sept. 1 and 2 in downtown West Palm Beach. bumblefest.com, instagram.com/dusted_brianborcherdt/ ~ David Rolland
