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Octoberman with the Fembots
Marquee Room
Saturday, November 1 - Saturday, November 1

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Marquee Room

“We’ve always been our own little world,” confesses Dave MacKinnon, singer and guitarist for The Fembots. Since their debut in 2000, The Fembots have stamped out their own subdivision of musical turf, one that extends well outside the boundaries of their Toronto home base. “There’s a bigger circle of musical friends that we work with quite frequently, and it’s beyond just Toronto,” he explains. “It’s a very good place to play music. At the moment, there are lots of adventurous musicians, and it’s nice to be able to tap into that.”

The Fembots’ unique brand of post-industrial folk-rock has grown steadily in concept, confidence and audience over their past four releases. For the new disc, Calling Out, MacKinnon and co-songwriter Brain Poirier have granted full membership status to drummer Nathan Lawr and artist and inventor Iner Souster, who share songwriting credits on the album. Lawr is well-known as a percussionist and solo artist, and Souster has created an oddball orchestra out of the flotsam and jetsam of urban landfill sites. His “junkstruments” include the “Weed Wacker string gas canolele,” the “chicken cooker dobo” and the oversized “bowafridgeaphone.”

“Iner is not really a musician so much as just a mad scientist,” says MacKinnon. At one point, The Fembots considered recording the entire album exclusively with Souster’s creations. “We’d get together once a week or once every two weeks. Iner would bring a batch of instruments over, and we’d just sort of fool around with them and start building up bits and pieces, fragments of songs and ideas.”

Ultimately, practical considerations forced a change of strategy. “The hardest thing with them is they’re fairly unreliable — it’s tricky to be able to play the same thing twice on them,” says MacKinnon. “So the way we were approaching the recording is we’d figure out the two or three things that you could do really well with them, record little snippets of sound and start trying to build up songs with these bits of loops and recordings.”

These beds and loops became the foundations for the 11 songs on Calling Out and, for the most part, it all works splendidly. Unlike other work where non-musical instruments and sounds are incorporated as novelties or textural embellishments, The Fembots blend their compositions and rhythmic source material into a cohesive, integral whole.

Unfortunately, Souster and his Frankenstein creations are sitting out the western leg of this tour. The presence of his junkstruments will be heard and felt through various backing loops and ambient tracks. “For this trip out, we’re a pretty straight-up four-piece band,” says MacKinnon. “Anybody that’s perhaps seen earlier versions of the band where we were a two-piece with lots of tape loops and gadgets, we’ve sort of gone back to that approach to cover the junkstruments.”

Though more straightforward than some of their previous work, long-term Fembot fans will find the new, fortified and reconstructed band as engaging as ever. “For us, really, it’s more about using those non-musical instruments as a way for us to kick-start the writing process and get out of our comfort zone as musicians and writers,” says MacKinnon. “What we’re always trying to do is to get to that spot where the happy accidents happen, where the magic happens and you end up with something that you don’t really know how you got there.”