MUSIC
Holzkopf
A range of samples: Holzkopf maps out his world in sound
Bryan Birtles / bryan@vueweekly.com

Though he’s been slowly migrating west for a few years and now lives about as far west as you can get in this country—stopping in Edmonton for University before eventually hanging his hat in the lotus land that is Vancouver—Holzkopf will always be connected to his hometown of Saskatoon. It’s not like his music references Prairie skies or endless fields of wheat by any means, but on an intensely personal level it is informed by the alienation that can only come from living in a medium-sized Prairie city where the music scene doesn’t really speak to your love of mix-and-match schizolectro.

For some musicians, that would be a problem, but for Holzkopf—whose mother refers to him as Jake Hardy—it turned out to be an advantage. Living in a small place and being an outsider opened his ears to a variety of “out there” sounds.

“I get a lot of people asking me, ‘Hey what you do is really weird—what do you listen to?’ because they don’t really know where this music comes from. The answer to that is that I’ve been involved in quite a few places in the world in tightly-knit, small communities—like in Saskatoon all of the musicians outside of the bar rock scene, all of the outsiders get together and one outsider might be more inclined to metal and one might be more inclined to techno, but you’re all the outsiders so you all form one scene,” he says. “So most of my influences come directly from the people I’m trading tapes and CD-Rs with within those circles. I think that’s the biggest tangible way that being a part of a small community has affected my music.”

Sampling also informs a large part of Holzkopf’s methods, though not in the same way it does other artists. When Holzkopf is looking to build a track, he’s not exactly searching for the right hook or bassline that will make it an ass shaker in the club. Instead, he’s looking to present a piece of himself to his audience. His samples—many of them sounds that he has personally recorded onto his minidisc while travelling—represent a moment in his own life, and he uses the samples to bring listeners into the headspace he was in when he heard the original sound.

“If I sample a track by Fela Kuti it’s not necessarily because of the track itself but because the time and place that I first heard the track itself has a really powerful emotional memory to it and the same thing with a lot of field recordings,” he explains. “When I was travelling in Japan it was my first time overseas, I was really anxious and nervewracked about how to interact with anybody on any sort of basic daily need, there was a huge language barrier—I only had three friends there that spoke English and otherwise I was communicating out of Japanese-English dictionaries and pointing at words. It was really isolating and a lot of those sounds have that kind of memory of being purely an observer without having an option of being anything else.” V

Fri, Mar 27 (8 pm)
Holzkopf
With Guests
Hydeaway, $7 (all ages)