FemBots and their evolving junkstruments
By Lindsey Rivait
Arts Editor
November 19, 2008
 Toronto’s FemBots, once a home recording project by band founders Dave MacKinnon and Brian Poirier, have found themselves as a rock band constantly bending musical genres. Their latest release, Calling Out, features the band taking advantage of found sound—or junkstruments.
Junkstruments, a portmanteau of junk and instruments designed by artist Iner Souster, were to be heavily relied upon for the album.
Their plans, however, didn’t turn out exactly as expected. “At a certain point when the record started to take shape, that stuff just didn’t really seem to fit in with what was going on with the rest of the record,” said MacKinnon.
Souster’s junkstruments are made from toys, power tools, and broken thrift store instruments.
“He makes instruments out of garbage, basically. They almost bear more resemblance to sculptures than to traditional music instruments,” explained MacKinnon.
Whether they’re classified as garbage or art, the junkstruments provide a unique sound for the regular instruments to work in conjunction with.
While working on the album, MacKinnon, Poirier, and Souster got together every week with the junkstruments. After a while, the band started playing over top of the rhythm tracks with drummer Nathan Lawr.
“Once we built up some instrumental tracks, I’d take those away and start writing lyrics to them. We’ve sort of always worked that way. The music always seems to come first and the lyrics come afterward and you do what you can to find a common ground between the two,” explained MacKinnon.
The FemBots’ experience with Calling Out was much different than that of 2005’s The City.
With The City, the band went into the recording sessions with all of their songs finished. On the new album, the band wrote everything in the studio and did a lot of improvisation.
“With this one, it was sort of similar to earlier records we’ve made, but it was certainly most different from The City,” said MacKinnon.
“It took quite a while and for quite a while we had no idea what we were doing and what it was turning into. It was a blind leap of faith at a certain point,” he continued.
The band’s current line-up is the most straight up rock version of the band yet.
“We’ve been out a number of times in a number of different incarnations of the band, and I think this is one of my favourites. It’s a four-piece, two guitars, bass, drums and/or piano, guitar, bass, drums, depending on the song. It’s sort of our leanest and meanest version of the band,” explained MacKinnon.
While you can expect to have an excellent time at the show, don’t expect to see the junkstruments on stage. Souster is not a performer, plus the junkstruments are too unwieldy and unreliable to bring on tour. The band, however, does have a backup plan.
“I think we’d need a 15 piece version of the band to be able to do it. For playing live, if people have seen us in the past when we were a two man band, we’ve relied heavily on tape loops and backing tracks. We’ve sort of gone back to that for some of the junkstrument sounds on this,” said MacKinnon.
Also expect to hear more from the FemBots in the not so distant future.
“There’s probably another record or EP soon in our future. We’re usually three years between records, but I think there’s already enough material we didn’t get to from this record that there will probably be another one much more quickly, and probably lots more touring,” MacKinnon assured.
Catch the FemBots on Friday, Nov. 21 at Phog Lounge, 157 University Ave. W.
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