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An Interview With Pholde

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Anne: When did you first start thinking about making music?

Pholde: In the early '80s. I started playing bass in a hardcore punk band called Binge of Violence in Windsor Ontario . After a couple of years, the band broke up and I started to record music on my own.

Anne: In your music beginnings what kinds of things were you playing and recording? Did you think then you would be doing what you are doing now musically?

Pholde: No. I had no idea I would've still been doing it.

In the beginning, I was producing sounds from the bass. They were ambient sort of drones I got from placing metal items on the strings and going through effects. This didn't go anywhere. It was just recordings for myself to listen to.

For a while, I was working in a welding shop and I wanted to harness the aggressive sound of metal being cut and ground and record it for my own listening pleasure. To start with, I tried to fabricate this sound on my own by using a lot of distortion and delay on my bass, then I progressed to fans, chains, and anything else that would produce a lot of sound when placed on the strings. At this point I was recording it just for myself. It wasn't until I went to L'Oblique records in Montreal , where my friend Michel told me that I should send out some of this material to some labels. I didn't think any one would be into listening to this. If I hadn't spoken to Michel that day, I would've stopped just like I did with the early bass recordings. Later I had an idea to turn it into a noise project and call it Knurl , which was to take music as we knew it and strip it entirely of what we knew music to be. It's harmony, structure, and verse-chorus formula. After that it just sort of snowballed and I started using other instruments to produce sound such as carsprings, fanblades, sawblades and even toasters.

Anne: Tell me about the birth of pholde.

Pholde: It was a point in 2000 that I started to feel the need for a change from doing noise, since I started Knurl in '94. I recorded an "ambient" Knurl release called Kharborundum , and it got some favourable reviews. I didn't want Knurl to become an ambient project so I decided to start a new one which would be called Pholde . I found a "scene" for this type of music through the Ambient Ping in Toronto and started playing there a lot.

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