Tell us about your band/career, including your history, where you are from and how you started?
Bilay – My career is something that I was always into. I’ve been throwing shows since I was 14 years old and had an arts collective in London when I attended Fanshawe College. We always had a plan for venues and nightclubs when the timing was right. I honestly would have never thought I would be doing this right now though. You don’t always get to pick the time in life.
Derek – Our band, more or less, created itself unbeknownst to us. We all worked with each other closely for years and bonded first as friends and then as family. We just became brothers and vital parts of each other’s lives and naturally starting playing music together. If you hang out with someone for so long and start to date them, eventually you marry them and take your connection to the next level, and that’s what we did except with becoming a band, and just as so, when we break up it will be the children’s fault.
How did you come up with your band name and why did you decide to form a band?
Bilay – Truthfully we’re all fans of so many forms of art. The band name is a reference to one of our favorite TV shows. It just came up one band practice and it stuck.
Derek – We didn’t come up with it, we majestically stole it and claimed it as our own, because it is our own which was evident when we organically came up with it and definitely didn’t do what the first half of this sentence said. Words are liars, don’t trust them.
Do you have any recorded music available for fans?
Bilay – Short answer no, long answer yes. Here’s the short answer, we don’t have fans and we don’t want them, we want a family of enthusiastic peers who appreciate our momentum and share our passion for the audio art of expression that we commit to erecting in the souls of our perception, as well as people with shitloads of money who will give us said money to afford the shipping and handling prices for everything we impulsively buy off Wish and Facebook ads. Long answer, yeah go nuts, it’s on band camp.
Derek – Yes we do! We have a few of our pre-mastered tracks available on our bandcamp. workerparasiteband.bandcamp.com.
How would you describe your music?
Distortion pedals, two guitarists with entirely different ideas of how to write music, a bassist that mediates the aforementioned lack of professionalism and defines the groove, a drummer with asthma that everyone laughs at because of his genetic disposition but secretly is the cutest, and a singer who is clearly the only experienced member who can perform their part correctly every time. Mix it together and you get a metal as shit band with heavy punk influence and every other rock sub-genre you can name because you could easily listen to it right now instead of reading this sentence we’re purposely going to make much longer to prove the point that describing music only goes so far because you can’t hear it from a remedy of words since words don’t inherently make the noises music makes which is why people don’t release albums in novel form. Stop reading this and listen to it, then send us your social insurance numbers and buy us Gucci shit.
What makes your band/music stand out from the others?
What separates us from B44 and Duran Duran, among all those other titans of droning enveloping darkness, is that we have different members in our band.
What do you like to do outside of music that contributes to your music?
Being conscious humans. That’s it. We don’t need to garden for inspiration when the natural flow of society is producing systematic cruelty, depriving the people who consist almost entirely of the world of bare minimum comfortable living, and so forth. Everything we witness and experience not only contributes, but creates our music. No action is without consequence.
Name your two biggest musical influences and why?
Any authentic artist of any genre who writes out of honest and true passion, we’re fans of anything real because real is ridiculed and drowned out.
Who writes your songs? What are the main themes or topics for most of your songs?
We all write them, Bilay starts a riff on guitar, Derek says he did it, and then everyone adds to it. The themes are whatever we want them to be, there’s no consistency across the board because we’re not a dedicated television channel.
What has been your biggest challenge as a band? Have you been able to overcome that challenge? If so, how?
Bilay – Starting nightclubs can definitely have their challenges. Luckily I have great partners. Cindy Collins, Mike Falcioni, & Edward Collins make running a club a lot easier. We definitely still have challenges, but we use our individual strengths to overcome them.
Derek – What’s your biggest challenge to building and fulfilling your dreams? Ours are the same, having to work and try to stay afloat in modern times. Everything is a challenge in the arts because there’s no ground rules, there’s no black and white route or exams to pass and become certified in our craft. Our challenge is staying committed to our love and passion against a social majority that often, if not always, deflates and patronizes the pursuit as well as participation in the arts. We haven’t overcome it, and we won’t until the passion we share with any other artist across any medium, is appreciated and validated instead of the current “left side liberal loafter” persona bestowed upon them.
What current projects are you working on at the moment?
Bilay – We currently have switched the nightclub to more or a concert/event venue. Post covid has forced us to reinvent what we do. Onyx Nightclub is allowed 50 people, which is well under our capacity. We have moved to more events and tied in an online streaming element that we created with Soundevents Inc. (Kitchener/London)
Derek – Birdhouses for cats who fought in Vietnam that the dang government don’t care nothing for, and a bomb ass EP that’s as long as an LP, but isn’t because we don’t write filler songs, looking at you Billy Talent 4 and plus. Give us another voices of violence you sons of bitches.
Bobby Ryan – Vocals
Mathieu Madore – Bass Guitar
Bilay Badoe – Guitar
Derek Schaller – Guitar / Vocals
Jason Madore – Drums
Facebook: workerNparasiteGuelph
Bandcamp: workerparasiteband
