photo by Adam Kelly
Hailing from the frigid prairies of Winnipeg, Tunic has been making waves in the underground music scene with their visceral live performances and unrelenting sonic assault. The band brings their signature abrasive sound to the stage at Meteor Windsor on Monday, May 8, 2023, showcasing tracks from their latest album “Wrong Dream.”We talked with frontman and guitarist David Schellenberg.
Your new album, Wrong Dream dropped on April 28th. What was the recording process like for that album and how did you approach it?
The recording process for the new record was totally different than anything we’ve ever done. We for the first time ever, we made a record with a new base player and which was a fill-in bass player named Drew Riekman who plays in a band called Blessed, and he sort of co-wrote the songs with my drummer Dan and I. And we went to Providence, Rhode Island, to track it with Seth Manchester, who has a studio called Machines with Magnets, who has worked on a bunch of great records by artist like Lightning Bolt and The Body and Big Brave.
Seth has a very different approach than we’ve ever worked with before. We did a lot of individual tracking of the drums, sort of just hitting one drum at a time to make it sound as clear and crisp as possible and as big as possible and Seth works very fast, which I’ve never done. I was like, we should take 2 weeks to make this record and he says, “If this record isn’t done in 5 days, I’m not doing it.” I was like, “Oh, okay.”, and so we were done in four and a half.
One of my questions was how Seth helped shape the album.
Seth as a genius, and he has truly golden ears. He’s starting to get known for this really amazing blown out sound that he can produce through some compressors and some gear that he has and we took full advantage of that. I should say also that when we made this record that Seth’s first child was 2 weeks old and he showed up every day just exhausted and would say, “Let’s just do this.”, but still it was just amazing. He’s talented at hearing sounds and coming up with the right tones and everything.
The new album was written during a time when your life really shifted, didn’t it?
A big chunk of it was written during the pandemic, but also I was sober for a year and a bit then. I had sold my shares in the business that I owned for the last seven years, which is a bar, and then I started a new job. I started for the first time ever making a livable wage and was able to afford things, but also had to work 9 to 5. So I spent a lot of time writing this record at about 7:00 in the morning by myself, which is also the first time I ever did anything like that. I would wake up around 6:30 and have a shower, then I would go downstairs into my basement studio and work on music for probably an hour and a half to two hours before having to log into a remote job.
I know quite a few musicians that just scrape by. It’s difficult to make a lot of money being a musician, of course, but it’s hard to balance your artistic life with that 9 to 5 like you said. The whole punk theme is anti-establishment. How do you come to terms with that personally?
I just never experienced it. The sort of mundane existence of just going to work and coming home, and that’s your life, without touring, without having something to throw all the money that you don’t have into and just hoping that it works out. There’s a very good tweet that I read during the pandemic from an artist named Devin, and I’ll butcher his project name, which is Minca, I believe. He just said, “So wait a second. Y’all just work your jobs every day? You don’t, like, spend all your free time writing the album and then playing shows for 15 people?” And I was just like, “Yeah, that’s what I want to do, but…”
The song disease, is that written specifically about this?
Yes it is, a hundred percent. The song Disease is pretty blatantly about living within capitalism and sort of coming to terms with that, and understanding that I didn’t have any financial security. I was making 12 to 16 thousand per year. And then I was just like, “This is wild. I can see how people just get stuck or how they just let money shape their life.
How did you hook up with Sara Dresti who produced a couple of videos?
Sara saw us play in Italy, in Bologna, and she just DM’d us on Instagram. She just had really cool work, and I liked it and we’re always looking for people to collaborate with. We never actually met her. Maybe I did speak to her for a second. We played this wild show outside in Bologna on a Sunday evening in a beautiful park. It was very strange that we were allowed to do that and we were the only band, so that was also weird. But there was a great turnout and so I guess Sara was there and then she just wrote to us and we decided to work together.
So if you never met her, how does that whole process work?
For Rituals, the first video she did, she just ran with it and I sent her some stuff that I liked. And then with Disease, I just explained the concept of the song lyrically and she found some images there and wrote me a real beautiful email about the subject matter and how it makes her feel, and then she created the video to that.
I’ve watched some of your older videos and it’s very minimalist. I love that. And your music in general, the songs are two minutes long. What’s the reason behind such short songs? It’s not like the early days where songs were made short for the radio.
No absolutely not. It’s kinda like do it as fast as possible and be done, jam everything that we can in a two minute window and not really worry about it. I would rather leave people wanting more than less. We really took that to heart. We used to go on tour and play 11 minutes a night back in the day. Nothing like driving 12 hours to play 11 minutes, but yeah, I’d always rather leave people wanting more than less. And so we really took that for songwriting. And then as far as the early videos go, that was just working on a 50 to 100 dollar budget to make those things.
I think the current album is around just over 30 minutes long, and it’s sold as one of your biggest projects yet.
The last two records are both 21 minutes long and this one is two songs less than the other two and about ten minutes longer.
I love My Body, My Blood. I think it’s a great song, and the video is just mind blowing. Who did that video?
That was a guy named Torin Langen who lives in the Kitchener/Waterloo area. We played a show at a brewery there; I can’t remember what it was called. But anyways, Nate, the guy that did the show introduced us to Torin after and he says, “I make music videos.” and I was like, okay. Cool. I think he sent us something that he made and I was like, “This would actually be perfect for My Body, My Blood because it’s so creepy and so wild.
Oh, yeah, creepy as Hell.
It’s got great response and we’re just so happy. Torrance shot that in his living room. It was just amazing visually and so we wanted to work with him on that.
What is that song about, by the way?
Oh, that song is about being in a variety of relationships that are abusive both mentally and physically and sort of feeling worthless and that feeling of getting talked down to. I had an ex business partner that would absolutely treat me like shit and it didn’t really matter who I was to him even though we were equal partners Then sort of just sometimes being afraid of the person that you’re romantically involved with.
How do you see tunic fitting into the current musical landscape?
Oh, I don’t know if we do. Sometimes we’re not hardcore enough for the hardcore bands, and we’re not straightforward enough for some of the more punk stuff, and we’re a little more, to toot my own horn, a little more arty than that.
So Yeah, back to that term, avant-garde, right?
Yeah, so I don’t know. We’ve been doing this for a long time and people like it. If people didn’t like it, I would still do it. We’re just a loud heavy band that makes weird music, and I see us sort of occupying a space with all these US based artier, noisy rock projects.
So what were your influences growing up?
I was a huge indie rock nerd. I went to CD plus every Saturday and bought a new indie rock CD, as a teenager, and doing anything from Sufjan Stevens to Wolf Parade to The Moldy Peaches and then I just got bored with that and now I’ve pushed into the world of noise and punk and more lately ambient is what I listen to more than just regular rock bands.
So it’s starting to evolve. I think the last track on the new album is quite a bit different from most of what you’ve done so far.
Yeah. I just didn’t really think I was capable of writing something that resembled anything on the prettier side and so it took until this record where I felt comfortable to even attempt that.
You’re coming to Windsor on May 8th to Meteor. You’ve played there before. What do we have to look forward to with that show?
So much yelling, so much sweating. I actually really love playing Meteor. I really like that room and I really like Shawn who does the show. It’s a severely underrated scene, I would say, in that chunk of town. And so we’ll just be red hot coming in from Detroit that day, well rested, I hope, and you know, curse and just sort of fuck shit up and punish people with noise and that’ll be it.
