Babysitter Keeps It Blazin'

From their seaside homebase of Victoria, B.C., longhair scuzz rockers Babysitter have been bumming out nerds since late 2010. Charting an evolution through their numbered cassette series, Tape I-V, is like watching a swamp creature slime its way onto land and transform into Godzilla. Between releases for Totally Disconnected, Electric Voice and (full disclosure) my label Planet of the Tapes, plus a shamanic coast-to-coast tour, these hellraisers have come one step closer to the revolution.

Next month sees the duo’s first foray into vinyl with a 7” EP and a split with good-time surf rockers Korean Gut, dusting off hits from the no-fi cassettes with some studio polish. Here’s “Holiday” from the split:

Like Cujo in heat, they couldn’t stop even if they wanted to, and Babysitter are now hard at work on their 66-minute blazer epic, Tape 666. However, since returning home from tour, they’ve found themselves without access to a jamspace or somewhere else to bash it out, resulting in a detour into slightly softer pastures.

“We’re mostly just smoking a lot of weed and plugging straight into the reel to reel in Andy’s apartment,” laughs singer/guitarist Kristian North. “It’s getting pretty hippie, so we’re trying our best not to make a New Age album. We had some bongos but they got ripped, and we decided to bring ‘em back. We might go all out and rent congas, because the bongos weren’t really delivering. Congas are where it’s at.”

“The frequency of the first few tapes came from living in an industrial area with all my own recording gear,” adds bassist/sax-man Andy Vanier. “We were able to record all the time. Now we don’t have that, so we’re getting a bit trippier with the studio and working on some quieter stuff. There’s definitely going to be a few ‘Planet Caravans’ on this one. Hopefully it doesn’t turn into prog territory.”

“It’s still going to be pretty squealy,” Kristian confirms. “Our plan right now is to do the blissed out hippie jams first, and then lay down the rockin’ songs when we score a jamspace. It’s not going to be too soft though, and everything we’re laying down still has a lot of feedback. Everything we’ve done until now has been live off the floor, so we’re getting more into tweaking out with effects. We can’t stop, so we just work with what we’ve got.”

Here’s the video for “Sex Pet” by Moduli TV from Tape V:

Also on the chopping block is a collaboration with the shredding Montreal guitarist JLK, slated for release through Dub Ditch Picnic. It’s an unexpected cross-country cross-pollination that sounds like a witchy Velvet Underground minus Moe Tucker.

“We just recorded to cassette and jammed for a few hours with two guitars and a bass,” says Andy. “It ended up kind of like desert blues or something. I love the sound of drums, but I think without drums it’s important to find the rhythm. I feel like we were hitting that at certain times. Gab edited out the best parts and recorded some vocals on them, so in rebuttal Kristian and I are going do the same thing here with the same cassette recorder to maintain consistency then send them back to her so she can do some duets.”

“That recording was sort of impromptu, but it turned out really cool,” adds Kristian. “We had a couple of spare hours in the afternoon during Pop Montreal, so we headed up to her wicked loft space, smoked some weed and jammed out. She’s been working on the tracks for the last few months and me and Andy are going to do the same and send it back to her through cyberspace. Her solo tapes and Velvet Chrome tapes are some of our favorites, Maybe we don’t have much in common musically, but I can definitely relate to their work ethic. We come from similar backgrounds, but the coasts have ways of influencing sounds in different ways.”

Follow Jesse at @wipeoutbeat

Previously - Actual Water