We Interviewed Wrong Hole About Knocking Off Rush Album Art

“Can you just make it clear that I’m just laughing really awkwardly throughout the whole interview?” When Wrong Hole frontman Nick Flanagan pauses to request this in the middle of rattling off a tongue-in-cheek explanation of whatever bastard of a vision actually propelled 2012 – the hardcore/punk-influenced trio’s debut – into fruition, I’m somewhat relieved.

Formerly the frontman of Toronto punk act Brutal Knights, Flanagan now spends his evenings performing as a comedian, and throughout the entirety of our interview he wobbles back and forth from genuine to flippant. Meanwhile, bandmate and guitar player Andrew Moszynski – formerly of Deadly Snakes and Quest for Fire, and still a member in Comet Control – plays the straight man and struggles (at times somewhat unsuccessfully) to prevent him from derailing the discussion entirely.

There’s plenty of sarcasm to be lost in transcription. Descriptions of this band really should come packaged with disclaimers regarding its awkward attempts to adapt to its surroundings. Started by Flanagan and Moszynski as a duo in 2012, Wrong Hole was originally conceptualized as a project that would streamline its existence as an active musical group by equipping its small membership with as many gizmos as possible.

As established performers in the Toronto music scene, they had few issues landing a first performance at a show Teenanger guitarist Jon Schouten was promoting, but a month before the gig, they still didn’t have any songs. That’s when Schouten came aboard as a third member, at first playing guitar but eventually switching to keyboard.

Like a square peg attempting to ram its way through a jagged and heavily codified entryway, Wrong Hole became a punk band with a keyboard, a drum machine, and vocal manipulator in it. But as much as that technology was accessed to help streamline the group, it’s proved itself to be a logistical nightmare of its own.

“From my perspective it’s just constant damage control,” says Moszynski. He explains that, because of the rigidity of the drum machine’s programming, the band has little room to accommodate mistakes with improvisation. “There’s no adjusting on the fly, which is way scarier than anything from any other band I’ve been in.”

Releasing physically June 7 via Pleasence in North America and P. Trash, Cut the Cord, and Prugelprinz in Europe, and then digitally worldwide on June 15, complete with Rush-parodying cover art. “We’ll be really sad if this even gets on Rush’s radar at all. I don’t think anyone’s going to be happy,” says Flanagan. But if they do, he jokes that “Maybe it would help them better understand Alex Lifeson’s portion of Rush’s acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Noisey caught up with the assorted Toronto rockers to find out what they had planned for when Rush fans see their project.

Noisey: What’s happening with this new project? How did Wrong Hole come together?
Andrew: I sort of had all of my bands collapse all at once. Nick and I were talking about doing this about a year before we actually started pretending to write songs.
Nick: Yeah, so it’s been two years probably.
Andrew: Yeah, but I always end up being in way too many bands. And I quit one band to focus on another, and that other one broke up a week later, so all of a sudden I had time. And I thought, why not spend it all with Nick.
Nick: I never have time. But I’m willing to make time. But our initial practices were really more about renting an office space or something – having a meeting, watching/streaming YouTube videos, eating sandwiches… I bought pizza.
Andrew: The only reason we have a third member of the band is so we feel guilty about wasting his time. That’s really what’s going on.

How does [Teenanger guitarist] Jon Schouten fit into all of this?
Andrew: He booked a show for us, and then a month before the show, I told him we didn’t have any songs.
Nick: It was more like it was feeling a little thin. Initially the idea was it was going to be the world’s easiest band—
Andrew: As few people as possible, as many gizmos as it took to make it sound like a full band—
Nick: But then we sort of needed the keyboards to fill it out.
Andrew: It just sounded like a poorly played guitar, a drum machine I had no idea how to operate, and then whatever Nick does with vocals over top.

How much of an opportunity have you had to play this stuff live?
Andrew: Maybe six or seven shows? Not much.
Nick: Eight shows.
Andrew: We’ll have to consult the archives.
Nick: We’ve maybe cracked the ten-show mark in our yearlong existence.
Andrew: Which is pretty good for us and a bunch of things that don’t work.
Nick: Although we have yet to play a show since January basically. We’re ready. With Jon being in Teenanger and having that other stuff, we’re pretty aware of shows, but the problem is that if Teenanger or if Comet Control are doing certain shows, Wrong Hole’s gotta do shows, where are ours gonna be?
Andrew: We’re definitely going to become a Thursday band over the summer. Someone who isn’t here has all his weekends booked. But there has to be a kid out there who has nothing but time on his hands that wants to essentially turn his life over to us to play synth.
Nick: We all have very conflicting schedules. I do comedy shows at night, Jon works everyday and then has a band and his label [Telephone Explosion]—
Andrew: I go to bed pretty early.
Nick: Do we seem depressed?

You seem anxious.
Andrew: I’m at the point where, out of terror of the drum machine falling apart I’m going to have to buy like four of them. Like honest to God, we’re hoping to tour at the end of the year, and we can’t be stranded in Germany or something trying to find the exact same piece of shit drum machine.
Nick: Yeah, and I have these vocal effects boxes that are also kind of spotty.
Andrew: The one good thing that is coming out of that is I’m learning how to fix all this shit.

The two of you have been embedded in the Toronto music scene for a while now. I’m curious as to whether either of you have recognized any changes within the community that have allowed for “weirder” music to find a place at local shows.
Andrew: There seems to be more consistent non-bar venues. I mean you would always hear of a bunch that would crop up for a summer over the years, but Double Double Land’s a great example of something that’s somehow lasted, whereas that would’ve been completely shut down immediately in the past.
Nick: Also I think just knowing people from being in bands for a long time means that you get on shows. Whether it’s weird or not, people will recognize us on a bill. I think there’s always been a lot of “weird” music that people do here, it’s just that now there are definitely a lot of different scenes. We could try to play some show for [veteran Toronto concert programmer] Dan Burke, or we could do something like the Soybomb show we’re doing.

Where do you think you fit into the Toronto music scene?
Nick: I don’t even know. We tried to get all these punk bands [together on a bill], but it is kind of a funny thing. If you’re not playing straight ahead hardcore, you can definitely play with those bands, but you kind of need to sort it out. You can’t do market punk [shows]. It would be fun to play a Kensington Market punk show. Fucknuckles’s [Kensington Market shows] being my favorite.

The release for this record is being handled by Pleasence here in North America as well as three labels – P-Trash, Cut the Cord, and Prugelprinz – in Europe. I realize these are smaller independent labels, but the reach of the distribution still seems pretty ambitious for a project that only has one song available to listen to online. Can you explain some of the decision-making that went into that distribution strategy?
Nick: We’re sort of at this weird point where we’re hoping maybe someone will put out another song for the record on their website, so we’re not really putting out anything else with that in mind. But really it was just because we had the recording first and it was so inexpensive to record that we could definitely afford to do that first. So once we did that it was just a question of sending it to different people. Pleasence wanted to do it on a tape, but then P-Trash wanted to do it, and one of Brutal Knights’ tour managers has a label, and our tour booker in Europe had a label, too, so those three labels were like, “Okay, we’ll all put it out together.” And then Pleasence was able to get in on that and put it on vinyl. It was really amazing. Just a really good turn of events because otherwise we would’ve just sort of put it out on Pleasence on tape and then digital.
Andrew: And then doing it this way the doors opened to touring Europe, which I’d like to do more than anything else.
Nick: And having merch that isn’t a tape. If any more labels wanna get involved, so that we can have a fifth label or a sixth label on this, we want a lot of labels.

What were you going for with the recordings?
Andrew: We recorded in Stustustudio, a small brick room studio that Jon had used for Teenanger demos, so we just kind of expected to get loud, not particularly slick bed tracks.
Nick: And we were doing vocals live off the floor, too.
Andrew: Yeah. No concern for isolating instruments, figuring it’s just gonna be messy no matter what. But yeah, we recorded onto analog tape, which is nice. We just wanted to catch those eight songs.
Nick: We had so few songs that there wasn’t really an option… we weren’t like, “What’s not going on this?” Although, had it not been made immediately we would’ve been able to cut some stuff and put some other things in, but a lot of songs were different. Like there are two that are kind of straight ahead synth garage and then several others that were like that but where I was singing in a higher pitch.
Andrew: Yeah so that counts. And different words! [Laughs at Nick]

The album art for this record is a spoof of the cover for Rush’s 2112. What role does satire, parody or humor in general play in the rest of this project?
Nick: That’s very hard to say. It’s always really been towing the line very thinly between being excessively goofy and not being straightforward. But I mean, it’s the same as with every band: it’s not really very silly musically, that’s just the ship. It’s like if you saw this really cool car with tinted windows—
Andrew: I’m really excited to see where this goes.
Nick: …And if you rolled down the windows, it’s got a bunch of clowns inside. It’s like a clown car, but in, like, a DeLorean. I think that there’s a difference also… satire is not a word that necessarily means parody or humor, so it’s all near and dear to my heart, and there’s rhymes. It’s supposed to entertain you, but it’s not necessarily gonna be like Weird Al-level where every line is a total joke. Although, simple is always good, too. So the answer is that we’re trying to get on the Dr. Demento show, but we’re also trying to get on Little Steven’s Underground Garage. If Punknews has a podcast, or MRR Radio… [Trails off into laughter]

The cover art replaces Rush’s Starman emblem for a red couch. What’s so “2012” about a couch? or is it a loveseat?
Nick: I think it’s just technology that hasn’t… they haven’t made a better couch yet.
Andrew: It was a peak year for couches.
Nick: 2012 was also the year I slept on the most couches, or that I slept on couches for the longest. I moved out of a place I was living in and since then I’ve just been subletting, cat-sitting, traveling… So yeah, lots of couches in the last two years. But beds, too; more beds than couches, but definitely a few couches. I was on my friend Dave’s couch for two or three months. That couch really dealt with a lot. I really crumpled the couch with my emotional weight.

Okay, so, scenario: a Rush fan picks up 2012 expecting it to be some kind of tribute. How would you hope they react?
Andrew: “I’m not going to bother returning this for a refund.”
Nick: Maybe they’ll think we’re related to Rush, maybe they’ll think we’re a Peart side project, maybe they’ll just develop a new appreciation for music that’s worse than Rush [laughs]. Maybe pity. We really just hope this starts a new generation of Rush fans who start electronic punk bands. Maybe it would help them better understand Alex Lifeson’s portion of Rush’s acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He spoke for about a minute in the cadence of an acceptance speech, but just saying gibberish.

2012 releases physically on June 7 and then digitally on June 15. What do you have planned next?
Andrew: Since we recorded 2012 we’ve put together two fully completed and recorded songs, and then several scraps. Future shows will be more than just the album being played.

Considering you’re all involved in other more established creative projects, is there any plan to tour behind your debut?
Nick: We’re trying to do a European tour at the end of the year.
Andrew: And even just ditch into the States. Apparently we have to play the Empty Bottle in Chicago because they have a cat.
Nick: We’re trying to get on tour with Atarti Teenage Riot, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, and Boards of Canada. [Andrew laughs] Hopefully all at once. And Air. We hope we’ll somehow absorb Air’s fan base as much as anything.I think our next album is probably going to be a tribute to The Virgin Suicides. Maybe we’ll cover the Virgin Suicides soundtrack.
Andrew: But seriously, I want to do things! I like being a busy musician more than I like being a guy who goes to work every day.
Nick: And it would be really nice connecting with bands that we know and going as support or something initially or conversely doing some sort of weird tour that was basically the same thing, but city to city, playing with bands we know.

Tom Beedham is a writer living in Toronto that really hopes you understand how sarcastic Wrong Hole is. He’s on Twitter - @Tom_Beedham

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