by Sheldon Birnie
Loud, abrasive outsider music has always had a home in Winnipeg. From the 80s punk rock explosion, to 90s noise rock, the out-there electronic experiments of Venetian Snares and beyond, a twisted frequency lies at the dark Heart of the Continent. One of the current crop of young, hungry bands picking at the carcasses of their fore bearers is Tunic.
“I wanted to make my own band for a long time,” David Schellenberg recently told Stylus over pitchers of beer at Cousin’s. “I’ve always been the bass player in everyone’s band.”
After spending years tending to bass duties in Les Jupes, Departures, and the Playing Cards, Schellenberg started writing songs on guitar a couple years back. Then he started jamming with drummer Sam Neal after a late night at the Lo Pub.
“I knew Sam from high school,” Dave recalls. “I showed him my songs and Sam was like, ‘Those are cool, but I play drums like this.’
“Sam plays drums like a brick in a dryer,” Rory Ellis, who plays bass, clarifies for the folks at home.
So Schellenberg was like, “I guess I gotta write heavier songs.”
“I had no sense of how to play along to that,” Sam admits with a laugh. “It definitely ended up morphing into what it is now.”
That “it” is an intense, propulsive exploration of isolation fuelled angst, with the volume cranked high. Schellenberg admits it is a somewhat different musical realm than the one he was once most comfortable in.
“I was born and raised on indie rock,” he says, “and got into punk rock later in life. Sam had played in a bunch of punk bands, so we kind of met in the middle. When we first started hanging out, about two years ago, we talked about Nü Sensae, White Lung, and Condominium a lot.”
“We found common ground in modern punk music,” says Sam.
“I agree,” Rory says, adding that his role in the band is often a reaction to the elements Sam and David bring to the table. “I write parts that give context to what [they’re] doing so that it resembles something that makes sense.”
This past winter, Tunic went into the studio at UMFM and recorded “a bunch” of tracks with Graeme Wolfe from fellow new noise barons Conduct.
“We’d been a band for a while, felt pretty tight,” says Schellenberg. “But there was really only the one out of like nine that we really liked our performance on.”
The boys in Tunic weren’t the only people who liked the track. Nick Liang, from Conduct, was planning on starting a record label, Dial Tone Records, and offered to put the track out on a split 7” with his band. The connection makes sense, of course, when you consider the long history between the members of both bands. A relationship that only deepened after the two undertook an extensive US tour this past summer.
“It was a lot of fun,” Sam says, “but it was a bit of a financial failure.”
“What tour isn’t?” asks Schellenberg. No doubt, undertaking a completely DIY tour, without a record, is a gamble. But Tunic admit that it was more of testing of the waters, and an excuse for an adventure with some good buddies, than anything else.
“It was great,” Rory says, “meeting other people who like punk rock and art punk, progressive punk. Interesting, loud music.”
“Winnipeg is a pretty isolated town,” says Schellenberg, touching on a recurring theme in any narrative about our local cultural development. “So it was nice to go out and some of those shows had way more people than our hometown shows. It’s cool to make friends and get into a new community that we didn’t really even know about.”
With the new split 7”, Tunic are setting their sights high, with plans to tour, and record a full length over the winter.
“From now on it’s like a rocket ship,” Rory boasts, as the pitchers of draft beer drain. “A fucking cruise missile to stardom!”
Don’t miss the Tunic/Conduct split 7” release show Oct 3 at Natural Cycle. It’s gonna get messy!