{"id":1992,"date":"2011-07-01T12:41:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T18:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=1992"},"modified":"2011-07-01T12:41:53","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T18:41:53","slug":"narwhals-are-gnarly-an-interview-with-the-blowholes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2011\/07\/01\/narwhals-are-gnarly-an-interview-with-the-blowholes\/","title":{"rendered":"Narwhals are Gnarly! An interview with the Blowholes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Photo by Alicia Jobse<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Kent Davies
\n<\/strong>
\nAttention buoys and gills! Once in a whale an act comes along that is destined to have bad oceanic puns follow them wherever they go. The all-female garage rock foursome known as The Blowholes have been making waves since forming in early 2009. Their ferocious wailing and catchy guitar work are a tidal wave of fun-filled exuberance that few bands can match. Their debut album features a series of wonderfully strange, rockin\u2019, porpoise-ful numbers about all things under the sea. \u00a0Recently Stylus managed to reel in guitarists\/vocalists Melody Titus and Alana Mercer to explore the depths of their chart-topping debut album.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stylus: How did The Blowholes come into being?
\nAlana Mercer:<\/strong> Julia Ryckman and I had originally had been in The Gorgon and The Blowholes formed in an emergency situation where The Gorgon was unable to play a show. It was basically Leanne Grieves, Julia and I playing covers. We played another show when we were asked to play The Ex-Girlfriends CD release party. We asked Erica Jacobson to fill in and the show was so much fun. After No Fun broke up Leanne brought up, why not make The Blowholes a real band? Erica was in because she wasn\u2019t doing anything and Leanne asked Melody if she wanted to join because we knew her from Space Amazon and the Warrior Queens. When Melody showed up right away we all knew it was going to be awesome.
\nMelody Titus:<\/strong> I told them I think I have a song or five\u2026
\nAM:<\/strong> Or 18! I think our album was written three years ago.
\nStylus: Local label Transistor 66 put it out. How did you join the family?
\nAM:<\/strong> Art rules. We told him that The Blowholes were thinking of recording an album and instantly he was like, \u201cYeah we\u2019ll help you out.\u201d He\u2019s pretty adorable. That is a man who believes in rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. It\u2019s so inspiring.
\nStylus: Who produced the album?
\nAM:<\/strong> We wanted to record right away and we were thinking who had the equipment to record us and it\u2019s Bill Northcott from the Angry Dragons.
\nMT:<\/strong> BILL! Bill is amazing.
\nAM:<\/strong> I think we asked him and then we did it all in 18 hours the following weekend. We did it in Erica\u2019s basement bedroom, which is lined with hardwood floors and is super small. We were all crammed in there and Bill had to straddle everything and lightly step over stuff to get to his board.
\nMT:<\/strong> His system kept overloading because it was too loud.
\nAM:<\/strong> Poor Erica had to play quietly which is not what she\u2019s used too. We had to put a sock over her mic and it was a smelly sock. I felt bad but it turned out.
\nMT:<\/strong> There was a lighting storm during the recording. It was a sign from the skies that we should be playing.
\nStylus: The album deals with the themes of the sea. Being from the prairies what inspired you to sing so many songs about the ocean?
\nMT:<\/strong> I think it started off with whales.
\nAM:<\/strong> I think we just wanted to write about things that mattered to us. We all had a natural fixation on the ocean. Leanne is a biologist. I lived by the ocean in B.C. We all practically dream about the ocean all the time. We all like to call each other by our whale names. No one knows our whale names except us. No one is allowed to call me by my whale name except for The Blowholes. I might punch them. It\u2019s too cute coming from anyone else.
\nMT:<\/strong> Shhhh. It\u2019s a secret.
\nAM:<\/strong> We miss the ocean all the more because we\u2019re in Winnipeg and it\u2019s hard to come by any water that isn\u2019t brownish. We write about what we know and collectively we all seem to know a lot about the ocean. We\u2019ll all have tidbits for each other. Leanne is like, \u201cDo you know cephalopods move by using siphuncles to pump air out of themselves?\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cLeanne, you are amazing.\u201d
\nMT:<\/strong> We\u2019re pretty educational.
\nStylus: Do you think you may want to integrate some sort of seventies style educational slide show to your music show?
\nAM:<\/strong> I like the idea of Iron Maiden-sized puppet sea creatures that come out and interact with the audience.
\nMT:<\/strong> So far all we have a rotating fish lamp that sits on the stage. It\u2019s quite small though.
\nStylus: What\u2019s your song \u201cHuck Fin\u201d about?
\nAM:<\/strong> It\u2019s not actually about Huck Finn. It\u2019s about shark finning. It makes me so angry and kind of hopeless. I took the name because it\u2019s the image I saw of people just hocking fins over the boat that weren\u2019t worth enough money. There are these limbless little sharks that are slowly floating to the bottom of the ocean to sit there and die. It\u2019s like AHAAAHRRRA! Right now I really want to yell.
\nMT:<\/strong> The screaming sound in the song is a reflection of the sound of sharks dying.
\nStylus: You\u2019ve been a band with a pretty good cult following despite not having any web presence at all.
\nMT:<\/strong> I think we just haven\u2019t got around to doing it.
\nAM:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s like an underground cult following. I could wear suspenders and a skirt and people would be doing it next week.
\nMT:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know how to do anything on computer anyway. We\u2019re not all about technology. We like to do crafts instead.
\nAM:<\/strong> We totally do. I\u2019ve never painted much, even as a child. We make all our Blowholes merch from scratch and everything is one of a kind, t-shirts, buttons, crafts.
\nStylus: Who did the art for your album?
\nMT:<\/strong> We all did. Alana did the cover. The next one over Leanne did. I did the one under the CD and Erica did the one at the back. It\u2019s important to say that because I don\u2019t think it says it on the actual CD.
\nStylus: What is your favorite ocean creature?
\nMT:<\/strong> My favorite one is a mermaid. I would like a book for Christmas all about mermaids.
\nAM:<\/strong> My favorite sea creature is a whale\u2014a narwhal, the unicorns of the sea. They have a tooth that sticks out, they clean with it, and they greet each other by crossing horns, which I think is amazing. They can also tell ocean depth and temperature with it. It\u2019s basically a raw open root from your tooth. I love them. They\u2019re so cool.<\/p>\n

Since the interview The Blowholes have managed to please marine and music lovers alike with a #1 album on the CKUW charts. If you want to catch a live show that will blow you away find out when they\u2019re playing next at http:\/\/theblowholes.transistor66.com\/
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kent Davies Attention buoys and gills! Once in a whale an act comes along that is destined to have bad oceanic puns follow them wherever they go. The all-female garage rock foursome known as The Blowholes have been making waves since forming in early 2009. Their ferocious wailing and catchy guitar work are a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[959,967],"class_list":["post-1992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","tag-the-blowholes","tag-the-gorgon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}