This week at NXNE, Montreal synth-rock duo the Handsome Furs will preview songs from their forthcoming album Sound Kapital, whose songs were inspired by a nerve-wracking 2010 tour through Burma, where the simple act of performing music in public can land you in jail.
In their current press photo, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry—a.k.a. Montreal synth-rock duo Handsome Furs—play the role of balaclava-clad criminals, posing in a house they presumably just ransacked. But during a tour of Burma last summer, the married pair felt like genuine smugglers, risking deportation and/or the incarceration of their local accomplices.
Their contraband wasn’t any mere narcotic—it was their music, the raw electro-punk tunes that Boeckner had written in between stints serving as the front man of (now defunct) indie-rock troupe Wolf Parade. The Furs encountered several culture-shocking hurdles while performing those songs on their Asian odyssey last August, but nothing was more intimidating than their gig in Burma, where the ruling military junta has banned rock bands from playing in public.
“In order to put on the show, [our friends] had kids running around the street with walkie talkies, making sure that the cops weren’t coming to shut it down,” Perry says of the gruelling moments leading up to their performance in the cultural capital of Yangon. “I think [the local Burmese musicians] opened up to us and allowed themselves to be in a very threatening position.”
Boeckner tried to convey the courage displayed by their local opening act Side Effect on “Serve the People,” the first song he wrote for the Furs’ latest album, Sound Kapital, out June 28. (They’ll preview its songs at this weekend at NXNE.) On it, Boeckner sings about lead singer Darko and his Burmese band “making noise when the generator’s on” for a few precious hours each day.
By performing with Handsome Furs, Side Effect risked what meagre resources they had. Big Bag, another Yangon power-pop ensemble, had recently been forbidden from playing any music for a six-month sentence that was peppered by police home-checks to ensure they hadn’t even attempted to tune their guitars.
In a country where the government lockdown is so stifling that choppy internet connections and bootleg DVDs have only now let vintage grunge rockers like Nirvana catch on among the populace, a performance by a foreign indie band like Handsome Furs evoked the rarest sort of local revelry. Boeckner says the mosh pit at their Yangon show included everyone from local Buddhist monks in baggy robes to 15-year-old punks with cheap leather jackets sprouting fake studs from the shoulders.
After the show, the Furs donated all proceeds to Side Effect so that they could record their sophomore album with equipment more sophisticated than their current Windows 96 software. Then, upon Darko’s request, Boeckner and Perry hid the debut master recordings that such faulty equipment produced in their luggage before their departing flight, trafficking music out in the same spirit that they had smuggled it in. That way, Side Effect’s songs could slip past their country’s asphyxiating borders for the first time like one of the Burmese people’s countless held breaths.
“On this album, I sang that song ["Serve the People"] with everything I had,” Boeckner says. “And that felt better than singing about any metaphorical ‘growing up in a Canadian small town’ sad feelings that I had written about in Wolf Parade. It was totally liberating.”
The Handsome Furs play The Garrison (1197 Dundas W., #DNW) June 18 at 1 a.m.
