The summer of 1992 was full of surprises at KZSU. After a new CD from the Japanese ultra-noise outfit Gerogerigegege made our top 10, I thought I'd seen everything. But I was amazed and delighted yet again when another group we'd never heard of before scored an unusual runaway hit. The song was "Mary Dear", in which a girl hopelessly attempts to convince her puritanical parents that the other children in her school aren't a bunch of "godless heathen". (Mary: "Why can't I play with the other kids around here? They're nice." Daddy: "Nice, you say? Ha! Spawn of the devil, just like their parents. Lazy, corrupt, evil in thought and in deed.") Backing up the cut-up bits of dialogue was a nicely looped guitar assault "stolen" from the band everybody loves to sample, Slayer. The rest of the band's CD, called God Family Country, contained even more examples of found-sound hilarity and musical deconstruction. I decided I had to find out more about the people responsible for this, and after a bit of sleuthing I reached a guy named Wayne Morris (WM) at his home in Toronto. Here, then, is what I learned about Wayne and his "band", affectionately known as Sucking Chest Wound.
JR: What exactly is Sucking Chest Wound, and are you its leader?
WM: I'm not really the leader; it's always been a sort of
cooperative thing, with different people coming in and out
of the project. We've been going for almost 10 years now,
doing various types of music. We're primarily a performance
group, and we put on multi-media performances incorporating
music and other media like video and film.
JR: Where did most of these performances take place?
WM: Mostly in the Toronto area, which is where we've been living
for the past six years or so. We all went to school
together in Waterloo, which is about an hour outside of
Toronto. We kind of got our start there, did a number of
performances there, and made out first two tapes there.
JR: How many people actually make up the team?
WM: Currently it's just me and Jeff Ibsen, who are the main
composers of the music and the performances. We also work
with Bruce Becker and Catherine Wilson, who do the video
system. Catherine also operates a kind of interactive
audio/visual software during our live shows.
JR: In other words, this CD that we have here is just one small
part of what Sucking Chest Wound is all about.
WM: That project, God Family Country, originally started as a
multi-media performance. The music was one part of it, and
we created video pieces to go along with it. Yes, with that
CD, you're only getting part of the picture there.
JR: It's certainly an interesting collage of music, some of it
even "conventional", along with lots of found sounds from
all over the place. How much of the music does the band
actually perform itself, and how much is "borrowed" from
other sources?
WM: It depends on the piece. For some of the pieces, we take
things from our "media environment", including the music
industry. Before this project, we operated more like a live
band, and we even went through a phase of being a kind of
disco revivalist band, taking old disco hits but re-doing
them in a live band setup. Before that, we did a lot of
live group work with different types of instrumentation,
picking things up off the street and trying to make sounds
with them. In that sense, we are musicians, and we're
always thinking of sound and music. But we're also trying
to stretch the boundaries of what is defined as "music" and
"musical instruments". I don't think you have to become
proficient in playing conventional instruments to be termed
a "musician".
JR: With all the new technology these days, you also have more
tools at your disposal that allow you to use other sound
sources and incorporate them into your work.
WM: Yeah, we do very much play with the media in making our
music, and it's exciting that there are new technological
ways to do that. The tools are now coming into the hands of
people who just like to hack around with the media. I
personally enjoy doing it because I'm quite frustrated with
the mass broadcast media and the amount of disinformation
that goes on there, especially the bias that's reflected in
corporate-controlled media. So we really like to play with
that and turn it on its head.
JR: What else have you recorded besides the God Family Country
CD?
WM: We did release four cassettes before putting out this CD.
We've always produced, packaged, and distributed it
ourselves, through mail order. This CD is really the first
mass distribution of our work.
JR: What led to your relationship with DOVEntertainment, the
label that released this CD?
WM: I knew Gerry [Belanger, head of DOVE] from the radio station
here, CKLN, where he and I both did radio shows. He had
heard some of our earlier material and was interested in
releasing it on a CD, so we came to an agreement. We are
working on our next recording project, which will also be
released by DOVE. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement,
because distributing records is a lot of work, and I'd
rather spend my time on more creative things.
JR: Many of us were curious about the story behind "Mary Dear",
the big KZSU "hit". What can you tell us about it?
WM: Actually, that's Jeff's piece, not mine. You see, the CD is
basically structured into three sections, naturally "God",
"Family", and "Country", and each of us worked on a
different section. "Mary Dear" obviously falls into the
"Family" section, which was Jeff's creation. That piece is
basically a statement about the dangers of the nuclear
family and its power structure. The dominating father
wouldn't let his child to go school and be influenced by
other people and other children, which resulted in the
child's built-up rage and unleashing at the end. Jeff took
the dialogue from a radio play of some kind; I'm not exactly
sure what it was.
JR: You've used samples of dialogue from other people, including
Dave Emory, a local talk-show host and conspiracy theorist.
WM: Yeah, his shows are syndicated and we play them up here on
CKLN. I've also been doing a fair amount of political
research, and another reason that I'm doing this kind of
music is that I really want to use it as a vehicle for
broadcasting information. I think this will be more evident
in our next recording. The music format, as well as film,
is quite a powerful medium in terms of getting that
information out. Dave's shows are great, but you have to
listen for hours and hours, because there's so much detail
about particular issues. When you put it into a dance piece
like we do, you can sum up things a little bit and have more
fun with it.
JR: Yes, but do you think that sometimes the humor of your
presentation might overshadow the message you're trying to
communicate?
WM: No, I think it's quite the opposite. We use humor a lot
because it's easier and more engaging for people to pay
attention to what the point of the song is. I think that
strikes a chord within people and I don't feel it undermines
the message.
JR: How do you feel about all the attention Sucking Chest Wound
has been getting because of this recording?
WM: Well, it's still quite limited. We only pressed about 1000
of the CDs, although they've had a lot of airplay and a lot
of attention, which is great. I think the fact that lots of
people are listening to this stuff has encouraged us to
explore more possibilities and to be more challenging with
the music, and really take a close look at what's happening
in society today. Our next recording is going to be all
about the war on drugs. We're going to go into some detail
about particular aspects of it, and relate some different
events that have happened recently, that show how the U.S.
intelligence service are actually the biggest drug
traffickers in the world.
JR: What are the chances of Sucking Chest Wound traveling
outside of Toronto to do a performance? Like maybe in San
Francisco?
WM: Not in the near future. We don't play live that often, not
more than once or twice a year. We're all involved in other
things, so we can't spend as much time as we'd like with it.
Of course, I hope that will change in the future.
JR: You also have some video work that's available?
WM: It's not available, but we are trying to put together a
video that can be aired on alternative TV. We do have a lot
of video that is used to accompany our live performances,
but we haven't really figured out how to package it.
JR: Sorry about this, but I really have to ask about the origin
of the name "Sucking Chest Wound".
WM: As with the naming of many of our "songs", we just use
things from the environment around us. I remember once when
we were all in Waterloo just looking at National
Geographics, picking out phrases and using them as song
titles. The idea for the name came from Paul, who was with
the group a long time ago. He had this military first aid
manual, and it was open to this page that talked about
bayonet wounds, and that's where it came from. Fortunately,
I think that a lot of band names do transcend their literal
meaning, and just become associated with whatever that
band's about.