Sara Howie
ARTS EDITOR


Dusted is the side-not-so-side project of artists Brian Borcherdt (Holy Fuck, By Divine Right) and Leon Taheny (Final Fantasty, Germans). Borcherdt was interested in exploring a different kind of sound after years of touring with Holy Fuck, and recorded Totally Dusted with Taheny in a garage. The result is moody, lo-fi and completely different than anything else to come out recently. The Lance caught up with the duo before going on stage at Phog Lounge on Oct. 4.
 
Sara Howie: Dusted started off as a side project, right?

Brian Borcherdt: Maybe yeah … maybe no, I feel like Holy Fuck for me has always been a side project to something that didn’t exist. So I feel like everything has always been a side project. It’s like a stencil, like you only understand what the image is by seeing the negative space around it. And so I’m filling more things around it, but it’s what I’m trying to get at in the middle that I can’t figure out. And in a way, this feels less like a side project and more like a real project. It’s sort of a thing I’ve always been allowing myself for mentally but I’ve never had the time to do it before now.

SH: The sound on this album is really different from Final Fantasy and Holy Fuck.

BB: We made the album over a year ago, and then we moved on from it because there were lots for both of us to do outside of this. I certainly wanted to have it out last year. It just turned out that we finished it and we both had so much to do that it didn’t fall into any easy release schedule. I’m personally quite glad that happened because I loved the album as it was … It just sat there a little bit, there wasn’t much behind it. Give it half a year or more before we returned to it, that’s when we started to talk about it like we should do it as a real thing. One of the things I found was that the response to the album changed after that time too. I sent it out to my friends and my agents and then didn’t really get any response. And then we went behind a curtain and came out wearing a new hat, everyone was interested. And I talked to my booking agent who decided she was going to work with it, and it came up in conversation that I asked her why when it first came out she was uninterested in it. And she said that she’s learned from experiences not to support musicians’ vanity projects, you end up becoming their manager.

SH: You both do a million things, how do you find the time for it all?

Leon Taheny: It’s a lot of work, but I want to have touring as part of my life, and I enjoy touring. I could do it for a long time. I don’t mind it, I know there’s always going to be an end to it; I know I can do it from the summer until the middle of December with Brian and then I’m definitely going to have two months off. So I don’t mind.

SH: From the middle of the summer until now? That’s a really long time to tour.

BB: Yeah, I know, well they’re good tours. But you develop calluses on your liver and your soul and the frailest part of you, of your sad, sad self that just wants to crawl underneath some blankets and cry, that part of you develops calluses as well, and it keeps you strong. But I think we’re a bit tender at heart.