We played a show at a west-end Toronto loft in support of our buddies Dinosaur Bones a couple of weeks ago. It was a total blast. In addition to the pictures (see all of them here) there's a little bit of us in this video, which you might enjoy watching.
I recently found some footage of our trip to Japan and decided to edit it together. Sadly, nothing of us actually playing. You can't have everything though, now can you?
Watch it here. Sorry, but it's too wide to fit into the blog.
When Uncut first started out, it was just me on bass and my friend Jake Fairley playing guitar and singing. We were using a collection of samplers, drum machines and computers at various points to provide drums and some keyboard parts, trying to come up with a mix of minimal techno and post-punk in the Joy Division vein. (As a small point of pride, this was before both "House of Jealous Lovers" and Interpol. Just saying is all.)
We put out a couple of 12"s in Germany (see pics below) that I think might have been well received (but I don't speak German, so I'm just going to go ahead and assume that people liked them) and had plans to release our first full length on Paper Bag ... but this would never be. You see, this whole time Jake was making techno records on his own and had started living on-and-off in Berlin while he was touring Europe. He eventually decided to not move back to Toronto, so we broke up, but only in the band sense, not in the friend sense.
Since then, Uncut has obviously been a different thing entirely.
So, what is Jake up to these days, you may find yourself asking ... he's still making the techno (doing quite well at it in fact) and living in Amsterdam. I've included some clips for your listening/viewing pleasure. You can also listen to more on his Myspace page.
Someone decided to take part of the German version of the movie Girl Interrupted and put "Understanding the New Violence" under it, to what purpose I am unsure.
I know it sounds kind of crazy, but it's true; the folks over at the Obama campaign used our song "Kiss Me" in one of their videos. The level of surreal I experienced while listening to him speak, with our song in the background, is pretty hard to describe.
This is our video for the song "Darkhorse". We had nothing to do with it (Kris Lefcoe directed it), so I'm allowed to say that it's totally amazing. We actually have the little versions of ourselves and our tiny instruments, so my dream of being made into an action figure has basically come true already.
Way back in 2004 we did our first music video. It's for the song "Understanding the New Violence". Derrick Beckles, of Street Carnage fame, made it for us in the apartment he and I used to share.
This is a video of us playing "Understanding the New Violence" live at the Mod Club when we opened for Metric back in 2005. As you can tell, we were still all about playing in almost total darkness. Jeff Harris filmed it. Thanks Jeff!
Speaking of Cravefest, we did an interview with them once and they had Jon chop a keyboard in half with a samurai sword. Jon gets all clever with a Highlander quote. Watch the footage below.
