OUCH • Eric Bolduc’s Experimental Excursion Into the World of Industrial Rock

On his latest experimental excursion into the world of Industrial Rock musician Eric Bolduc of the band Born has stepped into the peripheral fringe of sonic experimentation that takes instrumentation, feedback, digital synthesized programming, audio sampling and looping of random soundbites (such as a recorded phone call from the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana threatening to have someone killed)  and transforms seemingly chaotic threads of sound and noise into an organized arrangement of song cycles that are amazingly bold and surprisingly effective on his latest released titled Ouch.

Made during the worldwide pandemic from the period of November 2020 to June 2021 in a spare bedroom in his house and released on September 2, 2021, the eight tracks on Ouch were all written, programmed, performed, deconstructed, re-constructed, mixed and mastered by Bolduc, who proves with surprisingly effective results that he is quite capable of functioning as a one-man industrial complex.

In the spirit of artists that have embarked upon this road of experimentation in the past, such as Neil Young on Weld, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Kraftwerk, and David Bowie during his Berlin phase with Brian Eno, Bolduc creates a litany of disturbing and effective tapestries where music collides and congregates with divergently random aural environments to create order and direction out of what  otherwise may appear to be nothing more than meaningless chaos.

Standout tracks include the album opener, Piece of Sh#t, Ministry of Lard, New Wave of Stupidity, Casting Couch, and Robert Smith and KMFDM Walk Into an S&M Bar.

Eric says he started on the project a couple months before the pandemic hit in January, 2020. “I started doing some home demo recording for the first time ever, mostly to collect a few ideas I had over the previous year or so. I had to step out from working in public due to having developed Crohn’s Disease, so I had nothing but time on my hands.”

Once Bolduc began the project he didn’t stop and by the end of 2020 had almost 120 songs that were in various states of being finished, rendered in all different styles and genres.  “This blew my mind because I had never experienced a creative output like that before,” he explains.

While listening back a couple months later to the stuff he had created, Eric says he noticed a handful of songs that stuck out like a sore thumb. “They didn’t fit with the others, but they fit together well. They all had this vibe of Old School Industrial bands like Ministry and KMFDM. I realized listening back to these songs that I could feasibly make a record in my bedroom, so I decided to concentrate on those 10 songs and attempt to finish them as an instrumental industrial record.”

“After all the dust cleared an I deconstructed and mangled and reconstructed these tracks, I ended up having eight songs,” he continues. “When I was originally recording the material I would give the tracks goofy names, or names of what it reminded me of when I was creating it, or just so I could remember what it was an most of the titles stayed, mainly because I thought they were funny.”

“I played and programmed all of the instruments an samples, ended up mixing and mastering it myself, created the artwork, and made two videos for promotion,” he notes. “I created a Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even a Tik Tok account prior to releasing it in September of 2021, all of which I had never done all on my own. So this whole thing was a big challenge and learning experience. I wanted to know that I could do it.”

“The album has a bunch of weird samples all over it, once again in tribute to all of those old industrial albums, including G.G. Alliln on some talk show, Jim Morrison freaking out on stage, plus lots of strange sound bites that I found, clanking pipes, metal scraping, wood being hit with a hammer, and the actors from Thundercats just saying horrible things.”

Eric says he has definite plans for the other material he didn’t end up using on Ouch.

 “I have a variety of different styles and genres, from pop-punk stuff to stoner rock to more progressive metal. Plus, stuff that just fit more with my band Born’s vibe. I've been working with Mike Nowak, my singer and bassist from Born, on a bunch of it via emailing demos back and forth, just to get solid ideas to bring to Chris Adamick, our drummer in Born, so he can write his parts. I'm really excited to see where that is going, just from the 4 or 5 songs we have in the works as of right now.”

“We have a very democratic approach to writing in that band, which is one of the many reasons why we've stuck together for almost 22 years now;  and it tends to bring the best out of us when writing that way. It's always nice to have fleshed out demos to go into a session with.”

“I have also been recording a bunch of cover songs on  a collaborative project for a couple different charities,” adds Eric.  “I lost a lot of friends last year, too many, to a variety of different things. So I want to give something back in the best way that I can, to honor those people. I'm always looking for vocalists and really, anybody that wants to be involved in any of the process. Plus, It would be really freaking fun.”

Eric says that while he would love to make physical copies on CD or vinyl for the Ouch album, he actually made the entire release without spending any money, so is using the digital only sales at the moment to fund physical product in the future.  “I don’t really have any plans on playing live as Ouch, but I’m not ruling that out either.  I do like a good challenge.”

To purchase copies you can click the Ouch Bandcamp link here: https://ouch1.bandcamp.com/releases