The stigmata of Herbie Greenfish

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Sometimes a stage gimmick is actually born out of necessity. The frontman for Godswounds, the new Australian electro band currently touring Taiwan, reaches over from his keyboard to strum the bass mounted on a stand in center stage as the guitarist (who was just playing the bass) goes back to playing his guitar. They have no choice — they couldn’t find a bassist before going on tour.

“We tried me just playing all the bass lines on the keyboard but it robbed the music of the visceral edge the bass gives it,” said Lachlan Kerr, aka Herbie Greenfish, keyboardist, vocalist and sometime bass player. “Apparently this whole dancing car wreck is really fun to watch, so we’re going to try to maintain it as long as it seems healthy and not forced.”

Kerr’s experience of launching the Third Eye Theater Company in Australia and writing, directing and producing plays there prior to his first live music performance in May this year (at Candy’s Apartment in Sydney) has given him an idea of what works on stage.

He says the dynamics of the three-piece band are “akin to ballet.” They share duties on what they refer to as Ghost Bass after undergoing a series of “false leads, fall-throughs and confronting responses” while looking for a bassist to come on tour in Taiwan.

“I guess the reality was it was a bit of a scary notion going to a foreign country and taking on an audience and a culture you know very little, if anything, about,” said Kerr. “A lot of musicians also don’t seem to have a perception of the middle ground of being in a band. There seems to be a common perception that one day you’re fiddling about with samples in Garage Band and a week later you’re

a millionaire.”

The trio is happy to play the smaller shows that comprise the middle ground, with gigs at pubs and live houses from Taipei to Kaohsiung and most places in between scheduled from now until

mid-December. Their first show was at the Lost Lagoon party in Wulai at the end of last month, and they have gigs scheduled for Bliss, Riverside Cafe, Tone 56 and Underworld in Taipei, Light Lounge and 89K in Taichung, Join Us in Kaohsiung, and at the Red Wolf in Tainan.

The music is quite bizarre, with more than a passing nod to video game culture — more of a total physical response, in fact, with Nintendo-infused sound. Kerr, a huge Kaiju fan, said “there is a whole sub-culture of musicians mining this field at the moment.” Called chip-tune artists, they take Nintendo Game Boys and “use specially made software that allows them to turn the world’s most successful handheld gaming unit into a compositional or performance tool.” In Australia he played an actual Game Boy live, but said that melodically, he “gets a lot more freedom from sampling the instrument and stretching its sounds across an 88-note keyboard.”

Nonetheless, the music is composed quite traditionally, with parts given out to the players to be performed after it is written. As inspiration for the music he cites his obsession with the Large Hadron Collider and quantum physics, and “of course, Shigeru Miyamoto [Japanese video game designer] and 80s-90s video game culture.”

“Songs tend to mutate when you play them for [a] while.” Kerr said. “We do a cover of a song by an Australian band called Fage Panique that seems to get stranger every time we play it.”