Victoria’s BOUSADA is led by the charismatic Graeme Bousada. His music is a fusion of high-energy electronica, jazz, hip-hop and R&B. Accompanying him on his musical journey are multi-instrumentalists Michael Huerta and Ollie McKee-Reid.
With a mix of live looping, saxophone, and hype – Bousada is one of the city’s most interesting live bands. This energy and passion is a welcome addition to The Zone’s Band of the Month family.
After a Rocktographers photo shoot full of laughter and theatrics, Graeme, Michael, Ollie enjoyed caffeinated beverages with Tyson Elder to talk everything BOUSADA.
Tyson Elder: First things first, congratulation on being March’s Zone Band of the Month. It seems like a long time in the making.
Graeme Bousada: Thanks!
TE: Can you tell me a little about the single The Zone @ 91-3 will be featuring for the month of March? Is it a new song?
Graeme: The single is called, “Shake.” It’s a few years old now the song little crusty, but it’s still good.
TE: A good song is still a good song no matter the age.
Graeme: Totally. I wrote the “Shake” about experiencing death. It’s about the thought of being saturated in existential angst, but then realizing as long as you are alive life is pretty good. It’s about shaking away your existential angst.
TE: Sounds like something I might need.
[Band Laughs]
Graeme: We perform mainly on a loop pedal. I play a loop pedal, Mikey plays saxophone and Ollie is our hype man. Ollie sings and raps – we all sing and rap. It’s kind of like a fluid DJ party except we create all our loops live. All of the loops are actually physically being created and sequenced live on a keyboard, and our drum pad.
Michael Huerta: I have a fun time playing with Juicy Bousy and Young Viperteeth. I think one other cool things about playing with Bousada is the versatility. It’s so versatile because we can play the hype dance party, but we can also do the stripped down thing where Graeme is playing the guitar, doing vocal stuff and very acoustic vibes. That straight West Coast — almost Current Swell — style and then you have me on the saxophone. We are all able to do such different things. There’s this project, and Ollie has his own projects, and he has all of his own experience that he brings from those things.
TE: How did you guys meet? You’ve been a band for four years now, right?
Ollie McKee-Reid: I needed a bass player for a band I was in. I asked a friend of mine if he knew anyone. He then introduced me to this really smart guy with a degree in neuroscience. I met that guy at a party and then he invited me over to his house to jam. When I got to his house there was this other guy sitting there playing jazz standards guitar and that was Graeme Bousada.
Graeme: I don’t remember that, but it does sound right. [laughs] We did meet through our mutual friend who is a neuroscientist. I think Mike and Ollie have know each other since high school though.
Ollie: I hired Mike to play saxophone on a recording when he was thirteen. I might have paid him in homemade wine and cookies. He played sax with a broken finger. I was 16 and he was 13.
Michael: I met Bousada at a gig in Cumberland. He asked me to hop on stage to fill in some sound and we really clicked.
Ollie: Was I playing too?
Michael: Yeah, it was a Downtown Mischief and Bousada show.
TE: I’ve heard a lot about your live shows. A friend of mine covered Fernfest a few years back and they raved about your live set ever since. They talk about how much energy you put out there and how crazy it got in the community square. Especially around the gazebo in the middle where you were playing. There are some photos floating around that looked insane with one of you hanging off the side of the gazebo. Is that a pretty standard experience of your live shows?
Graeme: [laughs] Yeah, our shows are hype as fuck. That’s the whole idea.
Ollie: High energy and everyone is dancing. Most of the people that come are homies we’ve known in Victoria or met around the block from playing live. Our shows are always a very consistent vibe of high energy dance party.
Graeme: That’s definitely what we are going for with the live shows. We are trying to get people stoked and we try to get stoked too.
Ollie: When the crowd gets stoked we get stoked.
Graeme: It’s a great feedback loop of us feeding off each others energy.
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TE: What does BOUSADA have planned the next year?
Graeme: There is some music coming down the pike here, but it won’t be released in time for Band of the Month. Our main focus is making new music right now. The main challenge for us is the live show has been really good and fun. It’s a lot more challenging for us to record than to do a live show. Right now all of the energy I’ve been putting into the project has been the live show and those have been received really well. Now it’s about putting some of that energy back into the recording process.
TE: It’s got to be difficult to bring that live energy into a recording. I can see it would be hard work.
TE: Are you looking to play any music festivals this summer?
Graeme: We’ve played a bunch of festivals in the past like Shambala, Rifflandia, Woodstove, Song and Surf, and Laketown Shakedown. I don’t know if we’re going to do much in the way of festivals this summer. We are going to focus on recording.
Ollie: The big goal this summer is for us to all take a week off our schedules, get a nice Airbnb in Jordan River, and just hit the record button.
Graeme: That’s where we really need to put our energy right now. Our live show isn’t going anywhere… it’s really good. It’s the recorded music that’s hard to just put down.
TE: Do you guys record everything yourselves?
Ollie: Oh yeah, we do.
TE: So you’ll be recording in an Airbnb in Jordan River? That’s super cool.
Micheal: It’s kind of one of the best things for us. We don’t have the most complicated arrangements we aren’t like a Snarky Puppy where everything is charted out. We’re very much, “what’s the vibe?” and go from there. It’s all puzzle pieces.
TE: It’s refreshing to hear that artist like yourselves are still doing the DIY recording. You guys make it sound like a lot of fun. It makes me want to hole up in Jordan River and work on things.
Ollie: Not recording with a drummer is so freeing. When you have a drum kit you are pretty limited in how and where you record. You can mix and match things when you don’t have one. If you have a drummer and you want to play with them you immediately spend $2000 just micing and having and engineer work on the kit and renting the space. All we need is…[Starts beat boxing], fix the EQ, rent a good microphone and you have a recording session for under $500.
TE: Computers are huge tool these days too.
Ollie: There is a big advantage to the technology we have because we use all of that in recording in a makeshift studio in a basement or Airbnb. We also use that technology in our live shows. We use it for launching clips and samples.
The Zone @ 91-3 will be spinning Bousada’s single Shake all month long. You can find that song as well as two others available for download on their Band of the Month page. Rocktographers is proud to be a supporting sponsor of The Zone’s Band of the Month program.
Bousada will be performing an exclusive and intimate Zone Record Store Session at Vinyl Envy on Tuesday, March 24th. The only way to get into this show is to win tickets from The Zone @ 91-3.