The Band Explains: The Holy Gasp - 'The Mating Song' (Video)
Who: The Holy Gasp are a Toronto-based five-piece.
About The Track: 'The Mating Song' is a boundary pushing track that combines elements of punk, acid jazz, industrial, psychedelic and everything in between. This type of genre fusion allows the band to unleash their inner freak in a chaotic, alternative way, whilst giving underlying breaks in the instrumental structure that nod towards a manipulated yet much more understated and conventional sound.
The Band Explains: The video for 'The Mating Song' was directed by Pedja Milosavljevic of Balkanada Productions. Pedja has a perverse sense of humour, and a great love of the ridiculous. I told him I wanted the video to center around me in a theatre by myself watching animals fucking. He asked if I'd be eating popcorn. It was a happy collaboration.
I spent a day without sunlight, in a dark movie theatre watching animals having sex. It was a lot on the senses. It's not something I feel I'll ever need to do again. At times, I felt I needed to bathe my body, to scrub it with a thick bristled brush and repent for what I'd willingly watched. At other moments I found the experience erotic, and profoundly gorgeous. What stood out most was how similarly all animals seem to reproduce. With a small handful of exceptions, the mechanics of procreation is more or less the same across the animal kingdom. And you can see in the faces of many animals the same emotions that pass through humans during sex—the vulnerability, the lust, the fear, the tenderness, the desire, and all those power dynamics we are constantly attempting to navigate out there in the wild
What I'm attempting to sort out in "The Mating Song" is how men can be better feminists and still express baser, carnal inclinations. As the culture shifts slowly towards greater levels of gender equality, many men are struggling to find healthy and consensual expressions of lust. Deciding which aspects of our sexuality need to be overcome and removed from our repertoires, and which ones are healthy and in need of reconciliation is a challenging problem. 'The Mating Song' tackles this issue in some way or another, and gives voice to that little ooga booga in all of us which cannot be ignored, but needs to be kept in balance in the fight against patriarchy." - Benjamin Hackman