‘This perogy tastes funny’
Front Line Assembly’s Bill Leeb talks about alternative means of transportation
Jen Zoratti

“You wanna hear my Winnipeg joke?” asks Front Line Assembly main man Bill Leeb. “What do you get when you cross a perogy with a hit of acid?
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“A free trip to Winnipeg.”

Yeah, that’s one way of doing it.

One guesses the Vancouver-based electro-industrial quintet will travel by more traditional means to play its first show in the ’Peg, and Leeb says he’s anxious to see who will be drawn onto the dance floor.

“We’ve never played Winnipeg, and we’ve never played anywhere in Alberta,” Leeb says. “We’ve really only done Montreal and Toronto. But last time we went to Europe, almost every show was sold out. We’re interested to see who shows up.”

This cross-country jaunt has been a long time coming for FLA, which had to cancel the majority of its Canadian dates in 2006 after a disagreement with the company that provided its tour bus. The dispute effectively ended the band’s tour in support of 2006’s Artificial Soldier, so now the fivesome is using Fallout, a remix project due out April 24, as the hook for a new tour. The fresh effort is a collection of nine remixes primarily drawn from Artificial Soldier.

“It was sort of an unplanned accident that turned into a pretty good thing,” Leeb says of the Fallout project. “It was good because we don’t normally get to work within that domain too often. It was just really about having a few friends do their thing in their own way with our songs. It’s not all dedicated to the dance floor, as a lot of remixes are.”

With the emergence of bands such as MSTRKRFT and Holy Fuck, the indie-dance craze has been generating a lot of hipster hype. Industrial music is often regarded as electronica’s brooding older brother, but Nine Inch Nails hasn’t exactly been banned from mainstream rock radio.

For FLA — which has been around since 1987 after Leeb left oft-dissed cult favourite Skinny Puppy — the North American resurgence of industrial and electronica has both pros and cons.

“North America is such a bandwagon culture,” Leeb says. “Few of us have managed to hang around — but Europe, it never goes away. Ironically, even when people start paying more attention to it, it never gets the attention it deserves.

“Like Fergie using a Kraftwerk sample. It kind of makes you shake your head. But I also think people like Trent Reznor have been doing great things to keep industrial alive in the U.S., and I also think that this culture is still really underground.”

While a lot of new bands have been digging up the industrial underground, Leeb has no problem with new bands and new fans. Technology, however, has changed how the entire scene emerges squinting from its basement hiding places.

“The sampler, the keyboard and Pro Tools have changed the whole machine,” he says. “And computers have taken it even further.

“Now it seems that if you’re computer-literate you can make an album. There are lots of bedroom-warrior guys making tunes in their bedroom — but it’s still nice to go see four guys with a message.”