Photo of World News with Ben Goodman (middle, CJSW).

World News performed during Sled Island on Friday, June 19th at GULBAR.

Interview Audio:

Interview Transcript:

Ben Goodman
This is Ben Goodman from CJSW 90.9fm here with World News. Introduce yourselves before we start.

Bill (World News)
I’m Bill

Q (World News)
and I’m Q.

Ben Goodman
How are you enjoying your time in Calgary?

Bill (World News)
Yeah, it’s always a great time in Calgary. We played GULBAR last night, it was awesome. Great venue, great turnout. We played last year as well, and I think word spread around, so yeah. it’s been going great so far.

Ben Goodman
How do you like playing Sled, and like the festival overall?

Q (World News)
Oh, it’s excellent. It’s a really supportive bunch of people and we feel really taken care of.

Bill (World News)
I think for us we very much make art music and it just feels nice to be in a festival with like a real mix of genres, and a place where it’s appreciated, because we don’t really fit in a rock, or I mean, even electronic stuff we don’t, we’re a very live hardware electronics, so we don’t really fit with DJs that well either. So, it’s definitely good to find a place where it’s just a central arts festival.

Ben Goodman
it’s such a cool live show. I saw the clips from last night. Describe your live show, again, the hardware you have on stage is just incredible.

Bill (World News)
Yeah, it’s quite a thing flying it all here, and definitely flying by the seat of our pants. I’m very happy when nothing gets broken in transit, but basically we’ve got two three-tier keyboard stands where we face off against each other. So, on the bottom level, we’ve generally got drum machines and samplers then we have a synthesizer each, and then the top level is all more synths and effects and loops, and then for this show we were running two small desks, and we do a lot changing the rig around in the moment.

Ben Goodman
That’s so cool. I’ve been loving getting into the On Steroids album. For some origin story stuff, how did you two meet? What made you want to get into playing music, in general?

Bill (World News)
You do this one.

Q (World News)
I guess we met at a party in Toronto when we both moved there, and both were doing our own music thing then and just started hanging out. World News started with our old buddy Tyler. I was always in the music videos, hanging out.

Bill (World News)
Tyler left the band to go and make babies in Hamilton, and at that point I was sort of in despair, trying to figure out what I was going to do, because the way we make music is quite specific. It’s all written through a process of improvisation, so that’s how we’re able to bring it together live, because we have a pretty stable setup that we record all our improvisations, and then they half of those become the recordings, all the beds of the recordings that end up stay on the album, On Steroids. Basically Tyler left. I was like, “Oh, what am I going to do? And then Quentin, who was lurking in the press shot of our first ever World News press shot, he was hiding behind a bush, and you can see him. He wanted a music project, and he had a bunch of synths at home, so I said, “bring it over” and then it suddenly fell into place, where I was like, “hmm” It’s definitely a different sound in the four years since Quentin’s been in the band. We’ve been doing World News now for nine years and it’s a different sound, but we’ve kept the process and the basis of what we do kind of consistent, so it just felt wrong to change the name of the project.

Ben Goodman
I was going to mention the name. I love the name, World News 808909 which kind of tells you what it is right there, from the instruments. It’s just cool. Talk a bit more where the name came from

Bill (World News)
One of the first songs we had there was a lyric that we were just improvising, or I was improvising, where it said “they called it World News.” It was just being sarcastic, telling people to open their eyes and have a look at what’s happening in the world. And then we just took it from there. And since then there’s a British World News indie band that’s come in and muscled us out of it. So, if you search Spotify make sure you find the electronic one. We’re just World News on Spotify, but 808909 88 909 is a great way to find us on all of our socials and things.

Ben Goodman
Who are some of your touchstones and inspirations? Listening to it feels really singular and not derivative of anything. This comes in the tradition of the synth masters or analog electronics, I thought of some Giorgio Moroder. I heard a little bit on the thing, he’s an all-time favorite of mine, on a song like “Hype” I kind of hear that , which is incredible. Talk about some of your touchstones.

Bill (World News)
We’re influenced by a whole range of stuff, but I say we sit between kind of an alternative, post-punk vocal style, which we then combine with… Chemical Brothers is undoubtedly a massive influence. People say they hear LCD Soundsystem. It’s not something that we’ve ever really tried to mimic, and they have a lot of acoustic instruments, but we definitely pull from… it’s very driving what we do. Any other favorites for you?

Q (World News)
Oh, Liars, for sure. That’s something that I’ve been listening to for ages and didn’t really know anybody else who was. And then me and Bill met

Bill (World News)
I’m a massive Liars fan, yeah. Big up ‘They Were Wrong, So They Drowned’ what an album.

Ben Goodman
I want to get into the recording process of On Steroids. I love that you record in the small Ontario cottage, bringing that kind of analog feeling to not just the instruments used, but also how you live your lives. It’s, to talk about a musically very different vibe, like what Bob Dylan and The Band did when they went to Big Pink and Woodstock and just were just jamming, this fountain of creativity., What do you love about the recording process, and disconnecting to connect to your true artistic inspiration?

Bill (World News)
Yeah, so the album, half the tracks were conceived and recorded in Muskoka, like you said, and that was really nice, because we both live in downtown Toronto. I live in a basement. I’ve been a mole for the last 10 years, so getting outside of that, we’ve got all this set up there, and we’re overlooking the lake, and we just basically go and dip our toe in the water, so to speak, and just see what comes of it. That particular five day cottage session we did really formed the basis of the album, and we’re very much purely electronic, we do use some samples, I’ve got samples of that I did in the Amazon rainforest so we do pull in some organic sources, but it’s almost totally electronic. We like being outside and making the music helps, because I feel like we’re trying to pull something organic out of the electronic we get it all humming, it’s all whirring, it’s going, there’s something grounded about it. There’s a humanity when it comes to jamming. We throw a lot of the stuff that sounds too spacey away, and we tend to gravitate towards more of like organic stuff.

Ben Goodman
I want to get into the improv process, because I was speaking to Nate Waters the musician earlier in the week. He was talking about his recording process with his group, where they did hours of improv, now it’s just a task of like whittling it down or finding the best bits to form, to use, which he’s had listening parties to figure it out. How does that look for you guys in World News? How do you whittle down hours of improv to make a song?

Bill (World News)
So we record 16 channels simultaneously when we improvise, so that’s really helped us. Wheras before it was like “who’s making that sound? Is that the Moog? Is that the Deep Mind? Is that this machine, that machine? Where did it come from?” And then we just had stereo recordings of the whole mix. So basically that gives us like a real nice control over all the music we make. We’ve got a lot of music, hours and hours and hours, and then it’s a very diplomatic process, so we both go through, listen to the music, and you can generally feel where it comes together. There’s something, so wherever we feel like there’s anything at all, and sometimes there’s half an hour of just drivel. It’s just the nature, you can’t always be on form. Then it’s basically a democratic process. We both listen to them, we clip them up, we listen to them, and we agree which ones are our top ones, which ones are our second ones, and then when we both hit a top one, we generally take those ideas forward.

Ben Goodman
To really get into On Steroids some more. I love it’s kind of like a seamless mix in a subtle way. The use of vocals. Like on “Ejection,” The “are you talking mad shit?” line, and then the “you had a chance” refrain on “Last Chance.” The analog version of some of that ’90s electronic, like Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, with the repeated refrain, which is very close to my heart. So I love that stuff. Which again makes World News feel so singular, so talk about your approach.

Bill (World News)
Yeah, I think in terms of the lyrics, it’s stuff that gets repeated because we’re improvising.

Bill (World News)
It’s what I love about that process, I’ve been doing it for so long now, that I learn I don’t have to think about what I’m saying in the moment, like it’s all recorded there on tape, a funny little quip. “Move on Me” which is our new single, there’s a section at the end of that song that we recorded it, and it’s the audio on the track, but I don’t know what I’m saying. So when we do it live, I just sort of give it some syllables and make it more Sigor Ros, I guess. There’s this element of improvising lyrics where sometimes things just start falling into place, and when they do, I listen back a year later and I can kind of feel what I was speaking. I’m speaking to myself in the moment and when I come back to listen to it, I’m like “oh I can see why I put those words together in that order, because I was feeling this.” For the “Mad Shit” one, that one specifically just basically being like “shut up and calm down.” When we’re improvising in a moment where someone’s got on my nerves. How do you feel about the vocals?

Q (World News)
Oh, how do I feel about the vocals?

Bill (World News)
Do you want to say something?

Q (World News)
Yeah, sorry, I’m joking.

Bill (World News)
Quentin’s been working, so we’ve been blending the vocals, and you know, sometimes it’s nice. We’ve been working on trying to get more ones where the vocals come together, both of us simultaneously interact, but that’s really tricky to do when we’re improvising. So, it’s just we’re going to be entering a new phase of writing, you know, over the course of the next year.

Ben Goodman
Another song I want to single out is “Magazines.” It kind of has some almost news TV clippy sounds, which are really cool, and then some kind of watery sounds, just a lot of cool sounds in that song. How did you achieve this, and what your process of making “Magazines”?

Bill (World News)
Okay, so giving away the secrets now. So the audio I recorded, it’s a beach in Goa. I did a month travelling in India, and that was one of the recordings I made there. In addition to the birds that was also out of the back of my chalet. I woke up and those birds were so loud because you’re staying in a little hut, so I just did a few recordings of those and then I clean them up with the 404 which is the sampler that we use. I generally just make a bank of things with the clips, they are actually on an old reel, when I bought this old tape machine, which we used in the production of the album quite a bit, sometimes the digital stuff can sound a bit digital, so we sometimes then push it to tape, and it’s great for vocals as well, because if you’re like “hmm, these vocals aren’t quite hitting” it just flattens it in a way, which is really nice. When I bought that tape machine, it had this reel that they’d recorded a bunch of stuff off the radio. It’s like the Queen visiting Canada in 1960 and there’s all these like crazy adverts about perfumes and what men want, the smell of a perfume, it goes like “smell like men want!” There’s this one little clip that we clipped up where CBC cameras will follow them, they’re talking about the Queen’s visit.

Bill (World News)
It feels very Canadian, yeah. The music we make, I’m originally from England, I’ve been in Canada for 10 years now. Quentin’s born and raised Canadian, so you know it’s nice to have that. It feels very Canadian, the music that we make, even though it’s very different. So, yeah, those little motifs.

Ben Goodman
You mentioned you are from Toronto. Any artists from the Toronto scene that inspire you or want to shout out?

Bill (World News)
Absolutely. So, Kali Horse are a band we are very close with. They played a couple of times at the festival, so they do some amazing stuff, and their albums and music is great. Edmund Stay is another one. Edmond Stay is awesome. I saw them play at Do West Fest in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. MoonBean are good friends of ours. Colin from MoonBean filmed two of our videos, like the “Move On Me” video, which is honestly one of my favourite things we’ve ever done.

Bill (World News)
So, yeah, MoonBean’s a big one. There’s so much good music in the scene.

Ben Goodman
Just to wrap, what does the rest of 2026 hold for World News? Anything you to tease?,

Bill (World News)
So we’re kind of at the end of the cycle right now. This is the most prolific period for World News ever. In the last 12 months, well, in the last 18 months, we released an EP, a double A side single, and an album, and five music videos. We put out the album in October, On Steroids, give it a listen. It’s a lot of work, and it’s weird. It’s not easy listening music, but I do feel if you sit back and let it wash over you, it’ll take you places. At least, that’s how it feels for me. I wouldn’t say it’s the end of World News, because we’ll be back, but there’s nothing massive in the pipeline, apart from hours and hours of recordings, which we can start trudging through, and then we’ve got to get into the process of making music again, because the way that we improvise and make the music, it takes about three months for us to get up to a standard where stuff starts sparking immediately. You have to get the process going, so, that’s that’s what the future’s looking like for us.

Ben Goodman
it’s been such a joy. I’ve been listening On Steroids a lot, and excited for everything you guys do in the future. So, thank you so much for taking the time.

Bill (World News)
Our pleasure. Thanks for having us.