A conversation with Alex Lukashevsky from 2004

This Toronto underground icon—a hero to U.S. Girls, Owen Pallett, and Kevin Drew—is about to drop his first new album in 13 years, so let this interview initiate you into his lawless musical universe

Oct 17, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s and 2000s (and crusty mp3 files from the 2010s) to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars and the occasional classic-rock icon.

This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!

THE OPENERS

RIP Ace Frehley, my first-ever guitar hero, professional spaceman, and master of smoking Les Pauls and unsubtle metaphors.

Speaking of dearly departed childhood heroes: This week on Commotion, I produced an episode on John Candy, who, 31 years after his passing, is back in the spotlight thanks to a new documentary from Colin Hanks on Amazon Prime, as well as a new biography written by one of our guests, Paul Myers, who’s joined here by fellow Candy fans Vish Khanna of Kreative Kontrol and Super Channel reporter Teri Hart:
We also paid our respects to neo-soul messiah D’Angelo, whose cancer-related death this past Tuesday came as an out-of-nowhere gut punch that we’re still struggling to absorb. My colleague Ty Callender put together this loving tribute featuring testimonials from Jay Smooth and Dennis Davis Jr.:
And one more from the Commotion file: I produced this segment featuring Cleveland music-journo extraordinaire Annie Zaleski talking about what it was like to be in the room when Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced the Rush reunion last week, and how the group’s new female drummer is already changing perceptions of the band.
Sam Goldberg has been playing guitar for Broken Social Scene for nearly 20 years now, but he still feels a bit like the black sheep of the BSS family. Even though he’s got a long history singing in other groups, he has yet to take the lead on a BSS tune, and even at those epic BSS shows where it seems like every member gets an opportunity to play something from their solo catalogues, I’ve never seen Sam take the spotlight. And while he’s always got a side-hustle band or two on the go—including his current concern, Sam Jr—he’s not part of the Arts & Crafts roster. Sam Jr’s performance last Friday at Mill’s Hardware in Hamilton underscored the reason why. In sharp contrast to the group-hug energy coursing throughout the BSS ecosystem, Sam prefers a style of sinister sunglasses-at-night psych-rock that’s more spiritually in tune with another notoriously precarious collective enterprise featuring at least four guitarists at any given time: The Brian Jonestown Massacre. (And the connection goes beyond a shared affinity for druggy drones—both entities have collaborated with Toronto vocalist Tess Parks.) Sam Jr has put out two albums to date and, like his live show, both are greatly enhanced by some mood lighting—the redder, the better.

Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:

Click here for the Apple Music version

Breakfast in Fur, “Heaven”: I reviewed the wonderful debut album from this New Paltz, NY band in 2015, and then they seemed to completely disappear. It turns out there was a good reason for that: Shortly after the album’s release, Breakfast in Fur were in a car accident on the way back from SXSW, and bandleader Dan Wolfe suffered a major back injury that sidelined the group for years. But they’re gearing up to release their decade-in-the-making follow-up this November, and its opening track is a perfectly blissful reintroduction to their brand of dreamily propulsive indie rock in the old-school Velvets/Galaxie 500/Yo La Tengo tradition.
Sugar, “House of Dead Memories”: Speaking of long-dormant bands making surprising comebacks—Bob Mould’s other power trio has returned to unleash the fuzz-pop ferocity as if the past 30 years never happened.
Hannah Frances, “The Space Between” + Joanne Robertson, “Always Were”: I’m pairing these two together not because they sound anything alike, but because they each exemplify one of my favourite subgenres: singer/songwriters who use their acoustic guitars to poke holes into the fabric of the space-time continuum and rip open portals into otherworldly alternate realities. Hannah’s deceptively serene finger-pickin’ serenades gradually give way to blasts of orchestral-jazz anarchy, while Joanne’s cello-smeared spirituals aspire to nothing less than the folk Loveless.
Tame Impala, “Not My World”: I’ll admit to being a card-carrying member of the Make Tame Impala Rock Again club, and after struggling to connect with the plush, velvet-wallpaper production of Currents and The Slow Rush, I wasn’t exactly enthused by advance reports that the new Deadbeat heralded Kevin Parker’s all-out immersion into electronic music, as I anticipated a wayward drift into chillout-compilation slop. But Deadbeat actually scrubs away the washed-out, Instagram-filtered sound of post-2015 Tame Impala and takes a refreshingly raw, stripped-down approach to its rave influences, yielding absent-minded oddities like this track, which sounds like Parker vibing out to an early New Order demo in an empty warehouse.
TV Freaks, “Blue Genie, Pt. 1 & 2”: Hamilton’s most reliable hellraisers are back after a five-year break, and they’re making up for lost time with the two-part, 12-minute title-track suite for the upcoming Blue Genie (out Oct. 30) that hits the sweet spot between The Stooges and The Smiths.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Alex Lukashevsky

The date: August 31, 2004

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: Cocktail Molotov (which later became the Bourdain-approved Black Hoof) on Dundas West in Toronto

Album being promoted: Deep Dark United’s Ancient

The context: Since launching this newsletter, I’ve primarily featured conversations with artists you’ve likely heard of, because, after all, these pages don’t click themselves. But my interview archive is filled with local DIY artists who never fully transcended the Toronto scene, either because they ran out of steam before they found a wider audience or, in the case of Alex Lukashevsky, never sought one out in the first place.

For over a quarter century now, Alex has existed as an enigma, tucked inside a riddle, wrapped in a cabbage roll. Whether leading his bands Fell Gang and Deep Dark United, or performing as a solo artist, he’s inhabited a lawless musical universe created through a cosmic collision of broken-down blues, math-rock, avant-folk, and free jazz that’s ultimately bound together by his cryptic yet charismatic street-rabbi speechifying. Alex is a fixture in the improv community that orbits around Toronto’s Tranzac Club, but he’s never been one for touring life—since becoming a dad in the early 2000s, he’s stuck close to home, releasing music on an increasingly sporadic basis while managing a health-food store. In lieu of traditional music-biz promotional mechanisms, word of his music has spread most resoundingly through the enthusiastic endorsement of more popular peers like Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, Owen Pallett, and U.S. Girls. (More on that in the Encores section below.)

But after a 13-year layoff, Alex returns with a new album out next week called OOOH!, and this time, he has the support of an established international imprint (Rotterdam’s Tin Angel Records). Maybe the fact that his son, Charliecello, is now old enough to play in his band will allow him to take his music further afield. If you’re new to Alex’s work, OOOH!’s leadoff track “that musician that’s dead” (which you can preview on the Bandcamp embed below) is perhaps the most accessible entry point, as it showcases his signature idiosyncrasies on a sturdier rock-band foundation. And if it still doesn’t make sense to you, then read the following Eye Weekly profile, which, despite being 21 years old, still serves as a useful guide to navigating Lukashevsky’s labyrinthine musical mind.

“Toronto’s a foolish city because they haven’t discovered Alex Lukashevsky yet. He’s one of the best songwriters this country’s ever been blessed with.” — Kevin Drew, Broken Social Scene

“For me, Deep Dark United represent an entirely new way of approaching music performance. They always play the same songs, they always play them wildly differently. It’s like watching the greatest actors in the world on a Handicam.” — Owen Pallett, The Hidden Cameras/Les Mouches

Yes, Alex Lukashevsky has made a lot of great friends. It’s just that he deserves more strangers.

But then the music he creates with Deep Dark United doesn’t immediately ingratiate itself to pass acquaintances. It doesn’t shake hands, it doesn’t give warm hugs—it greets you by speaking in tongues and dancing around you to a rhythm that exists only in its own imagination. It might make you smile, it might make you very afraid. It sounds quite like nothing you’ve heard before and will most likely never hear again, because Lukashevsky doesn’t make music for the past or the future, but for the instantaneous moment that’s just elapsed as you finished reading this sentence.

His new Deep Dark United album, Ancient, could be the closest music gets to being made in a vacuum in 2004 (while occasionally sounding like a vacuum). Likewise, the album title is Lukashevsky’s comment on what he sees as life’s—and, by extension, music’s—most oppressive enemy: time. For Lukashevsky, time isn’t just something that makes the body grow old, it’s the measure by which all human experience is quantified and contextualized; in other words, it represents a forced attempt to explain that which should only be simply felt and appreciated for what it is. (He compares the constant next-big-thing hype-mongering of music critics to “kids around the Christmas tree, and the mom and dad are dead, and everyone’s like ‘My way!’ ‘No, my way!’”)

As such, the wheezing, combustible music of Deep Dark United—which features singer/guitarist Lukashevsky, synth technician Ryan Driver, organ grinder Tania Gill (organ) and sax-master Brodie West—doesn’t attempt to take you on any kind of journey so much as exist all around you, a foggy diorama of creepy carnival ambience, cartoon-soundtrack mischief, and avant-jazz psychosis. And as you may have noticed, the above band roll call makes no mention of a drummer—all the better to defy pop music’s hegemony of rhythm.

“No one’s keeping time, I love that,” Lukashevsky says over evening drinks, shortly after he’s tucked his newborn daughter and three-year-old son into bed. “I feel like the music is so much heavier without the drums. The minute I stopped playing with a drummer was just like, ‘Oh my god, what have I been doing all this time?’ My friend Rachel says, ‘With a drummer, it’s a song; without a drummer, it’s music.’

“It’s like whenever I listen to really good jazz, it reminds me of my brother and I playing when we were kids: you’re playing a game you’ve made up—you’re changing the rules and you’re playing the game at the very same time. And what exactly are you most excited about: is it the actual game you’re playing, or is it that you’re changing the game while you’re playing it?”

But even if Deep Dark United’s songs possess no easily discernible form—or one that changes radically from show to show—they are rife with suggestions and possibilities. “It’s like Ikea,” says Lukashevsky. “I try to come up with bits or parts or themes and then we just kind of assemble it—but unlike Ikea, there’s no finished product, and we assemble it differently every night.” But regardless what shape they do assume, the songs can all be reduced to a common emotional core: Lukashevsky’s charmingly anachronistic lyricism (“Gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says / I don’t care if she’s a nun or a bawd / either way is a way that pleases the lord”) and blues-inspired truthin’.

You could trace the Soveit-born, North York-reared Lukashevsky’s irreverent approach to his highly musical childhood; at the age of five, he was already playing violin, singing in choirs, and joining his father’s wedding-band onstage. But Lukashevsky actually credits his alternative-reality awakening to two songwriters firmly entrenched into the conventional rock canon: Lou Reed and Paul Westerberg—ironic, considering how Lukashevsky’s songwriting completely shatters the indie-rock orthodoxies that so many Reed/Westerberg followers strive to uphold.

“I find those people are really individuals—they’re unique, and that’s what I love about them,” Lukashevsky explains. “I love the voice, I love the expression—that’s what I really love: hearing someone’s idea.”

Which is Lukashevsky’s way of saying he refuses to buy into the cult of personality that’s created around musicians for the sake of image and, ergo, record sales. And, at the age of 33, he certainly isn’t about to start cultivating his own, even if some of his more popular Toronto indie peers would happily lobby Parliament to have Lukashevsky’s face forever enshrined on our legal tender.

“It’s a question of distribution,” says Lukashevsky, referring to his soul, not his records. “If you’re constantly distributing yourself, you just pick yourself apart and there’s nothing left of you. There’s something to be said for secrecy and giving yourself room to learn.

“It just doesn’t feel right to be constantly giving, giving, giving, because you know you’re going to run out of stuff. That’s why I’m not really interested in it. I’m just trying to make the music better all the time, and hope to get to the point where it won’t alienate everyone. I suppose one day I might get really desperate in terms of making money for music… but for now I love it, and it’s so hard to find things you love.”

ENCORES

The arrival of Lukashevsky’s new record couldn’t have been better timed, given that he recently received a promotional push in the form of the latest U.S. Girls record, Scratch It, which features a cover of Deep Dark United’s “Firefly on the 4th of July.” (OOOH! further cements their mutual-appreciation society, with Meg Remy turning up to sing on the album’s colossal closer, “things keep happening.”)
The aforementioned Kevin Drew produced and contributed vocals to the 2001 Deep Dark United cut “We Two Too Do,” while his Broken Social Scene bandmate Andrew Whiteman quotes a bit of Lukashevsky’s 2002 track “Tammy Two Cocks” on Apostle of Hustle’s “Baby You’re in Luck.”
But if anyone can lay claim to the title of No. 1 Alex Lukashevsky fan, it’s composer Owen Pallett, who, in 2008, released an entire six-song EP (Plays to Please) of Lukashevsky covers. (It comprises tracks 6-11 of the collection linked below.)