Folk-punk duo embrace better living through busking
The Rough Sea is a folk-punk get-up that takes lo-fi living to heart. Accustomed to singing for their supper the dynamic duo comprised of 20-year-old Christina Laurin and her 26-year-old paramour Justin Kops prefers earning $100 an hour busking on the streets of their native Ottawa to punching a time-clock in order to earn their daily bread.
“We used to busk all the time and we still do it whenever we’re broke” confirms singer and ukulele-maestro Laurin. “I don’t have time for a job. I had one in the winter for a bit and it was too stressful. Making it to work then a gig and then having to get up and then being responsible enough to get up do it all over again in the morning. It was just too much. I’d rather be busking on the street any day weather permitting.”
Laurin teamed up with her partner in love and music through friends of friends thanks to Ottawa’s thriving indie scene. Drawn together by a mutual love of acoustic instrumentation the couple strives to apply the same freewheeling philosophy that guides their day-to-day life to their artistic endeavours using banjo guitar ukulele kazoo and vocals to weave their understated yet imaginative musical magic.
“We met at a party at the old Cathcart house in Ottawa” she recalls. “At the time I was playing with a crust-punk band called Belligerent and Justin was doing his solo thinger called Cap’n KoP$. When we started living together we heard from friends all over the country who have bands and wanted us to hook them up with gigs in Ottawa. We said ‘Why don’t you play at our house?’”
That house played a pivotal role in the band’s development. Unfortunately Laurin and Kops have had to move on.
“We throw big parties in the Greenbelt collective” she continues. “It’s a very intimate environment in Centre Town near downtown Ottawa. It’s the cheapest place to live but unfortunately we’ve had to leave it behind recently. One of our roommates Jackson did a very punk thing and put all the dirty dishes under the sink. Two weeks later we discovered it had turned to black mould city and [we] had to get our landlord to let us out of our lease. It feels like a sad kind of dying moving out of there but Justin’s dad found us a great old van so we’re living in it for the summer and camping our way from show to show.”
Last year saw The Rough Sea release their first E.P. Drawn in Crayon: A Tale. Named for a joke lullaby Kops wrote for Laurin the three-song album effectively captures the clever sensitivity with which they treat their musical subject matter and each other. Able to successfully translate their signature “$5-a-head” house-party throwdowns to larger venues the couple has wooed audiences at Toronto’s North by Northwest festival with their disarming confessionals and pretty ditties for the past two years. Despite these gains the ever-humble couple shies from the limelight and is apt to blush and giggle their way through songs inspired by “booze cigarettes roadside mental breakdowns campfires morbid fairy tales solidarity and corruption.” An exercise in parity Justin’s rough vocals provide a solid foundation for Christina’s softer tones just as their anarcho-vegan punk esthetic complements their strictly D.I.Y. acoustic presence. No amps no soundboards just nose-rings vulnerability and raw talent. Justin’s “O-P-E-N R-O-A-D” knuckle tattoos and a handwritten cardboard busking sign that reads “$2 Away from Owning the World” say it all.
“Our friend Menno [Versteeg] has been incredibly supportive of us and helped us record Drawn in Crayon after seeing us perform live” says Laurin. “We’re also excited that a friend’s company Cobraside has agreed to release our stuff digitally. The plan is to head back into the studio again later this summer and then to travel through Western Canada in the fall in our van with our pet rat Otis. He’s always on my shoulder. Although a friend of ours warned us that he was busking in Alberta and when the pet rat that lived in his guitar poked his head out of the hole a big cop who was watching grabbed it and killed it! So we’ll have to be mindful of ‘the rat patrol’ when we come through Calgary.”
