Biography

FemBots are a Toronto based band led by the song-writing team of Brian Poirier and David MacKinnon. Formed in 1997 as a home recording experiment the project took on a life of it’s own, eclipsing the duo’s “real” band and becoming their main focus. FemBots sound draws on folk, Americana, classic soul music and often includes found sounds and everyday items repurposed as musical instruments. Over the course of their first ten-year run FemBots transformed from a duo, playing instruments raided from thrift stores and dumpsters, into a full band with a line up drawing on a who’s who of the Toronto indie scene. They released four critically acclaimed records between 2000 and 2008. After a decade of recording and touring the band took what was supposed to be a short break. The break lasted almost ten years. In 2018 FemBots were asked to provide music for the CBC series Farm Crime. Their rekindled collaboration led to an outpouring of new music. The result of that spark is Transfigurations, the first FemBots release in 14 years. Joined by long time collaborators Nathan Lawr and Greg Smith the band digs deep into an acoustic set of songs about love, loss and mortality largely informed by the loss of MacKinnon’s wife to cancer in 2020. Transfigurations is a spare and bare bones record compared to its predecessors. Gone is the exotic instrumentation and orchestrations of their previous work. In its place is an unadorned directness that put’s their words and voices front and centre.