Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
To date, there have been 77 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, Fuzzpeddler is the New Music Monday highlight!
Fuzzpeddler is a three-piece heavy metal band from Victoria, comprised of Rich Noonan on bass and vocals, Zac Vandergugten on guitar and vocals and lastly, Samuel Nadeau on drums.
They started playing together back in 2022, while Vandergugten and Noonan were roommates, but it was more just for fun than anything.
The duo eventually moved apart, but Noonan ended up living with Nadeau, who entered the fold and allowed them to jam together as a three-piece with a bit more intention.
“That was when we formed the basis of the band—we kind of got our sound and started taking things more seriously,” said Vandergugten.
“We really started to get into it—making music, having fun and playing shows,” Noonan added.
The band says they are all fans of metal, but have varying tastes in subgenres. Where Vandergugten and Noonan both lean more into classic heavy metal, Nadeau loves doom and death metal.
Fuzzpeddler says that through their taste in music, and the three-piece dynamic, they were able to find a sound unique to them.
In 2023, the band released a demo tape before honing their sound and working towards recording again.
“It was just a rough cut, it was five tracks, and we kind of sat on that for a while,” continued Vandergugten.
“We’ve got a bunch of material now that we’ve just kind of decided to release as little collections of singles.”
The most recent of these came with two singles, packaged together as Duality I, which Fuzzpeddler says will have a followup in the months to come.
“Those songs in particular, really fit part and parcel with the music we wrote for the demo, so it’s kind of a culmination of our earlier songwriting and now we’re focused on bringing some of our new stuff to light,” explained Vandergugten.
Highlight Tracks – “The High Priestess” and “Event Horizon”
Vandergugten and Noonan share the responsibility of being primary songwriters in the band and each contributed one song to Duality I.
According to Vandergugten, “High Priestess” was written about experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
“I wrote it quite a while back, as there’s kind of a trilogy of songs—two songs from the demo, one called ‘Thus Smoked Tharasustra’ and the other was ‘Vide Supra’—and then ‘High Priestess’ is the third in that series of songs,” he said.
“They’re kind of a mish-mash of my interest in western hermeticism and esotericism, and frankly, psychedelic drugs.”
He added that they represent the integration period of psychedelics, and trying to make sense of drug-induced experiences after taking them.
Vandergugten says that an added layer of the song is about paying women reverence by kneeling down before a woman on a throne.
As for Noonan’s contribution, he says that “Event Horizon” was mostly inspired by the sci-fi/horror movie by the same name.
“A lot of the vocals I write have a lot to do with sci-fi, and this one in particular came from Event Horizon the movie,” explained Noonan.
“It’s like, ‘where we’re going, we don’t need eyes to see.’ It’s a portal into hell, that sort of thing, using dark imagery.”
He revealed that a lot of the lyrics come straight from the film’s lines.
Noonan also noted that in the second verse, he felt stuck while writing, so he pulled from his own life and personal relationships, specifically his relationship with his father.
“You’d never know unless I told you,” he laughed.
Check out “High Priestess” below:
Fuzzpeddler chooses to only have their music available through Bandcamp, because their ethics as a band do not align with those of the major streaming services, so click here to listen to the rest of Duality I.
“No shade to people who use [Spotify], I just prefer being as independent as possible and ultimately I want the music to be the focus of what I do,” said Vandergugten.
The band just played a show in Duncan over the weekend, but they have a couple more in the works.
In Victoria, they will be playing at Little Fernwood on June 3rd alongside Poors.
They are also excited to be a part of the lineup of a new festival called the Mandrake Abbey Art and Music Festival, which is taking place on August 8th in Bridgelake, BC.
“This is the second year they’ve done it. I went out there last year and checked it out and it was absolutely fantastic,” said Vandergugten.
“They have a beautiful property out there and Hedonist from Victoria headlined last year—it was really great.”
Aside from those two gigs, Fuzzpeddler is working on organizing some other shows on Vancouver Island and is working on getting another release out soon.
To stay in the loop with future shows and releases, follow Fuzzpeddler on Instagram.
Related:
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“I have been listening to CFUV since I was 12 or 13-years-old,” said Vandergugten.
“I first discovered them when I was going to punk shows as a young kid and it stuck with me forever. It’s an amazing resource.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Fuzzpeddler in the comments below!
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source victoriabuzz.com ’
