karol orzechowski is a bit of a local legend. The local musician has a prolific catalogue of doom rap under the moniker “garbageface,” and put out All War is Spiritual War, an album of instrumental music at the tail end of last year as part of his side project Gnostic Front. 

More to the point, orzechowski isn’t shy about his politics. His musical endeavours are often a vessel for making a point. orzechowski's records as garbageface make use of his trademark heavy production to spit bars aimed at political and religious institutions. 

Before releasing All War is Spiritual War, he published excerpts from a longform essay meant to accompany the album, which details the environmental impact of American imperialism, specifically the United States Army’s logistics corps. 

He wears his heart on his sleeve, if only you read the liner notes. 

However, one of karol (he’ll insist you call him karol)’s periodic projects with which many will be less familiar are his impromptu “Hellection” streams. 

I first became aware of these streams, where he projects a bit-crunched newsstream of an election with its audio feed scored by droning and electronic noise, back in November of 2024, when he invited me to sit in on a screening of the U.S. federal election. 

The effect of the distorted video and eerie instrumental score was hypnotic, almost hallucinatory, an appropriate accompaniment for what in many ways felt like watching a car crash happen in slow motion. 

The week before Canada’s recent federal election, karol began promoting an accompanying Hellection stream and—knowing I wanted to attend—I seized upon the opportunity to talk to him about his inspiration for this ad-hoc project and the feelings the present rise of Conservatism in North American politics have instilled in him. 

Evan Robins: Hi karol. 

garbageface: Hello! How are you doing? 

ER: I’m alright. Busy busy. We’ve just had the next editors in; getting them ready to take over things. 

GF: Resizing crowns and getting measurements for royal girdles? 

ER: Exactly. Getting military uniforms tailored for the takeover. 

GF: So what do you want to know about Hellection 2025? 

ER: Good question. Walk me through what exactly this is, because I was at your last Hellection night (for the U.S. election), but I imagine most of my readers don’t really know what this is. 

GF: I’ve been doing these election streams...gosh, since 2016, since the first Trump administration.  

It started off just doing this sort of thing at the Spill. It didn’t really feel like a big deal back then, and it’s still not a big deal now. There was just always things happening at the Spill, so I thought “You know, I’m gonna watch the election anyway. I’ll tape some of the keys on my synth down and we’ll put this stream up on a projector.”  

I guess I just kept doing it. 

The intent is always just to provide something ominous, whatever that may be. In this case, if I'm believing the polls that I'm seeing, we might see a Liberal minority or a Liberal majority even, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna play some fucking celebratory music. 

It’ll be ominous the whole way through, regardless of the outcome. 

There’ll probably be some minimal beats, but it’ll be kind of progressively happening through the night; electronic drone, maybe some rhythms here and there. There’s a cash bar. 

Apart from that, I’m not trying to be the entertainment for the night. I mean, we could also just put the election on the screen and just all watch it together. That would pretty much accomplish the same goal. The ominous music would just be in our heads rather than playing over the speakers. 

ER: Is the cash bar part of the ominousness? 

GF: (laughs) I mean, do you want it to be? I suppose it depends on your relationship with alcohol. 

ER: On election nights, mine is not good. 

GF: I’ll be exercising moderation. 

ER: Was it a conscious choice do you think, when you started it? Obviously, a lot of people viewed the 2016 election as this sort of exceptional thing. 

GF: I don’t wanna be one of those people who like, revises history and says “Oh, I knew that Trump had a chance.” People didn’t think that Trump had a chance of winning. 

I think it just seemed like another excuse to have a party or get together. I don’t think it had much to do with the politics of it, or the specific moment being more consequential than any other election, because I don’t think anyone really believed that was gonna happen. I definitely didn’t. 

I do remember that night getting like, remarkably drunk, once it seemed like it wasn’t such a decisive Hillary win—not that I cared about Hillary winning anyway!  

But when it didn’t seem like it was gonna be the decisive trouncing that everyone expected, I do remember getting like, very very drunk after and then going to bed and waking up the next morning, looking at the results going “Damn!” 

ER: Do you think, then, that the politics of streaming the election through this framework have changed or become more of a focus in subsequent years that you’ve done this, where perhaps the political consequences of those elections have been better understood? 

GF: I have this weird bubble effect happening around me, where for the last decade, it’s felt like myself and people that I know are much more interested in elections and politics. 

And yet I keep feeling like every single election now is like, a record low voter turnout. 

I don’t know where there is a disconnect happening between what it feels like for me. It feels like people are tuning out en masse, whereas it feels like a lot of people that I know seem to be caring more. 

But I don't know. I saw some things about this particular election, that advanced voting has been a record turnout. 

ER: Yeah, I voted on the Saturday of Easter Weekend and I heard that people were lining up in some places, which seems at odds with what I experienced during the provincial election where every polling station was a ghost town. 

GF: Yeah, I went and voted early at the Advanced Polls and when I got to the Elections Canada office they actually weren’t set up yet, and they handed me a piece of paper that said at the top: “I vote for:___” 

I had to write in the name of the person I was voting for, and then they put it in a special envelope, and then that went into another special envelope and then into the ballot box. It seemed more official once they did that. 

ER: You could have voted for Joe Biden. 

GF: Who’s to say! 

ER: At past garbageface shows, especially around previous elections, you’ve been fairly critical of voting—is that a fair assessment? 

GF: I mean, I’ve voted in every election since I was 18. But I also don’t think that voting is the be-all and the end-all. 

I think people have a very skewed sense of what their political responsibility in life is. I think for most people there’s this idea of like, you know, “Vote like your life depends on it,” and it’s like—if your life depends on it, voting is not what you should be doing. 

You know, there’s a really broad spectrum of political activity and voting is at the very minimal end of it. 

I know some people who would be very quick to shame someone for not voting. My position is like—look, if you don’t want to vote, I hear you. Like fair enough, cause I don’t like any of these motherfuckers to be honest. 

ER: Oh my God, yeah. I hear ya. 

Obviously coming from the trans community I’ve heard a lot of people scared about the sort of existential danger that they believe a Conservative majority would present, though I think even when it comes to the NDP, I wish they would do better. 

Even though they’re the “better” option, depending on your views, I resent handing my vote over to people who are promising, like, the bare minimum. 

GF: I do think it’s been an interesting election because the Conservative movement in Canada has really thrown their ideology in with the Trumpian way of kind of presenting and talking about things in the kinds of “culture war” issues that they push on. 

And I think in a lot of ways, because of how terribly things have swung down South, it’s kind of backfiring. 

I think it might be tempting to kind of dismiss them as a warmer and fuzzier threat, but you know, I was working in a newsroom when Pierre Poilievre was first elected to parliament in 2003 or 2004 and he’s been an absolute fucking ghoul the entire time he’s been around. 

In some ways it reminds me a lot of JD Vance in terms of like his ability to kind of sound like a normal person, and I think that’s the most dangerous part is the kind of hardcore Conservatism that sounds reasonable. 

I do think that stuff is a threat, and I do think that it’s different from Liberalism, that it is different from whatever the NDP is, and is different from the Greens or whatever. 

Yeah, I’d rather have anything other than a Conservative majority, but I also know that once, let’s say, the Liberals win, it will feel like a victory for about two or three weeks and then we can go back to all being disappointed together. 

There’s these common refrains like, “Well I’m gonna do a strategic vote and then we gotta get to the real work.” But then the “real work” never happens. 

ER: I think “disappointment” is a good word to sum up politics these days. 

GF: (laughs) Sure. 

ER: Any other thoughts you’d like to share? 

GF: You know, I hope that this isn’t the only place that this is happening. I hope that somewhere, in some other small town in Canada, there’s a bunch of weirdos who are watching the election while there’s noise show going on. 

ER: Maybe this can be a call to action. 

GF: (laughs) Yeah, wonderful. That’d be great. 

Monday night’s Hellection proved somewhat subdued, perhaps tempered by virtue of it being a school night. A smattering of people—just shy of two dozen at its peak—milled about in The John at Sadleir House, chatting, drinking, and commiserating over their shared hopes (or lack thereof) for the electoral outcome. 

The Liberals took an early lead in the maritimes, and the wave of despair I’d experienced at the November show failed to take as strong a hold as it had then. Most people began filing out after the CBC declared a projected Liberal government, with most of the stragglers taking leave after Emma Harrison was confirmed as MP-elect for Peterborough. 

Partisan sympathies were largely absent in those I was talking to. garbageface fans, it seems, share a certain ambivalence towards the pageantry of election night. 

At about half-past midnight, karol cut the feed and bade goodnight to myself and the two other people still hanging around. 

Secure (if not content) in the knowledge of a Liberal victory helmed by Mark Carney, we went our separate ways; the election over, the real work yet to start. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.