LNOYL

Within weeks after finishing school in 2005, I began a pilgrimage of sorts. I drove out west to the Island, and began a routine of working, house sitting, and recording. Over this three year period, I called about twelve of these accommodations home. It wasn’t really a purposeful thing to be so vagabond, it was more practical solution – by spending close to nothing on rent, I could invest money into the recording gear and instruments, and really learn the other side of the craft: recording, mixing and eventually producing. On the island, I lived with Uhual boxes full of instruments and equipment. In the corolla they would go, and multiple trips later (until I made a few friends, one of them who owned a truck), there would be a make-shift ‘studio’ where ever the new digs would be. I became really good at minimizing Uhaul box breakage with foam and duct tape. Sometimes, if there was a slight delay in move-in time between accommodations, I’d sit in a park with a car full of recording equipment, watching the ocean waves. I wish I had photo’s of all that, but I didn’t take many pictures back then. I did do a lot of recording though. It might sound kind of hippy-esque, but it wasn’t. I became pretty obsessed and structured myself with making new songs and recordings. The scenic highway mountains, and surrounding ocean views blurred, and ended up in the mix anyways.

After crashing and Jay and Lori’s house for a few weeks, my first living arrangement was in the basement of a vet clinic. It was an unfinished basement, and I lived with pet food and other assorted equipment. There was a shower, microwave, and plug-in kettle for instant coffee, and all in all, it was a pretty cool basement as far as basements go – because if you opened the double doors at night, it would land out beside this shipping dock where those gigantic international freight ships would sit in the ocean, with their cinematic, thousand watt lights blaring into the sky.

There was a vintage X-ray unit in this basement, and Jay let me set up all my equipment on it. First to go on the X-ray table was the relic of our times – the digital Fostex recorder, produced in the late 90′s to early 2000′s. It worked fast and quietly at a time when average PC’s were slow, noisy and expensive. The ghosts of old X-rays must have permeated the old school digital Fostex, because years later, we found some older tracks buzzing out of the fostex’s hard drive that sounded better than they should have (some even made it onto our new LP). Behind the x-ray table, I put the drums, then ran wires to the kitchenette, which became the vocal booth and mix down room. I put up some curtains on the basement windows, so no one could peek inside.

About once a month, there would be a new ebay’d microphone arriving at the clinic. I’d find all these vintage, less common (and cheap) German, Russian, Chinese and U.S. manufactured microphones. Most microphones, up close, look like something out of THX 1138. Is this why engineering is such a male dominated profession? I’d stick mics everywhere and record anything, from the pitter patter of vancouver island rain on tin roof tops to slugging my way through the instruments that I was slowly acquiring. I was incrementally learning these tools, but didn’t know how to put everything together yet, and you could hear that in the music. All my recordings that summer were disappointing – the kind of thing that friends would smile at to be kind, but you knew that the real connection to be made was not there yet. The slightest ability to do something new was enough of a reason to keep going with it I thought, and with every place I moved to, something got better. Although I couldn’t articulate it back then, what I was doing was figuring out the necessary pieces to create a pallet; sorting through the infinite availability of equipment and software that the net provides, to focus on the best representative sounds.

I began to write short, biographic stories to wring out ideas. I’d just heard from an old friend, Jen, who I hadn’t seen for many years, and I’d write up these short stories to show her where I’d been. I’d put these stories to music in the months that followed, and recorded them on the X-ray table. I made most of the noise and recordings overnight or on weekends when the clinic overhead was closed. Although the place was made of thick concrete and had good sound proofing, I wondered what the locals and tourists thought of all those muffled drums beats coming out of the vet clinic. The sound of a cheapo pawnshop keyboard and pump organ also blared out of the vet clinic for a few months. I had no experience with keyboards, until a classmate named Laura left her Casio at my place a year earlier while working on a song of hers. I plugged the Casio into this cheap little tube preamp, which resulted in a fuzzy tone that I got excited about.

Once in a while, Tash would knock on the basement door. I think she heard all the sounds coming out of the basement. She worked in the clinic above, and we became friends. We’d get popcorn, and started watching movies on occasion. She would listen to some of the demo’s I’d made (a lot of them were probably vocal-less, rambling jams, since I didn’t know how to produce myself at that point), and would give me the thumbs up nonetheless. Being a small, island town, people would talk, and rumours would fly. Sigh…I never saw her again after she left town a year or so later.

I moved out of the basement, and my next place was going to be a weeks stay at Trish and Scotts house up the road. Their beautiful home used to be a hostel of sorts, and was now their primary residence (Trish said they occasionally had people  knocking on their door seeking accommodations).  It even had a urinal in one of the bathrooms. I had just received a pair of Russian, pencil bodied mics, and I planned out 4 or 5 songs I wanted to do that week…

addendum….so many mic’s, trails of wire and so many places have left their mark on this album. Some of these mics would not look out of place orbiting the planet, when viewed up close and personal. The telenfunken stereo basket mic, when it worked, showed up on various vocal or acoustic guitar tracks on ‘the plan’. The cello was recorded through just about everything. The blackfire mic came with its original box, which featured 70′s musicians with disco bell bottoms. I bought it from this church that was selling equipment it didn’t use anymore. The microphone featured up top, with its multiple grills, was what Dareck sang ‘got a new kitty’ through. They all coloured the sound in a way unique and relative to their history.