The world was in full approval of what was taking place below in the park, because the forecast rain was nowhere to be found. The gear remained in the backyard as I moved each box into the golden trailer. In the fall of 05′, I had no appreciation or vocabulary for design, so I could not have told you that I had to move the vintage mid century dining set aside in order to place the drums and computer in the dining room. It was just all tables and chairs to me. When I finished hauling all the boxes and the lone suitcase inside (the well built, unfailing, Ralph Lauren suitcase that functioned as my portable dresser drawer for the next 3 years – one of the best gifts I’ve ever received), I took to opening the two Canada post parcels that were sitting on the kitchen island. I thought these items would be neat to mess around with in general…but I really hoped that they would help me to understand sound and design in a way that I quite didn’t grasp yet. The ebay boxes kept arriving because I had a lot of questions. In time, you want a table to cease being just a table, and a chair to reveal that it is not just a chair.
The first box contained a “lynx one” sound card. Any computer, regardless of if it’s a Jonathan Ive designed macbook, or a cheapo microsoft beige box special has a sound card in it. Sound goes in, and sound comes out because of these swappable computer chips. The lynx sound card altogether changed how I interfaced with the computer during the recording process. The lynx was going to clarify the sounds I could hear, and allow me to try a limited amount of higher resolution recording. I knew there had to be something special about this chip even before I received it, because even though it was born and released in the 90′s, it was still being manufactured brand new and sold for its original price. That is a huge feat for something digital, which usually equates to disposable very quickly.
I unpacked the lynx, careful not to squash the tiny yellow boxes and flat black canvasses embossed into the green silicon board. There was a cello on the front box. I have no idea if the lynx engineers realize it, but beyond efficiently conducting electricity, up close, their sound card has remarkable architecture. It looks like a modern city, complete with a downtown district and city hall:
side streets and a board walk,
an outer suburbia,
and a nuclear power plant.
The cables that come with the card look like a mechanized godzilla-like sea monster, contemplating while the townsfolk gaze in awe.
The flip side of the card contains a fog that surrounds anonymous grave markers. Is it amazing that a digital chip looks like a city, or a sign of the times that many cities look like a digital chip?
“Mih-Dee”. It’s “mih dee”, and not “my-dee”, the music store clerk said with a condescending smirk. I let the overpriced midi keyboard slide out of my hands, and left the “recording section” of the long and mcquade music emporium. I’ll support local business, but not if your a jerk. Ebay, on the other hand, is usually not a jerk I mumbled as I opened up the other delivered box. Just like the first time I entered the park, my head was full of preconceptions. I saw the word “midi” associated with a lot of music I didn’t appreciate other than for entertainment or train-wreck value – cheesy, bad sounding sample driven music like “don’t copy that floppy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI). Apparently, midi gear didn’t actually make sounds or music on its own, but you had to connect it to a computer to generate sounds from samples or software. When you hit a piano key, the hammer strikes the string, generating the played note. When you hit a midi piano key, it sends a series of 101010101010′s to the computer, which then gets interpreted as turning a sound on in whatever program you are using. Dareck and I used to make fun of midi stuff, and Marty and I probably would have broken it years earlier. Yet here I was, years later, coveting my first midi keyboard. What convinced me to try this thing out was the pump organ and thrift store keyboards. Hearing things I would normally play on guitar, but massaged through alternative instruments was eye opening. I could start to understand the decisions one could make within an musical arrangement, and the resultant effect on the overall story presented within as song. Unknown to me, Dareck had started collecting old, eighties hardware samplers and midi stuff as well. One of his first songs he wrote this way was called love collision.
The following weekend, with clothes still in the suitcase but boxes unpacked, I set up the mics and recorded two songs. One was called Ash, and the other was a version of Darecks new song, Love collision. Ash came out quite well (I would probably still enjoy it if i heard it today by chance). My drum sounds were a harsh and unbalanced disaster, which I could now hear in fantastic detail thanks to the lynx card, and love collision paid the price. While struggling for ideas to improve the drum sounds for love collision, I tried putting swaths of fabric all over various drums and cymbals. It was an attempt to change their sound so they would record well. I even cut out and stuck a big piece of felt over the highhat. My drum kit looked like a shanty. I embarrassed that poor drum kit, and halfway through playing, all that stuff just fell off anyway. A year later, I did find out what the culprit behind my dismal drums recordings were…
Shortly after finishing ‘love collision’, which was still kind of cool despite my failed technique getting in the way, I got in touch with a girl I knew from school. Earladeen lived in Victoria, which was just a drive over the mountain away (things were cool that way out west; to get somewhere, you went over the mountain or through the valley). Earladeen was an attractive, athletic girl, in the process of figuring out her post-school world just like I was. We met up for coffee. I was really enthusiastic about the recordings I had just finished, and she was kind enough to listen to them. She liked love collision. Earladeen was house sitting in this awesome neighbourhood, close to the water. She was just learning to play guitar, so I pulled the acoustic out of the trunk.
The acoustic guitar is an arthritic old beast. It has been the acoustic in the trunk, the acoustic in the snow, the acoustic on the floor and underneath the stairs. It’s that kind of guitar. It has never required the use of a case, because it is undomesticated with a thick hide. Dareck was the first to possess the acoustic (actually, I think he bought it), way back in high school. Dareck covered the guitar in shag carpet. Later, he stripped it down, painted it green, and glued a compass onto it that fell off.
There is a single dehydrated, organic nacho in the body of the guitar, that has been there for 14 years. You can shake the guitar around and it rattle via the nacho. Marty is a messy eater, and he dropped it in there when he took the guitar. I once picked up my electric guitar case, and a whole dusting of orange cheato dust came out – Marty was hungry and wanted to play at the same time, apparently. When I moved to Guelph to start school, I took this acoustic guitar, and Marty came over and wrote phrases all over it with pencil and marker. It’s final transformation involved replacing the bridge with a cut segment of coat hanger. It’s been there ever since, and the guitar is more playable than ever (it even has a pretty unique twang). Even though the acoustic is ghetto, I would feel bad if anything happened to it, because it has more than earned its keep – it’s kept me company when the best of what I could record sounded like it its own battered shell.
Earladeen was a quick study, and I was surprised at how quickly she picked up on the chords, and most importantly, understood rhythm. We went out for a bite to eat, and on the way back, the conversation dried up real fast until there was no talking. I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, or what to say. As it turned out, I think I took corners in my toyota too fast, and she became nauseous. The second time I saw Earladeen, she had her own apartment in Victoria. I remember these cool little animal shaped toothbrush holders she had in the bathroom – she gave me one. It’s a little horse that sticks to the mirror and holds the brush. We went out to this pot luck that night, and there was a table full of munchies and meatballs in the centre. I drove home that night, across the mountain, and started to feel a little warm as I got to the peak. The vomiting started later that night. That was the first time I’ve experienced food poisoning. I haven’t seen Earladeen since.
2012 by