New songs abound….this one should be called “sub-zero”. Teamed up with James Elliott, an ON sponsored sprinter/trainer/athlete to film this. We both froze….

Dremel-plywood piece Dareck was working on. I think he goes through 30 dremel bits per piece or something like that.

They used a variety of practical lighting  and dimmers to set the tone, with attention to detail with shadows and reflections.

The lighting needed to catch the string vibrations of Kirk’s cello was so bright that it put spots in your eyes if you looked straight on. We used the same technique here as for the tattoo machine needle – hi speed shutter.

Fast shutter on the cello strings…

Shades and filters were swapped out a few times if the light just wasn’t where they wanted it…

Thanks to Robbie, Rian & Adam;

Richard, Mitch, Monty and Calah let me film them doing their thing – custom tattoos. I set the images along to our song ‘isolation & company’.

After being shirtless for a few hours, the recipient of this particular tattoo turned and basked underneath the hot lamp I had set up. I pointed the camera at her back, and through the viewfinder saw that as she breathed, the figure on her back breathed in turn. With each breath, his arms and wings postured in an anatomically correct way. He was dark, alive, and discovering the boundaries of the world he had been born into. Wow…

I had one unshielded continuous hot light so close to Calah…it must have raised her body temp a few degrees well above comfortable but she kept on going. I’ve burned myself on those lights before. At one point, I put the camera on a gorrillapod, and gripped the whole set up to the clients upper thigh (i told him it would feel…well,  weird). That way, I could get this perspective while his calf was being tattooed while lying down.

I had a buddy carve a hole in this bucket, and cut some glass, so I could film something that Calah had mentioned. When they rinse the tip of the machines in a jar of water, the ink blasts out like a supernova, and radiates all over. I got it from the top, side and from below. Mitch stayed late to film that one…

To film Monty, I had only two angles I could get. The chair was set to lying position, and Monty is a big dude, so we had less room. I set the tripod to maximum hight, and stood on a chair using tippee-toes to look down to see what he was doing….

They dragged my sisters unconscious body out of this.

Can you tell what end is the front, and what is the rear?

She was perforated on the inside, but still alive, so they summoned the priest to the emergency room to read her the last rites.

But she survived.

Then things took a turn for the unexpected. They got worse.

It was like her body still wanted her dead. As if scratching the dirt on top of the grave was enough to set her off in that direction for good. And the most unexpected of all? The medical system that was supposed to help her instead took a spade to that scratch and dug it even deeper.

Im going to tell that story.

(If I could pinpoint my most important sonic influence within the music I’ve made with Dareck and Kirk, then this would be it. I put it all in the pitch shifting).

Because I used uncommon and very fast shutter speeds, you can see the needle and gun oscillate, and even transfer that energy to Mandy’s skin. The image darkens with noise as a result, but the video posted above reveals things you can’t see with your naked eye.

The opening and closing scenes were filmed in my kitchen by attaching my camera to a skateboard, and having it crawl down a plank of wood towards the tattoo stencil which was suspended by a microphone stand. I put the stencil above an airvent on the floor, and turned up the central heating so it would blow air and excite the stencil. A chicken rotisserie and string at the top of the plank allowed the skateboard to drift down at a relatively constant speed. Maybe we’ll call all this “kitchen-core”. It’s the best thing i’ve made in here so far, on or off the grill…(p.s. fortier thanks for lending me the macro lens).

Dedicated to the national trust…Dareck wrote this song, and the first time I heard it, I was reading the final chapters of the last Harry Potter book. So the last chapter of that series and this song is sort of tied together for me.  It’s fitting that this video is tied in with fantasy literature…

message in the machine from kristopher chandroo on Vimeo.

Shortly after we pressed our LNOYL album, I picked up this portable, dual 1012 turntable to play at our vinyl release. It’s housed in an old school teak box, and has to be at least 30 years old (closer to 40 according to this http://www.dual-reference.com/tables/1210.htm).

At first spin, it squeeked and squeeled – this thing had not been lubed since day one. So I unscrewed the bottom, and witnessed the dusty and grimy workmanship that went into this mid to low level turntable. It’s like clockwork. There is one motor, and through a system of pulleys, gears and metal arms, everything moves within a cascade of action, so the automatic features of the turntable can function. There was a lot of thought that went into how this mass produced German turntable was going to work. “Planned obscelence” was not one of the design goals. Pretty cool. People still buy and restore these things (http://www.doctordual.ca/).

To film a few scenes, I used a chicken rotesserie connected to a walmart skateboard with twine. Most people dont know what to say exactly when i tell them that. The guy at home depot said i could cook a whole lot of chicken when he handed me the rotesserie box. I told him i was real hungry.

My sister said I should get some frosted screen for the kitchen sliding doors, and If I DIY’d it, it would be really cheap to do. I ordered it from the DIY section here http://www.apexfilms.ca/, and it went up easily enough. The blazing morning light through the frosting makes everything look epic. Even the coffee maker.

I got the last cheap skateboard at S-mart, I mean walmart. I left the shrink wrap on the skateboard in the event that the whole thing failed, so i could return it.

The rottesserie pulled the canon mounted skateboard up a plank of wood, so i could get certain angles and movements in the frame. It’s so rag tag that it’s sort of embarrassing to take it into public, with extension cords and all, but I’ve already taken it out twice.

k

Dareck did not have the easiest upbringing. I never saw his dad (and for most of his life, neither has Dareck), and he moved from place to place, seemingly constantly. His mom’s separation, new job or new relationship seemed to set the pace of his movement, and Dareck had no choice but to pull up roots constantly. Marty and I used to comment that he seemed to be really level headed for that level of transient existence, but in truth we had no idea what it was like for him. It was hard making plans with Dareck back then, because it seemed that everything in his life was always changing. So even though people in his life might have said it, not many people had actually shown it – that you could build a foundation, and set new goals to lay on top of it…

So it was a milestone event to see that Dareck, for the first time ever, had built himself a foundation. He had found that his artistry skills and ability to work at break neck speed made him a desirable on film and commercial sets in Toronto. This wasn’t waiting tables, line cooking, washing dishes, or the factory job he coasted through. Dareck was now getting paid via his God given talents. Not only that, but he was joined at the hip with Jen, a girl who he was crazy about. From the time this guy came of age, girls were never a “problem”. A dark haired, crystal blue eyed, charismatic and talented individual, he would sometimes complain that he had too many women in his life. Marty and I would just glare, wishing for a taste of his ‘“problems”. Jen was a girl that we all liked. Dareck and his girl got a new loft apartment near ‘Little Italy’. It was pretty cool, except for the Portuguese club below that turned up the sub-woofers for the dance floor at night. The loft floor would shake. Sometimes we set up the old reel to reel, and would listen to some of our demos play back while the sun would set. As we listened, I’d think that Dareck was letting go of things from the past, and making room for the new.

It was a year later when his girlfriend decided that she was going to move to BC. To live closer to her family and friends, to start school, and leave her job in Toronto. She was going to start something all together new, move on, and reinvent her life. It was exciting for her, and seemingly a great step ahead in her life. When I had found out, she had already set a date, bought a plane ticket, and it was done. For those of us looking from the outside in, Dareck, it seemed, had one of two choices. To stay behind, and somehow continue building the foundation that he had started (his film and commercial work, and music), or to follow Jen out west to start over. Complicating things was that Dareck would not be able to keep their apartment on one income after she left.

When she left, I drove to Toronto, picked up whatever would not travel by train, and moved his stuff over to my place, and that’s how Dareck came to live in my apartment in Guelph. The living room, with the futon, became his room, and the instruments and our recording gear was kept there as well. At first, I think we were both happy at the prospect of having some company. I needed something to take my mind off of my deteriorating physical condition (snapped tendon – no more cross country) and the isolated existence that was school, and Dareck needed a friend. Although we never talked about it, there was a basic, submerged rejection from Jen that he was coming to terms with. I knew he was hurting, and always the scientist, my solution was to somehow objectively channel these issues into something constructive, and work at develop our writing and sound engineering. Make an album, yeah, that’ll fix everything I thought. I thought Dareck had chosen to stay. But in reality, this was temporary, and as he headed up Eramosa Street towards the temp office, I suppressed all those feelings that told me that we were heading in different directions.

We have never worked like this before. We punch in, and punch out. Fuck everyone else…let them leave. We’ve rented a drum kit, borrowed a bass, and the stream of ebay packages that flowed all winter litters the floor and tables. We are set up in a Eramosa Street house at the bottom of the hill. An older century home, that was converted for use by multiple tenants.  When those multiple tenants left for their morning commute, we turned the equipment on and begin to work things out.

Dareck stuck a bristol board schedule on the wall, and would mark down the major goals we would try to reach. Early morning was spent mixing the previous nights recordings.  By 11am, we’d write, jam things out, then make new recordings. We worked twelve hour days for as long as we could. Our pentium III, and IV, single core computers and old TV style CRT monitors (this is 2002 after all) wheeze under the strain, but the old school fostex recorder is as dedicated as ever. At first, Dareck is skeptical of the new recording equipment and techniques, because they seem extracted and divorced from the creative process (why buy all this stuff and then wait or spend twenty minutes placing a mic on a guitar, when you can just press record and be done with it). My new found techniques are a hinderance, because although I’ve got a few tricks in the bag, I still don’t fully understand them yet. But the friction diminishes as we listen to the first songs that began to emerge. We are pushing each other, making ourselves aware of our deficiencies, and provoking each other to overcoming them. Could we really be better without them?

Our final jackrabbit album (it’s what we called ourselves back then) is not perfect, and if a major studio production belonged at home plate, we would be sitting pretty far away – not quite at nosebleed elevation, but there would be gum stuck to the bottom of the seats. We don’t care, because we are making progress, and at least we are within the ballpark. Dareck makes artwork for the CD sleeve. He carves stamps out of rubber, and we get an ink pad to stamp our artwork on the disks. In thirty days we have seven songs that we have written, performed, recorded, mixed, and assembled in hand made custom jackets.

We drive up the hill, away from the apartment below, to the coffee-time that sits on the apex. We angle the car in their parking lot, facing the downtown vista. With the traffic spinning by, we unwrap one of the CD’s, and listen to what we have created from start to finish. We are both stunned, proud, and excited about the possibilities. That we will break up and fall out in three months time, with the end result of no one ever hearing the CD is besides the point…

It’s -30c, and im still wearing canvas running shoes. With double socks.

I scrambled down and up a ditch at night to get the shot above, of the old, arthritic tree. The headlights of the Subaru parked beside the ditch provided some ambient light. We had to hurry, cause the snow plow’s move fast on these country roads, and he was doubling back; I set the tripod up and opened the shutter for 8 seconds, then used the flimsy tripod to get purchase so i could climb out of the ditch. It wasn’t till i got back home and blew up the picture that I realized that you could see me in the pick – my shadows are crouched at the base of the trunk. There’s a similar ‘hidden’ detail on the inner sleeve of our vinyl LP…

till next time,

k

No gimmicks

mom, pop, and even the dog got into ripping up paper

lights off the floor; the first set of lights we got were from the dollar store. I plugged them in, twiddled with the cord, and the cord snapped, touched hot and cold wires, and exploded….six lights on the cord just popped. We had to fumigate the burnt plastic smell out the whole night…we threw the lights out into the snow.

BoneyM’s on extended play…

Peter’s worked at this store for as long as I can remember. He’s a soft spoken, tall white guy in his late twenties or early thirties. I was floored when he told me that he played guitar in a Christian Rock band. What the hell was “Christian Rock”, and what did that sound like anyways? Peter sold me my first guitar. A sunburst stratocaster, like the one Hendrix played upside down at the Monterey pop festival. He kept it in the back row, and while he couldn’t completely hide it away from other customers, he did say that he’d keep it for me as long as he could. Peter was kind. He was also wrong about the fragmented remains of the green guitar that I brought in one day….

In this non-franchised music store, there is no such thing as debit card, and I was underage for credit. After a few minutes of shuffling and recounting, I pick my cash up off the table, and at that moment, the front doors open, and in walks my dad. Im completely surprised, because I can’t remember telling anyone I was going to be at this store, spending the cost of a mortgage payment on a guitar amp. I felt weird about it, because money was tight since my dads small business went under. He looks at me, and puts 40 bucks cash on the table. We put the amp in the back of the car, and drove off. I never ask him how he knew I was there…

Im half way over the Malahat mountain, edging through the Goldstream, winding the windows up when the drizzle starts to bead my glasses. Im listening to the tracks I’ve finished over the past 3 months, interspersed with new music Dareck has written over the summer. He’s been particularly prolific lately. The song writing tools at his disposal have gone beyond his acoustic guitar, and he’ll send me songs which have the rhythm or melody based in retro analog synths that he finds at Paul’s Boutique. It seems that for every new one he gets, he sells another, until he has more or less used a rotation of these devices to write songs with. Multiple versions of the same song can show up in my inbox, using instruments originating in different decades. One of these songs is pretty abstract, and there is a sample from an old 60’s movie wrapped in it, so the speech sounds tinny (I guess there was only so much space left for the sound track on the physical film back then, hence the nasal sound). The tin green army officer say’s that this will be ‘the last night of your life’.

I end up in Victoria, down Government St., then onto Bay, and decide that i’ll stop at the Long and Mcquade music emporium. There is no Paul’s Boutique on the island (but i’ll later discover all the other musical hermits who live out here – who tool away in their shops in obscurity, and build the things that will eventually lift this these recordings off the ground). This version of the franchise is pretty big, and it’s staffed by regular people, in addition to the standard jaded musicians who smirk at me when I pick shit up. The guitar area is a carpeted auralexed sound booth filled with large, buzzing amps. There is a shredder to my right, rippling the fretboard faster and faster. The door to the sound booth is closed, so you can still look around with only a slight undercurrent of shred.

I see a girl at the pedal counter. She’s young, maybe twenty, and as we begin to talk, I learn that she’s just travelled to the west, and just moved out of her parents. I look down at all the guitar pedals (FYI a guitar pedal is that thing the guitarist puts on the floor, fiddles with, steps on, and the asks if anyone has a spare 9-volt battery they can have). I’ve been so immersed in figuring out the whole recording thing, that im completely out of touch with what is new in the world of pedals. Not that I care, because it’s usually the same things just rehashed, rebadged and re-marketed. I ask the girl if there is any cool looping or other pedals that work with pitch. She looks around the cabinet, and with her brows furrowed, eventually finds this blue pedal in the third rack. On second thought, she hand’s me two of them to try…one of them is big and green.

She takes them over to the central, circular isle in the middle of the store (shredder is still using the booth), and collects all the batteries and cables we’ll need to try them out. The first pedal I plug in is the big, green ugly monster with multiple places you stick your foot on to activate it. It creates a looping effect – so you play one thing on the guitar, hit the pedal, and it will play back what you did while you play something new over it. It parrots back what you put in. It sounds ok, but I don’t want to play it longer than a few minutes. It reminds me of the green machine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygcConBiLV8). Big, bad and ugly, but made entirely out of plastic. I broke the neighbors green machine at my babysistters when i was a 8 years old, and my dad went ape shit when the kids mom followed me to the parking lot telling my dad he had to pay for it. I just sat on the thing, and it broke. It had to have been busted, or stressed at some plastic joint just waiting to break, cause I was a skinny kid. Piece of shit. I put the green pedal back in the box.

I plugged in the blue pedal next. A small box described the knobs. As you turned the knobs, stepping on the pedal would do different things to the pitch – like lower it, raise it, and it would do this at different speeds. I set the pitch to a half step, so it would sound sort of natural when activated. This pedal became a third hand on the guitar. That is what great pedals do…they create an extension – more of your physical emotion that drains down your leg can influence the sound. I was missing something in my recordings. I needed an extension…

The girl at the counter had walked back over to the centre of the room. She said the blue one was the one. She asked if I had a band, and where I was playing ‘cause she wanted to come…so I took the blue one home with me….

The super powerful and loud drum kit is always a buried mess on my vancouver island recordings. When you record music, the biggest and loudest things in real life can become the opposite “on tape” (or hard drive if you will). They easily become small, muddied and lose any sort of distinction. It’s like that extraordinary thing you saw while on vacation, took a picture of, and then have to explain it to all your friends in detail because “you really had to be there to get it”. The photo makes it look small, two dimensional and invokes just a whisper of its original feeling. If I can’t figure this same thing out with music, then I might as well quit now – no good rhythm section, no good song. I look at the rag tag, piece meal equipment set up, perched on my do-it-youself racks around the room. Is all of this stuff just no good? Im crazy to be buying all this stuff when I up to my ears in student loan debt I think sometimes…

Im comfortable with the best and worst part of getting better – the recluse. The extended amount of time you are about to spend alone. Some people can’t do it. Without friends or the constant distractions, they get uneasy, unsure, I tell myself. (But maybe thats the wrong way to look at it.  What if they are just people who’ve figured out that “life is the stuff that happens while your making plans” – I shut out this line of though quickly). I don’t know about that. All I know is that while living in the basement suite in Shaunigan Lake, I began to make plans. I close the blinds on the most beautiful of days. I can hear the boats go by and people laughing at the side of the lake. I cringe if there is a knock at the door, or if the phone illuminates (the ringer is shut off). Standing in front of the sliding doors, drapes closed, and looking forward in a watch face, I’ve got the drums at 3pm, Marty’s guitar amp that I lugged from the mainland at 4pm, the computer with the lynx card at 5:30pm. The kitchenette is at 9pm, and the futon sits just about midnight.

There is a shared laundry in the basement, and sometimes Nicole or Matthew will knock on the adjoining door and invite me up for dinner. One night, I find out that I can’t handle scotch whiskey very well. I begin to flail about, waxing and waning about this and that. The room is spinning, and I wake up saturday morning still feeling like the pride of Edinburg. I close all the blinds as usual, and get on the drums. The microphones are already set up and ready to go. My rhythm, which is just ok at the best of times, is still there, but my control is off…and Im whacking this drum with my arm instead of my wrist. I get frustrated, and throw the headphones at the snare drum. My eye’s are wide open when I hear the playback through the yorkville monitors that sit on top of the modified “studio” ikea kitchen cart. The snare sounds huge, and floats over the instruments. Not because of a new microphone, or some other piece of equipment I researched for three months on the internet before buying. It was because I hit the drum like a scotsman.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrmDxEOVtJQ

(If playback stutters, click HERE to watch it in Standard Def on youtube).

Her arm is draped across the olive green bench. Her hair is always an attractive contrast against the white collared uniform she wears. My buster brown dress shoes, white socks, grey pants, and round flaccid shirt collars meet the obligatory high school dress code with pure function. Like the clothes I wear, my personality would appear to be default – I haven’t struck out on any particular defining path as yet, and im quite unnoticeable as a result. I’ve got the guitar, but it’s still insular at this point – im wood-shedding in the basement. So I can’t understand why Sophia is actually talking to me.

A summer family trip has been planned and we will soon be piling into one of those old 1980 toyota mini vans that looks like star trek. A second family is going to pile in the van and travel with us as well. They are like an aunt and uncle to me, and I’ve been calling them that since I can remember. The engine in the toyota is situated underneath the driver seat (maybe that had something to do with what happened), and there is a huge sliding door in which the eventually somber passengers will exit. The morning before we all enter the space wagon and leave for disney land, Sophia calls and asks if i want to come over and give her a guitar lesson. We must have talked about it on the bus, where she looked so cool to me, and made me feel like somebody. There is this new acoustic ballad on the radio called “more than words”, and all the girls are really into it, and I guess want to learn acoustic guitar as a result (you would later hear a lot of misgivings after that album was purchased – the rest of it was comprised of funk fused with pregrunge 90’s metal).

The morning that im to go to Sophia’s house is the same day im supposed to leave on our road trip, so most of my stuff is already packed in the van. I decided to take a quick shower before I go to her place. There is only one bar of soap remaining – a perfumed pink bar that my mom sometimes gets when its on sale. It’s called ‘rosemilk’, and I smell like Monsanto’s version of a fresh croquet of flowers. I throw a pair of black jean shorts on (rolled up at the ends with the stringy cut bits hanging out) and an oversized t-shirt. My antiperspirant is packed away in the space van, so I lock the doors in my parents bathroom, and start looking around their cabinets for something i can use. It’s thirty degrees outside, and i’ve got to walk to her place after all. I find this new liquid antiperspirant in the medicine cabinet, and run out the door. It’s one of those funny types that looks like a ping pong ball at the buisiness end.

Im half way there, when the tingles begin. The ping pong ball roll on deodorant is reacting with the fragrance in the soap, and the combination of chemicals are brewing something awful. I begin to smell like an overcooked cheese and cabbage roll. By the time I arrive at her place, Im so embarrassed that I squeeze my arms together in an attempt to hide this chemical stench. You know the cliqued scene where some guy goes to give golf or instrument lessons to the centre of his attention, and leans over for that instructive embrace while he does it? I bet he didn’t smell like a cabbage roll – and all I could think of when I went up to her room is how much I did. There were no cliches happening that day…

The road trip ends up being a disaster, because the adults are having a ‘falling out’, while us kids have no where to escape misdirected wrath. As far as I know, we are supposed to stay over at the first house we visit in Florida. The people who live there are relatives of the family we are traveling with. I walk in the house, and my jaw drops to the ground. I see guitars, amps and pedals all over. What is this place? I meet the owner of all this equipment, and tell him that hey, I play too. We began to talk, and thats when I figure out that this guy used to test out effects for Roger Mayer. Roger Mayer was the engineer who made Jimi Hendrix’s fuzz and octave pedals in the 60′s. You know, all the little boxes he used to step on that made his guitar explode and squeal through a marshal or sunn amplifier stack. The sounds of purple haze. And purple haze, the first time I heard it, well, it just opened me up to a different way of thinking about music all together. And here he was, this living, breathing link to one of my sonic idols, handing me a guitar so we could jam. The chemistry was exothermic and we spent hours playing and talking about sounds. I began to feel like all that playing in the basement – that it could amount to something – I could take it somewhere. It was quiet in the other room – were the adults patching things up in there? I got a tap on the shoulder. I begged my dad to let me stay…but “Roger Mayers” and Hendrix was just that noise that came from the basement, and we going to stay in a road side motel instead.

The next day, we ate breakfast in a mall food court. The tension from the day before had my dad on edge, and he got really upset about something. As usual, “something” was so inconsequential that you cant even remember the initiating event that set things off. He walked out of the mall, got into the car, and drove away from us while we stood on the sidewalk. We were stranded in the middle of some mall in florida. I eventually found the toyota parked elsewhere in the mall parking lot – with my dad perched in it looking through the windshield. I pounded on the windshield, and yelled “this is bullshit”…his eyes widened, because I don’t think  id’ ever raised my voice or swore in his direction like that before. He was more offended that I raised my voice to him than anything else. In that way, the seeds of resentment were planted in the orange juice capital of the world. They were healthy, and would flourish over the next few years…

Back in London, I went back to pumping gas for the rest of the summer. I didn’t see her again until school started again, but I would meet up with Sophia many times as ten years would pass, as we grew up into our twenties. And every time, I would be out of sync with her. I was mostly behind, once in a short while ahead, but never could I make contact in the middle. The last day I saw her, Sophia wore this t-shirt with an image of hendrix on it. He had his bandanna affixed to his fro, head up to the sky during his rendition of the star spangled banner as he worked the Roger Mayer Univibe pedal beneath his feet. I told Sophia I was getting out of London, I was moving down the line, going to try out this place called “Guelph”. Maybe go to school there and start something new. She said “why would you do that”, “why wouldn’t you just do something else – just find work here like regular people do”? Instead of looking her back in the eyes and searching for truth beyond the face value of those words, and instead of accepting her as she was, like she did for me all those years back on the bus when I had nowhere to go, I turned on her with a look of disdain and a shake of the head. Is that when I started trying to ‘get ahead’, by leaving other people behind?

We moved the fallen tree limb off the path, and drove the panel van through the overgrown trail. Eventually we can’t see the path ahead anymore, and none us wants to chance the van getting ditched…it already seems to be having some trouble on the uneven, slippery ground. So we get out and begin to walk. I used the battery draining camera accessory LED to light my way (the five dollar special Hong Kong super battery pack actually worked) and carried the axe. Kirk and Dareck walked up ahead, waving the torchlights. The dew starts to soak my canvas shoes and jeans…we are really not prepared to be up here. Why can’t they make Rocket Dogs more sturdy – the glue is coming loose were the rubber meet the canvas already…We turn a corner on the trail, and the flashlight beams catch pieces of the house up ahead. It is so dark that an ordinary flash light can illuminate something hundreds of meters away – there is a burned, rolled over car adjacent to our path, but we even don’t know it yet because its two A.M. darkness, and no beams have happened to cross its way yet.

The abandoned two story house is groaning, and is pitched to an unnatural angle – it’s literally on its last legs. Half of the first floor has been blown away and destroyed, so the foundation on the bottom, and ribs up top are visible. The second floor leans down and buckles towards the first, as if looking for a dismembered wall that once held it secure. There are rotting boards with rusty nails all over the floor, and encroaching tall grasses and weeds. Nature is taking over floor number one.

We enter the house. There is no door – just three quarters of the frame. Broken glass, and a pile of sheet-rock dust is loosely arranged in one corner, as if someone has been here in an attempt to make the place presentable. Old wiring hangs all over, but this place has been off the grid for a long, long time. The house is gutted, but our entrance is noted by something, which begins to fly wildly on the ceiling, beating its wings until it finds its exit…its pretty large, and I hunch down and hit the button on the camera which turns it off, instead of on. We stick close to the remaining walls, feeling the floor boards along the way.

The side of the house where the second floor is falling in stretches out into the blackness. The flashlights point to another room in the back. There are stairs in there, and we decided to creep forward to take a look. Dareck takes the lead, and calls back “be careful Kris be careful”. Dareck notices the hole in the floor. There is a cellar down there. The walls are covered in aged newspaper. I’ve seen enough, and want to get the hell out. This ceiling feels like it is going to drop. We were lucky that night, because the floor didn’t move. Had it shifted the way it eventually would, we probably wouldn’t have come back the following night. This is the place we are going to perform in. We are going to film sunset traffic. True to the monsters in the belly. We left, and began to prep for our rotting house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soxv4wRTclU

It’s great having my own robot, that way i wont get squeezed by charmin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WBmpaoLS4g). Kirk and I argue way more when it comes to video…with music it’s pretty much an unspoken thing thats worked out subconsciously with instruments. With video it seems like there is a lot more friction generated before anything gets done, as we all bring different approaches to the table. Were going to try and shoot “sunset traffic” this weekend…

I carried robby everywhere I went the past few weeks and recorded stuff:

Plastic Horses http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvmRMeBmgI

Roncevalles weekend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBes4jQFvhg

Backyard in the clouds http://vimeo.com/13198248

Julie and Johns wedding http://vimeo.com/13438731

The barn http://www.vimeo.com/12654853

…for jeta (up in the clouds)

The song is a new demo called a place underground. I did the time lapse in my backyard.

The lot had two rubber strips on the road that would activate the ‘ding ding’ bell when a car drove over them towards a gas pump. There was a whole lot less dinging past the dinner hour, so as soon as I finished up with the chores (clean the bathrooms, sweep up trash on the lot, then count everything in sight for the inventory clipboard), you could throw a mix tape into the boom box and watch the sunset over the pavement. You’d often wonder about the people inside the cars as you’d watch their tail-lights turn right and disappear out of the lot. You convinced yourself that their lives would always be more exciting than yours – because they were literally always going somewhere, and you always were stuck behind, just watching…

I worked with Cheryl every other week. She was about three years older than I was, which at that age meant she was a lot more mature, and therefore demonstrated a type of experience and sophistication that I found appealing. I looked forward to the shifts we had, because when she was on the lot, I’d feel like anything could happen. She was into Gish and other cool alternative albums I’d never heard of (I was all about obscure Hendrix tracks and Slash n’ Izzy guitar licks). Her brother, Adam, was a soft spoken, laid back guy who worked there occasionally; he’d listen to this one metallica tape on repeat while fixing cars now and then. Lazy Lloyd (as he was called by many) was probably in his late thirties/early forties when I met him. He was a ‘gas jockey lifer’, and during the summers when school was out, I’d be on shift with him during the day. Lloyd lived for the weekends, and he would tell you about his sordid sexual exploits over them in pornographic detail. I really didn’t want to know, but he’d tell anyways. I got along with him pretty well. Jason (another kid on the lot) didn’t, and smashed the headlight of Lloyds big grey 80‘s sedan with the handle of the window washing squeegee one night after an argument. When I started laughing, Lloyd took my limited edition Hendrix tape (‘Are you experienced’ on Side A, ‘Axis bold as love’ on Side B) out of the ghettoblaster, held it up high between his motor oil smudged hands, and threatened to smash it on the parking lot. I pleaded and yelled “don’t do it – I NEED that tape”. He must have heard the desperation in my voice, because he gave it back without a word. I know I know, I should have made a copy of that limited edition tape, especially to bring to work, but I couldn’t part with that original white plastic cassette; it formed a huge part of my identity…

I thought Dave was really cool, because he’d ride into work everyday on his honda motorcycle. It was styled as a classic road bike. Because I was a few years younger I kind of looked up to Dave in an older brother-ish kind of way; he’d actually listen to stuff that I would say, always had advice to give, and was patient with my varying levels of confusion or stupidity about things in general. I actually started putting some of my gas station money aside for a bike just like Dave’s. My dad, who was the family comedian when he was feeling good, would joke around with him on the days he dropped me off at the station, and called him “Captain Nozzle”. I got drunk for the first time in my life at Dave’s apartment after reaching my limit with my dad. When I was about 15, and my mom was away on a work trip, my dad, as per the norm in those days, changed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. He could be happy with everything that life had granted him one minute, and hate the world in the next. He’d give the shirt off his back to try and keep us safe and content, and could fill the house with laughter, and at the same time his anger would fall like rain. You’d do your best to navigate between the drops.

My dad got upset that there was dog hair all over the carpet. I guess my mom wasn’t there that week to clean it up. To palliate him, I took Cody, the shedding Akita, out back to brush her down. I was able to get a lot of fur off, and halfway through brushing the dog, patchy thickets of white fur appeared over the back lawn. A bunch had flown out of the grocery bag as I was sticking it in. When he came out to check on my progress and saw the dog hair all over the back, he glared red rage. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said. “Get inside, now!”. I cant remember the argument that ensued, and by argument, I mostly mean that I’d sit there, head down and slack jawed until he got to the the final part and said “your attitude stinks, get out of my sight”. I got so accustom to the phrase “your attitude stinks, get out of my sight”, that like in an any other dysfunctional household, it can be parodied when you get older. You move out and are able to put it in perspective. Its sounds screwed up, but my sister and I will utter that phrase to each other nowadays, and it’ll just elicit laughter…

There was a some type of get together after work, and after he cooled off from the dog hair fiasco (some incidences were forgotten within hours, others led to days of the silent treatment), I asked my Dad if I could go when my shift was finished that evening. He was still in a dark, volatile mood, and wanted to know why I would want to go to such a thing in the first place. I could never explaining to him the truth (i.e. i’ve got no friends and actually got invited to something so I really want to go), so I just murmured something about that ‘it was at Daves house and you know Dave already’. He eventually relented – “just do what you want, I dont care”.

I didn’t go home after work, and rode the bus in my dirty oil and gas fumed clothes. It was tolerable, because I didn’t pump that much diesel that day (sunoco gas smelled like burnt raisin bran muffins; diesel smelled like rotten eggs). By the time I got to Daves apartment, everyone was already there. Dave just bought a new electric guitar, so I settled in pretty fast with that in the corner. I was probably playing “little wing”. I knew I smelled like a bottle of 10W30 and was a little bit embarrassed surrounded by girls in their summer dresses. Id talk to Cheryl when she talked to me, but I wasn’t really good at sustaining conversations back then. I had until 11:00. After eleven, I’d miss the connecting bus, and id be stranded in some London suburb, and would have to call my ol’ man to pick me up. The clock said 11:23. Sigh..

The thought of going home, or having him pick me up at Daves building (and chance a public scene in front of all these people) was too much to take. There is only so much you can hear of how much of an useless idiot you are in one day. There was a bunch of beer cans, liquor and shots on the table. I’d never had a whole beer before, and while I knew what Jack Daniels looked like, id never tried it. I drank that beer (i forget what brand it was, but it was so bitter that i couldn’t finish it). The shots on the other hand were downed before I even knew what they tasted like. They burned. I rambled on to the amusement to my workmates, then slunked on the couch…and then didn’t worry about anything at all for the rest of the night.

Fear. I can wake up, and immediately and instantaneously have a filled-to-the-brim onslaught of emotion press up upon my eyelids. It’s all physiological – it’s all fight or flight conditioning, and it took years to be rid of it. But that morning, I was in someone else’s home, so I put on my game face…but really, it was all shaky fear on the inside. In the movies, the teenage kid screws up, goes home, and gets grounded but is forgiven and everyone eventually laughs upon the days memory – cause the kid is essentially a good kid. I was a good kid, but just getting grounded and laughing about the past would always be the reality of someone else son. Ramping levels of fear at any wrong turn, inadvertent or not, was the deck I got dealt, and I was powerless against it. The glares, verbal onslaughts and threats were always possible and unpredictable (he’d never hit us – but he’d break and destroy things all around us as if to prove that point). And the whole time, you’ll do or say anything so everything would go back to ‘normal’ as soon as possible…because ‘normal’, believe it or not, was there on a regular basis, and was actually really good once you swept everything that had happened under the rug…

Dave passed me a helmet, and we took his honda back to my place. I’d never been on a motorcycle before. I made him stop two blocks away, so my dad wouldn’t see me arrive home on a bike (that would just add to the inevitable). The cycle was exhilarating. Joy on the surface as we rode and the wind blew against my face, fear at the bottom of my belly as we got closer and closer to my house. I opened the locked door, walked in, and he was sitting in his chair, just waiting…

What happens when you are middle aged, with kids you dont understand, working a low paying job you hate, after your business fails, and you still havent figured yourself out? When you dont have the tools to deal with your own personal demons and failures? When you dont have anyone in your life to confront you, to show you that there is another way? If you are this person, and then the depression sits in, you are going to do things that you wont be proud of years later. Things that you do your best to forget – I know this because he erased some of the family video tapes. My dad taught me that the most important relationships in your life are going to be the most volatile. Im trying to see the world through his eyes. But I learned all that much later, after the resentment began. After I learned how to get angry…

I went from getting bullied or ignored to full force I don’t give a shit guitar obsession in two years. There was this other unpopular kid in grade eight (except he was big for his age, so no one gave him a rough time), and he brought this grey, pointy head-stocked guitar into school one day. The kids flocked around him, and for all the awkwardness that he was, it didn’t matter once he held up that guitar. He couldn’t even play it that well, but it didn’t matter. It was like there was something about that instrument that would make things copacetic. When I left for London, I became aware of my first adult thoughts. They were provoking…and they were all focused around that instrument. I would never think the same way after that kid brought that grey guitar to school. It’s amazing that a life long path can stem from a  single day in your life.

There was a full serve Sunoco station in the south end of London, and my dad knew Dan, the owner of the garage the gas bar was attached too. They made a deal, and Dan gave me my first real job that paid “real money”. I pumped gas, checked oil and washed windshields at the full serve. I cleaned up the lot, and eventually would break dawn or close up after sunset on my own. It was London, so cleaning the station bathrooms and killing the night shifts wasn’t that bad at all. It was minimum wage, but at fifteen, cash meant independence, it meant I could get an axe and start a band. Friday and Saturday nights, until I was about nineteen, I was on the corner, pumping hi-test to make my coin.

I didn’t know anything about cars, and being a full serve station, I quickly found myself under the hood, putting on the occasional tire, and inadvertently sniffing gas within the tanks of every make and model. I also didn’t know much about dealing with the public, and as fate would have it, on my very first day, one of my customers was a grey haired jackal. I still remember her glares and insults mouthed through the windshield, her pointing fingers, and cackles of “whats a matter with you boy?” She pulled up in one of those old four door sedans, a battered land boat that took up most of the isle. I ran out, and she said ‘eh boy – check that oil”. She popped the release, and I couldnt find the lever under the six foot grill to pop the hood (on older eighties cars, those levers are all over the place under the grill or recessed within the hood, and have different mechanisms; in time you just know what hand gestures will pop the thing in a few seconds on any model). When i finally got the thing open and secured up with its rusty support, I couldn’t see a damn thing. This car was one of those weird ones with some type of insulation material underneath the hood. It was rotting, so lengths of it fell all over the engine. Everything else in there was camouflaged in dirty soot coloured black grime. I moved all that crap aside, but I couldn’t find the dipstick to check the oil (it was old school – made out of little black plastic knob, and tucked underneath a big circular air filter – effectively invisible to virgin eyes). I tried to gesture for a fellow “pump jockey” to come help me out, but the lot was completely full and everyone was preoccupied with doing their own cars.

After about 30 seconds of me searching under the hood, the lady rolled down the windshield, and barked out a train of “whats a matter with you”, “do you want me to get out of my car and do it myself”, “you aint found it yet – whats your problem boy, you a little slow?”, “what, you some kind of idiot – it’s right over there”. Her glare and tone was just nasty…and even at that age I knew there had to be more behind it than not finding a dip stick fast enough. She watched my movements like a hawk, and my lack of progress was met by reprimand at any available opportunity. If there were less people in the lot, I think she would have just said what she really wanted to say: “why don’t you just fuck off back where you came from immigrant”.

She got loud enough that Dan came out of the shop to see what was going on. I was relieved that someone was coming to back me up, especially since I didn’t know how to react to verbal onslaughts on the job. Dan looked at me, looked at the late forty something woman in the car, and then apologized to her for the delay. He said “I know ‘mam your busy and in a rush, we will get you taken care of right away”. He found the stick, pointed at the oil cap and I finished up the car. When I walked inside the gas bar, Dan came out of the garage and said “I saw you fumbling around with that car – that was bullshit! Just what the hell were you doing out there – goofing around?” I gripped the oil rag that was hanging out of my pocket…I was pissed off but I needed this job. I wanted that strat. I was fifteen, and didn’t want to look like a sissy…I forced my eyes not to water up. Tom petty was playing on the radio – “im learning to fly, but I aint got wings, coming down is the hardest thing”. On the way back home, I stopped by the library, and picked up this cassette called “GNR’ lies”…

Over the next few months, the London gas bar got real busy…and I got much faster at doing my job. I’d listen to Guns N Roses and run around the lot with a smile on my face. I still screwed up from time to time; I poured tranny fluid into someones oil reservoir once, and I pumped a tank full of diesel into the gas only tank of a Lincoln mercury (the dude parked right beside the diesel pump, pointed at it, and said fill er up). Once, when I was the only one on shift, and the lot was chock full of people upset about the wait time,  I left a gas nozzle into some ladies car as I rushed to start the fifth vehicle waiting in the lot, and she drove off. The nozzle anchored into the car and ripped the hose out of the the pump. Gas started shooting out into the air. I had to hit the emergency shut off, and the yelling customers got real quite; they didn’t say a word and just drove off. My dad came down to help me clean up the lot, and that was the first time I think he ever heard me cussing. The lady, who’s car was all bent up, was an angel…she was kind and didn’t make me feel any more stupid than I already felt. Dan, to his credit, never gave me a hard time after that first incident, and never fired me either. He’d fix all the mistakes and would just say “shit happens”. He gave people second chances, and because of that, he’s a good guy in my books.

Even if it was all down to pre-adolescent fantasy, the bullying had gotten out of hand that final year- i would skip days of school or get up and walk out of my eighth grade classroom when it got bad enough. The worst was when I got swarmed. I got out of it ok, because not one of those suburban kids was ready to cross that line as a group – there was always one kid, a linchpin, behind anything physical. One day, my dad and sister were driving in a mall parking lot, and my sister pointed out one of the linchpin kids – my old man stopped the car on the street, ran up to the kid, and threatened to find and kill him if he ever touched me again…

We lived in the older part of town, a bike ride out of reach of the industrial area in the south end. There is a scrap yard there, and someone has recently welded a collection of metal sculptures; they sit in the sky on poles as tall as street lights. In true london fashion, someone driving by screamed out their car window while I was snapping these shots. It’s an isolated lot, so I hurried the hell up.

As for my sis, she’s like this image snapped from the basement window.

Trapped within black screens. Everything is pixelated, so she can’t tell what is to come next, and the future is a mirage. If she breaks through (and she will), the brambles will make sure that any victory is seated in discomfort. But off in the distance – it’s blue out there – the grass is greener on the other side…

Because I managed to live rent free for half of 05′ and now the first few months of 06′, it meant that two more boxes were going to show up in the mail. Always by USPS; I learned the hard way that if you order things from the US into Canada, and used UPS, you’d get a nasty surprise at the post office. By inflating their border handling fees, the extra UPS charges could end up being more expensive than the item you actually bought. No other shipping company does this, so I “boycotted the brown”.

The “Broadhurst Garden” mic preamp was first to arrive (it hooks up to microphones, enabling you to record whatever you need to record). It’s a monolith, steel black box that isnt much to look at from afar. It’s web 1.0 netscape navigator AOL website isnt much to look at either (http://www.davelectronics.com/bg1.htm). But thats ok, because Mick Hinton knows how to make a preamp that makes the microphones come alive. Things you record sound slightly larger than life through this black box. Mick worked at Decca Studios, way back in the 60′s. Decca put out the classic sounds of that era, and Mick was the engineer responsible in part for building the equipment that resulted in those recordings. I had all these preamps to work with by this time. Fostex, art-tube, studio projects, symetrix, rane, full voltage akai tube, and now the “Broadhurst Gardens” Decca preamp. They all made it on the album in some capacity. The album is a preamp mutt.

Natalie had come through for me – it just so happened that her old basement apartment was up for rent. So when the second box arrived in the mail, I just stuck it on the pile of other moving boxes that I had started to pack. I used duct tape instead of clear packing tape on all my uhaul boxes so I could unpack and reseal them easily for future moves. It gave them a distinctive ghettofabulous look, and even though they were starting to show signs of wear with mild bulging on sides, they were still holding up because of the thick layers of “duck brand” duck tape.

The new apartment was just 5 minutes away from the trailer up in the hills. I drove towards the lake, turned left at the T-junction, and entered the shaunigan lake villa. It was very west coast – a real bakery, greasy spoon, and art gallery all on the same strip. I turned right onto the little road where the house was – and as I looked up I knew immediately I wanted to live here. I saw an older neighbourhood, with a huge canopy of trees draped over the road way up above, blotting out the sun. Nicole and Matthew lived on the last house beside a very steep hill leading to the boat ramp, water sport club and lake. I took a liking to both of them pretty quickly – very easy going, down to earth people, and they had a cool skinny dog named Sophie. Matthew worked at the private school (I never figured out exactly what he did but he dressed nice for work), and Nicole did custom furniture building and design. Her shop, full of large, loud industrial furniture building equipment was located in their renovated garage. I guess they were used to loud noise – because when I mentioned that I had drums, and all these other instruments, and that I played them quite often, they didnt seem to mind at all, even though I would be living in the basement right below them in their two story home. The house was perched on the steep slope, so the basement wasnt submerged, but actually opened up to the rolling hill towards the lake. This was going to work out…I’d have one room full of gear and all the basic amenities. I decided that I was going to settle in, bunker down and record an EP over the summer months…

I didn’t know that the beast was waiting, in the corner, biding its time. I wasn’t aware that I’d get this one last summer to live without it. You can plan things out all you like, but come fall of 06′, God knows we were all helpless.

I started acquiring some equipment this week. While surfing around, I began to experience that familiar feeling…the online audio engineering world allows for endless hours to bask in pure geekdome. Im looking at you, “gearslutz.com”. How many hours of my life did I give you? In any audio forum, you can discuss the sound differences between all sorts of gear, debate if analog is better than digital, and watch weekly flame-wars erupt over the most arcane details. Saturating your brain within these websites also predisposes to “gear-acquisition-syndrome”: you feel like you can’t do anything for real until you just get that special mic, or this particular plugin. There is always one more thing to get, one more excuse around the corner before you think you can put forth your best work. The ironic thing is that for all the countless hours I spent on those sites, I never ever read anything that actually translated directly into a better recorded sound per se. Those type of improvements were totally left to the realm of trial, error and experimentation…

So it was interesting to see that exactly the same structure and community exists for indie film makers: Huge, established online forums dedicated to film gear and discussions of technique? Check. Cult followings for certain pieces of gear, while certain other gear selections are frowned upon? Check. Periodic nerd-o-file flamewars between trolls, sages, and wisecrackers? Check. But beyond that – you can learn a tonne of essential details on some of those websites, really fast. Especially if you are taking baby steps. And many people are genuinely willing to give their time to teach…just cause they want too.

So I picked up a video camera this week – a tiny little tape based canon hv20 that’s got a huge following for indie film making. Like all great deals to be had in the digital realm, it’s a flagship model that’s outdated by three, four or five “product generations”. So the depreciation is quite severe, and you can ebay them for pretty cheap. My particular hv20 was the backup unit for a zombie flick, produced by a first time filmmaker who just happened to live in the same city as I did. I was in a total asthmatic haze when I picked up the camera the other day (im having the worst seasonal allergies ever – it’s like im ten years old again with a runny nose and asthma puffer). I could tell that Randy kept his stuff in good order, just by the way he had the original box and packaging set up. When you pack stuff in haphazardly, the little cardboard flaps never go down and the box bulges all weird. This camera and all of its add-ons looked like new. We talked about his recently produced short film – called “Fear of the Living Dead” (http://www.fearofthelivingdead.com/trailer.shtml). I thought it was cool that he just decided to use what he had available (his house and neighbourhood), then organize a bunch of people and just get working, ready or not. Cause it’s so easy to stay online…in forum land…

There are two buildings adjacent to the back alley parking lot where I show up for work. The first building, which is a renovated house, is painted blood red, with black trim on the window frames. Apparently it’s where music lessons are held. I think its supposed to be a homage to the “Red House”, as in Hendrix’s “There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay”. The house instead looks vampire cartoonish and sinister, like a west coast crack shack painted by its tripped out inhabitants. Because of the impossible cost of real estate out here, crack shacks regularly compete with legit houses on the market. No kidding – http://www.crackshackormansion.com/original.html. Can you tell which is which?

The apartment building right beside the red house is one of those standard 70′s concrete constructions, about nine floors high, with black wire balconies lined up facing the parking lot. Because the balconies face the sun for a good portion of the day, and there is no central air, the people who live inside shade themselves by lining the smaller windows with tin foil, and clip up queen size bedsheets over the large sliding glass double doors that lead outside. When you watch the sun rise and set, and see the shadows shroud or light bounce off the balconies, there is something that you begin to notice, that eventually becomes undeniable. It’s not the sparkle of light off the tin foil, the assorted plants, or even the fact that someone has left a plunger in an disassembled American Standard toilet that just sits there exposed on the third floor. One day at work, I look carefully at the balconies, and I blurt out to Jolene, “there are stains all over those bedsheets – that building should be called “sperm towers”. The name sticks.

I occasionally buy guitar strings from the music store next door that owns the red house. There is a guy who works there who I chat with, and I eventually meet his wife as well – they’ve got a new kitty. They are a young couple who married pretty early in life. He plays guitar, she plays piano. We talk about music a lot, and I get the sense that working in the store is not exactly his most favourite job. It’s not anything he says in particular; its just that once the muse bites, any other job becomes hard time. I get motivated when one day they invite me over for dinner; it’ll be great to get some feedback from fellow musicians I think to myself. They have another friend over as well, a girl named Christine. She’s pretty cute and she’s going to school to become a nurse. We all pile in a car afterwards, and we are heading out to see a show in a converted theatre. On the bill is some guy who plays wonders on his acoustic guitar and sings his story. It’s not my favourite genre of music, but I haven’t yet been to see any live music since I’ve arrived on the island. On the way there, I pull out my CD of songs that I’ve done so far. I’m excited to have a small group of people casually listen to them. He takes it, but then hands it back to me almost immediately. “We are going to listen to this before the show he says,” as he pulls out another CD. We listen to down tempo folk on the way there. He tells me that he’s given up on trying to play rock music, and has escaped the attempts to emulate his heroes. I cant argue with that, but the show is kind of unremarkable. Not that the music is bad, but the message within it just doesn’t resonate with where I am at; I need things to provoke and push me. It’s ok if a song can console, but I don’t want the music to tell me that “everything’s going to be alright” just because it always must be so.

I begin sending Dareck the recordings I’ve been working on. Most of the time, he has one of two responses. He can ignore them completely, and I receive absolutely no feedback whatsoever. Alternatively, an mp3 will show up in my inbox, in which he has added on some really good vocals. If he is really into something that I’ve sent, he’ll on occasion reinterpret it and record an acoustic version, with the aid of an old AKG stage mic his friend Aaron gave him (Aaron’s son is holding the chainsaw on the front cover of the album). I often like his versions better than my own. Darecks best feedback is all or none, and anything in the middle is often hard to interpret (any particular recording assessed as great for any reason can also be claimed to be a failure three to six months later). He’s one of the few people I know who shows sustained interest in creating music, and in that sense he pushes me to do better.

One day, Dareck calls me up, and tells me that he has built a robot. His evolution of robot building is quite unorthodox. His first was a gigantic, 9 foot tall suit, that you could wear. It was made of huge sheets of foam, and was very costume like. He actually built two of them, and when they took to the street, he said people were stopping to take pictures. His second set was a pair of miniatures, based upon his larger suits. They were made of felt, paper and erasers. He animated them for a short video he made. The third was actually a real robotic arm he built on set for a film, that functioned via hydraulics and was made of metal. A pretty steep curve in robot building that was. Little did I know that his writing was going to take off in a similar way. Overwinter, and into spring of 2006, Dareck was going to connect a train of old 80′s electronic equipment that would set his song writing off in a new direction altogether…

Subscribe

Anything involving html means that several days will be lost dicking around with code. It’s like pig latin to me, so the process is purely trial and error for the most part. It’s like french class back in high school, and I barely passed that one. No wait – I actually flunked grade nine french, and had to repeat it in grade ten, at the “basic” level. The school where I lived organize things such that you would be sorted into ‘advanced’, ‘general’ or ‘basic’, because that’s gotta be good for self esteem, right? Basic kids were unpredictable, and I bet you a lot of them went on to do things they never would have imagined, even if the biggest accomplishment in basic french was to make a laminated placemat with french words all over it. Anyways, I used “fanbridge” to create a LNOYL mailing list you can subscribe to. They were the best providers of the bunch that I checked out, but I just couldn’t relate to their name and logo. I altered the html as much as I could to remove their ‘totally awesome’ logo. They still say that im ‘totally awesome’ and should ‘clap my hands’ when I log into my “fanbridge” account. Pretty campy, but it works well. I encourage you to subscribe to it – were going to send out our upcoming tracks for free this way, as well as blog updates (http://www.lnoyl.com/subscribe-to-mailing-list/).

Vinyl Collective

Rabid music fans can be found at vinyl collective. Thanks to everyone who participated in our promo, and we’ll announce the next one on the mailing list. Vinyl for all! People from Montreal to Texas are going to receive the first promo release of our vinyl L.P. (Yeah, I typed stuff on the back of the photo). Check it out: http://vinylcollective.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=49665&page=1

Rehearsals

Last week we parked a cube van up against one of those desolate highway motels – you know, the Hitchcock bungalow psycho styled joints. We rented a room and practised. Somehow we had left the guitar amp in Kingston, so I leaned my guitar into the dresser to amplify it. Yeah, I used a piece of furniture to amplify an electric guitar. You lean the headstock into an open drawer, push up into the corner, and the whole unit amplifies the strings. It worked best during the intros and verses, but I got drowned out at other times. The toilet in this place did not work very well. At least is was clean.

Modern Cello

Considering what that thing is worth, im amazed that Kirk lets me mess around with the cello for photography. Hammer in the f-hole is the best shot so far, and so far, not a scratch.

Archives of Canada

So when you make a record, and manufacture the pressing yourself, the government of Canada views you the same as any other record label.  One copy of everything you create must be submitted to the National Archival library, and we got a letter a few weeks ago telling us that we are obligated to send the album in. I had no idea this library existed, or that there was such a law, and I don’t mind the idea of it. As an archival medium, vinyl is great. It is impervious to the effects of magnetic disruptions that render tape or hard drives useless, and it still works even if its surface degrades, unlike CD’s. And you don’t need advanced technology to decipher its contents. Any sharp, thin piece of metal (sowing needle or paperclip) attached to something hollow will reveal whats on the vinyl. Im putting a note inside the record, so that when the aliens come a millennium from now, they will know that a copy of the record has been set aside for them and is available for a spin – like at the end of Steven Spielberg’s A.I…

A month ago, I learned that I lived 20 minutes away from a nuclear bunker (http://www.lnoyl.com/2010/04/04/diefenbunker/ ). Yesterday I figured out that I also live 20 minutes from the Canadian archival library! Im totally set for Armageddon. So I took the record to the archive building yesterday. It’s got all these little windows on the outside, resembling port holes on an ocean vessel. The archival office was closed, but the first floor was still open for visitors. The security guy had this uncertain look on his face as it looked like I was taking photos of the floor. He said “just don’t use flash”.

When I arrived, I was surprised to see how clean the place was, given that it was inhabited exclusively by males. During my first couple of years at school, I subleased and moved to new accommodations pretty frequently. It didn’t matter how awesome the houses would look on the outside – the bathrooms were almost always a toxic nightmare. In the first apartment I shared, the thin plastic shower curtain was calcified. The water would leave mineral deposits on it, and over the years, I guess this shower curtain began to obtain tensile strength and moved as one piece. In another place, I painted over the stains in the bathroom, so there was a layer between me and it. But the absolute worst was when I lived in the attic. This house was right beside campus, in a very respectable area, and on the outside, it looked like a squeeky clean, well kept Victorian era home. There was three or four of us living there over the summer, including the dude who never left his room – he’d be on his computer 24/7. He pretty much had a monopoly over the shower downstairs, which left the upright shower on the second level for everyone else. It seemed alright at first first glance; older, but the sink worked fine, and the tile on the shower floor looked pretty clean. The next day after moving in, I got into the shower and turned on the water. At first, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from – that faint, mouldy odour. But it grew and grew until it was the only thing I could smell. Five minutes later, I felt something against my foot. I looked down, and the fucking tiles were bent and raised off the floor. The wood underneath them was swollen, and pieces of it pierced upwards from below the tile. There was mold all through it. For the rest of the summer, I got up extra early, got in my car, and took a shower at the YMCA. Wearing flip-flops.

After taking the tour of Darecks really clean house, I saw the drum kit set up in the basement, owned by some girl apparently. She was dating (or had just broken up with) one of his roommates, and the drums were still in the basement. I began to set up the Symetrix gear next to the drums. In the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s, Symetrix made a lot of equipment designed for broadcast studios. You can still find their equipment today, devalued on the used market. In 2004, there still was not that many available options when it came to good gear on a shoe string budget. That is, not much between relatively inexpensive but mediocre sounding hobby gear and the out of reach pro stuff. The older Symetrix equipment lived between that gap, and ebay always had their microphone preamps, EQ’s and compressors in stock. When you lit them up, they still had lots to say, and gave this kind of gritty radio tone to whatever you recorded with it. If you listened to people talking on the radio in the 90′s, then you’ve heard what symetrix sounds like. Dareck made a few calls, and Silvana showed up the next day, ready to play her kit in the basement.

With the old electrovoice mic and symetrix rack, we did the base tracks to “got a new kitty”. We experimented with a few things; at one point, Darecks friend Adrian came over and played some tin whistle over the top of it. I could never find those tracks again, but they left their mark on the album – I think there was some headphone bleed, because whenever I listen to the intro of that song now I can faintly hear the whistle! When Silvana came over, she sat down on the floor next to her drums, and listened to the tracks. The timing near the end of “got a new kitty” worked, but we didn’t use a metronome or click track, and therefore the tempo wavered back and forth towards the ending of the song. Despite all that, she liked it. In three takes, she adapted her playing to ebb and flow with the tempo variations, and improvised an explosive drum track. An hour later, I had three dozen drum tracks full of alternative takes for that one song. She hit those drums hard – I have no idea if she was creating this work back then, but later on, I learned that she would take the drum skins off the kit, and would create these images out of the stick impacts (http://www.silvanabruni.com/gallery.html).

Sitting in the golden trailer, I had all these drums tracks of hers that I started to mix…

Marty was in love. All the pistons of “puppy dog phase” romance were still firing away, and Marty seemed really happy…and serious. He was really, really into his new girlfriend. When he arrived off the ferry, I had imagined things as if we were back in the basement with all of our gear and instruments. Jamming, or just talking about anything at all for hours on end. We used to have these conversations, that would just expand and expand. We could talk about something in particular, draw the most cryptic stuff on chalkboard to explain it even more (pictures, words, whatever), and would end up pushing each other until we’d both walk away with something new for the effort. I guess that’s a tall order to sustain as lives become more sophisticated and new relationships unfold. Things like that are supposed to change, right?

Although it was just the two of us, I began to feel like I was the third person tagging along. With frequency, he would dial up his phone, or it would ring, and whatever we would be doing or talking about would get temporarily dropped as he talked to his girlfriend. “So, what were we talking about?” he’d say when he got off the phone. We decided to drive up the road to Victoria to get something to eat. When we got there, we visited a few landmarks and homes that had all to do with his new relationship. We visited and ate at a noodle shop that his girlfriends brother worked at. I couldn’t share in any of these experiences that obviously had meaning and were important for him, and I started to feel excluded. Plus, I was too busy being extra sensitive and jealous to understand what was really going on. I didn’t want things to change. Marty had been in a bunch of shitty relationships in the past. Not that he was involved with destructive people – it was just that he really gave each one all he had, and it never was reciprocated back in the same way. I should have been happy for him that he clicked so well with his future wife. I probably sulked.

Just before Marty arrived, I totally revamped the recording arrangement in the trailer. I moved around a few more things of Cathy and Ians, set up the little fostex mixing board, microphones, compressors and preamps. I arranged all the cables, and miced up the drums in their new location. As a result, things sounded better. When you are recording on your own, the preamble takes a lot of time. In a real studio, there would be an assistant, engineer, and the talent. The assistant runs around, fixes things up, tunes the instruments, assembles and disassembles, and completes all the grunt work the makes the session go smoothly. The talent does his or her thing, and then based on what the engineer is hearing at the board, he tells the assistant or talent to do something different (play this way or that way, change out that mic, or move the whole drum kit over there). This way, you get a sound that matches up with everyone’s expectations.

If you are trying to play all three roles in the recording process at once, you do a funny little dance sequence. You set things up, then hit record, swerve your hips to avoid all the boom stands while running back to the gear, play whatever instrument is set up, run back, hit stop, listen to it, then go back, move things around, tweak a knob, or play something harder or softer. Then rinse and repeat until you have something that approximates what you want. I can’t tell you how many of my early songs feature the sounds of jiggling change in pockets, or stuff falling down as you run back to the instrument after you hit record. It once took me 5 days to mic up a drum kit, working this way…

We recorded the rhythm section for one of Martys songs. It took us only a few takes before we nailed it. The original version was very sparse and well done. He wrote it while watching this old time movie, where a guy was situated in a boat on an artificial sea (you know – the painted cardboard cut out waves that go back and forth). I dropped him off at the ferry afterwards, and finished the rest of the song during the week. I over-enthusiastically added every new technique or sound I had on the pallet thus far. There was a cacophony of mangled cellos and violins all over the thing. It made sense, in a busy sort of way, but I should have set the volume on a few of the mixed in tracks to zero. Through this song, I learned that the mute button (the button that turns a recorded sound off while mixing) was an instrument in its own right – and it had to be on the pallet. Zero is just as important as all the one’s. I think that holds true for making your way within vital friendships as well.