The Weather Station

Goodbye Blogspot

2010-06-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader (s?)

I have decided to move my blog to wordpress. Is this a faux pas? I don't know. But the fact of the matter is, wordpress allows me to have a website as well as a blog, and my own URL and all kinds of stuff a fledgling musician creature needs.

So, reader, my parents, and other reader - I'm now found at: www.The-Weather-Station.com.

And still blogging and musing at: www.the-weather-station.com/blog.

I hope you don't mind. Come join me on the other side of the internet tracks.
t

Birdsong & Darkness

2010-04-07T17:50:00.001-07:00

Last night, I went to a very special show that, as part of the Images Festival, was performed in complete darkness. By darkness, I mean COMPLETE DARKNESS. The organizers did an amazing job of making sure that no light whatsoever made it into the theatre, so we all had the unusual sensation of not being sure if our eyes were closed or not, or where our limbs might be.
The experience slotted in well with my current consciousness, having just read Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, in which the main character spends a great deal of time at the bottom of a dried up well, where in complete darkness he goes on strange journeys through walls into hotel rooms where he aquires a bluish black mark that allows him to heal people by touching their foreheads but also perhaps dooms him and if you've read Murakami, you'll know what I mean.
In any case, I was prepared for the experience of darkness to be transcendant. And it was... somewhat. Once I got over the flashes of hallucinatory light that shot over my eyeballs from time to time, I spent a long time noting how much bigger things seem when touched than when seen. Running a fingertip over another finger, I could have sworn my hand was a foot long, my hair Rapunzel esque. But the whole point of the sensory deprivation, or rather, focusing, was the sound. It wasn't music, persay, though performed by musicians like Ryan Driver and (sigh) Mary Margaret O'Hara. One was a spoken word piece discussing room tone and how it is used in film, something that I've always been fascinated by. Though with this particular piece I was distracted, as I always am, by how much 'room tone' is actually microphone tone. Anyway, it was interesting to sit in a room of people noticing, finally, the little shifts in tone that happen in square rooms or round rooms or big rooms or soft rooms, or rooms with refridgerators (that sound terrifying), all because no matter what we did, we couldn't SEE anything to distract us or give us context for the sound.

I used to hum under my breath all the time when I was a kid. Sometimes I would hum tunes I knew, or phrases lifted from things, but I'd weave them into a narrative of my own devising, or sometimes I'd just make up the whole thing, a kind of accompaniment to my day or what I was doing. It was usually an orchestra in my head, and looking back, it was probably kind of humorous - a blast of horns for a toboggan ride or soft flutes at night. Or sometimes, if I was out walking in the woods or fields where I grew up, I would sing the ongoing song at the top of my lungs. I used to drive my sister crazy with trying to play the song on an imaginary piano, drumming my fingers on things. Now I don't know if I did this all the time, but I remember it happening a lot. I didn't think it was unusual. But of course I grew up and the inner symphony ceased, and I went to high school and didn't play music at all. And then I became a musician and played music all the time, but it's only recently that I've been returning to it. I've been singing all the time lately, just walking around or doing dishes, just singing little phrases that repeat and repeat and then change, bit by bit, into new phrases, and I don't think about it at all. Anyway, I was thinking lately that this singing reminds me of birdsong sometimes, just this constant sort of meandering melody in the background that's certainly communicating something, but something I don't necessarily understand. In any case, I find it deeply calming.

Speaking of birdsong: there is an interesting video which you've probably seen, if you follow these things, wherein people were taught bird songs that had been slowed down till they were in a normal human register, and singable, and then they sang them, and then the video was sped up to bird song register again, and the people sound exactly like birds, and look like them too, with their breath super fast like birds.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html
I also liked this quote about birds:
"Birds are thought to have a finer temporal discrimination of sounds than humans. This means they hear the individual elements of composite sounds that for us appear as a single blurred sound. Their hearing may have up to eight times the temporal resolution that ours can achieve. One way getting some impression of this is by slowing down bird sounds; the simple way of doing this also lowers the pitch of the sound by the same factor and this is a fascinating way of tuning in to the hidden depth of birdsong, a kind of transformation to a more human musical sensibility."

I think this all fits in with how much I, for one, have been thinking lately about detail in music, detail in general. I think a useful way to judge the health of one's psyche could be joy in detail - the ability, which I don't always have - to notice and see beautiful little things, the knit stitch made miniature in t-shirt fabric, the sound of pulling open a guava. And I think about birdsong and all the tiny little variations in the repetitions that they use to say things, and i think of the same thing about my dishwashing songs, and of all the best folk songs, and I think of how if you really narrow in and close your eyes, the tiniest little shadings of timbre and melody are where the musical joy is.

And yet it's funny how so much of it depends on where you're at, and sometimes you can't hear those things at all. But I feel lucky to be hearing them these days.

2010-03-24T08:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I even wonder what I've been doing all this time. When so many people I know have put out multiple records, and I've only put out one.
But - I'm working on the next one.
I had a good long chat with a very accomplished musician about the different ways people listen to music. He hears, in great detail, what exactly is played, and how certain chord changes are unusual and surprising, and how certain melodic choices in jazz solos have meaning for the song. Whereas I'm, much like most luddites, a straight up timbre listener. What interests me is generally not what is played, but how it sounds, and what's behind it. Which isn't to say I can't appreciate interesting time signatures - i do more and more these days - just not as much as a strange and unusual guitar tone. So I realised after all this time of trying to learn to write songs like a normal musician, with a guitar and a pad of paper, that it doesn't work for me. Until the song is recorded, I can't tell whether I like it or not. It also made my horribly long album process make a lot more sense. I would half hazardly record some riff sometimes, then like it and try and go back and re-record it in a better way, and I wouldn't like it anymore because the tone of it was incrementally different, and I'd wind up recording the song over the badly recorded riff (that often wasn't to a click track, troublesome always) or scrapping the song altogether.
The other thing I've suddenly learned to do is compose without an instrument. I can't play at the speed of my thoughts, but I can sing at that speed, and so I'm trying to compose with just voice as much as possible, and then sort out the chords later. Though I'm starting to feel in certain keys that my fingers can keep up, which is a shocker for such a crappy guitarist/banjoist as myself.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that now I've sorted out these two things, as well as a dreamy, dreamy cabin on the island for the month of June, I feel super confident that I'll have an awful lot done on a new record before the end of the year.
It's still a strange process. My last record, obviously, had such a driving impetus behind it, such a clear over arching form to me, that it's difficult to know what to write next. I've found myself writing about happiness with the same shock and confusion that I wrote about sadness. I'm just as surprised to find myself contented as I was to find myself sad, years ago. Also, I feel like I've wrung out all the interest I had in sad music, and every minor chord seems dry and overdone these days.
But who knows. That could change by June.

That's enough about me.
I also have been up to other things, like getting to be in Bruce Peninsula. We just returned home from playing SXSW. I've been having trouble figuring out what to say about what SXSW was like, and all I can really say is, it was INSANE. It was CRAZY. Living in Toronto, one can almost begin to assume sometimes, not that people don't care about music persay, but that they don't deeply care about it... but then you go to a place where nearly every bar is thronged with crazed fans, lined up down the street, and the thousands stalk 6th street in a wild throng, and while some of them were certainly lost and drunken University of Texas students, many of them are jaded old musicians like us, managing to find a sudden wide eyed desire to squeeze into a crowded bar and watch a band we've never seen before. Also, it was lovely of course to see so many of the people who I've known and rooted for all these years sort of ascend and get theirs - Rural Alberta Advantage, Woodhands, Timber Timbre, all those folks, not to mention other Canadian bands I hadn't seen much of before prove their awesomeness, people like Katie Stelmanis and Hey Rosetta and Think about Life. And Austin is a fantastic city, and it was warm, and we lay on the grass living the Miller High Life and throwing frisbees around, and meeting like minded souls, and generally agreeing that it's one of those things we'll remember when we're old and grey.

The other thing that I've been getting to do these days is play producer for my other band (yep, that's three now) Entire Cities. We're making a record, and while our friend Heather Kirby did all the hard bits, recording bass and drums and guitars, I get to do the fun bits, recording vocals and saxophone and piano and whatever else we want to throw all over the tracks. And I get to kind of shape the album in the process. It's fascinating to take this role, to decide what notes and instruments and tones go where, and imagine how the whole sprawling thing can fit together in the end. I'm once again reminded of the many differences between live and recorded music, how something can be so exciting to watch, but so wrong once set down in the recorded track, and then again how a small change in the way the song is mixed or the instrument is recorded can make or break it all over again. A little hint of distortion on a sax takes a song from cheese to sleeze all in one instant, and then reverb on the vocals takes it back into the monterey jack territory, and then the addition of some panning on one of the guitars expands it again... I pretty much just want to do it all day, forever. Though I'm reminded again of how difficult it is to stay neutral and critical of a song that you might hear a hundred times, and I wonder at the job of producer who may record music he deeply dislikes, and yet have to find a way to make it good, not by his own criteria, but by the criteria of the type of music that it is. Also the difficulties of communicating what's wanted and what's desired and what's best, even within the context of a band I've been a part of for 5 years.
It's interesting too to meditate on how people make musical decisions when money and time (because I'm doing the recording) are not an issue. Sometimes I think the only way to narrow down the infinite possibilities is to go on a sort of voodoo. I had Simon write out a little essay on the meaning of each song, and I'm trying to translate it into instruments. While I think nobody will care in the end, or notice, it's helped us to make decisions on what should go where and how it should sound. Because while we could record for the next year or two, we don't want to!

And finally, someone special gave me a ribbon mic for Christmas and it's pretty much the best thing I've ever received. It's just a crappy Chinese made Apex, but it's so incredible. It sounds so exactly like the human ear, so dark and swoony and fuzzy and real, that I'm madly in love with it. I find it strange that the recording ideal now is bright and exact - well, I understand why that is - but I don't always like it. I can see how ribbon mic stuff could get bogged down in a big track, buried in low mids, but I also feel that it could be lifted and separated and stand out somehow. I also feel that it works so well for stuff heard on laptop speakers, where the high range is accentuated, and some well mixed tracks that sound fantastic on real speakers wind up sounding tinny. That said, it's interesting how it really suits certain male voices, but I still prefer my own voice through my old AKG that captures a little more fidelity and a little more breath noise.

Ah, the musings of someone who knows absolutely nothing about recording. I hope no actual producers read this.

Tour.

2009-10-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

TOUR.

Well, the tour is over. I played my Weather Station songs, played banjo in Entire Cities, and also hollered with Bruce Peninsula all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean and back again.

As always, touring reminds me of what I already know. That Canada is a beautiful place, full of people that are deeply kind, very talented, and worth knowing.

Halifax Pop Explosion is the nicest festival EVER. I just want to point that out. So nice. And so many lovely/crazy things happened. Like a completely unexpected house show in Saint John that got broken up by the cops in the nicest way possible, but we still sang Crabapples while dancing wildly around a shag carpeted living room with babies, youths, and older folks shreiking 'OH HELL NO!' while the cop smiled, and took Leon's drum sticks. And then there was playing a coffee shop in the Ottawa Valley to the most lovely crowd ever, in the middle of nowhere. And also leaping exhaustedly around the Gus's Pub stage with Entire Cities, waving streamers in the air, channeling my 7 year old ribbon dancing self while screaming 'fucked up' into the microphone. And the myriad pleasures and pains of driving a few thousand kilometers, sardined into a station wagon, with our gear and possessions piled to the roof.

We got a couple reviews for our Halifax Pop showcase. Gosh, they are nice.

SoundProof Magazine:
"So nice to see new venues on Gottigen Street," my cab driver remarked as we pulled up to The Company House. The venue, barely a year old, has added a welcome vibrancy and nighttime bustle to one of Halifax's most maligned and overlooked north-end neighbourhoods. Inside, the red walls, cozy lighting and friendly faces added to the warm atmosphere. Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who plays under the moniker The Weather Station, looked a little flummoxed by the bright lights and noisy crowd—"All I can see are sparkles of light. It's quite surreal," she said at one point—but quickly became comfortable. Lucky for us, too, because her show is spellbinding.

It's easy to see how Lindeman has dazzled so many other writers and showgoers. When you try to describe this woman and the music she makes, words fail. It is difficult to describe something that sounds so familiar but also feels so otherworldly. Lindeman's voice rings delicate but deep, and her fingers move on instruments—banjo strings, guitar frets, and a bow—with strength and sureness beyond her years. A lot of female songwriters are compared to Joni Mitchell, but Lindeman is the first musician I've ever seen who actually captures her vocal and lyrical prowess. The music is also delightfully ambient—sometimes Lindeman would loop her voice into a three part harmony, and ended one song with a gentle whistle that sounded like the call of a loon. For her last two songs, she was joined by bandmates from her equally good ensemble, Entire Cities. They launched quickly into a banjo-fuelled, propulsive rager, with some members seated offstage and standing on the floor. Somehow, all of the song's intricate parts floated and eventually met, fitting together just as it seemed on the verge of collapse. The show was entirely too short, and my only complaint is reserved for the people clustered at the back, talking loudly throughout the set. But Lindeman seemed unfazed, totally locked in this unearthly, beautiful musical landscape she'd created—and so were we.
By Alison Lang

The Coast - Scene and Heard
Later on I went to the Company House for The Weather Station, the solo-ish project of Tamara Lindeman, who plays banjo with Entire Cities (Gus', 12am tonight). I had a love affair with banjos in the spring and summer of last year, ending with a week at a friend's in Winnipeg where I'd sit in a chair with his cat and listen to him practice every night. Then those banjo times disappeared and life went on, but The Weather Station puts me right back there. Understated and elegiac, this is kind of what I imagine it was like watching Joni Mitchell play an empty club in Toronto in 1965. The contributions from her Entire Cities bandmates on some songs are lovely, but the stripped-down aesthetic is completely fulfilling on its own.
By Laura Kenins

Where I must live, obviously.

2009-10-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

http://tinyhouseblog.com/tiny-house-concept/the-weatherstation/

Video

2009-08-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

I got to make a video last week with Lenny Epstein, one of Kingston's finest videographers.
I should have made something really high concept and cool that would be eye poppingly unique and grasp the attention of the internet with an iron fist.
But instead, I decided to make something that I would like, that I pictured when I heard the song.
The song is 'Can't Know' (track 11 on the line) and it is all set on a river. Said river goes from the lake near North Bay that my family has been cottaging on since the fifties to a string of other lakes that are all on untouched crown land. I soloed up the river in a canoe, with Lenny and the camera in another canoe. Cameras in canoes is a terrifying prospect but we managed to get everything we needed without serious incident. There are many slightly wobbly, gliding shots.

2009-07-27T09:01:00.001-07:00

It has been ten thousand years since I've updated this neglected corner of the internet. In the intervening years many things have happened. The album came out and it was shockingly well received. Thanks world. I got to go on tour with one of my personal musical heroes - Timber Timbre. That was wonderful. We had a big CD release in Toronto. I went home to my parents place and we cut up deadfall to make about 20 life size trees, which we then scattered around the Tranzac. We found a homemade bird and suspended it above the stage. I recorded crickets, coyotes, birds, and wind, and played the sounds on mp3 players I hid around the room. We got two stages going. On one, Lisa Bozikovic and Snowblink did their gorgeous thing, and on the main stage we had Weird Weather and Muskox featuring Isla Craig.
What else has happened? We got to play Apple Crisp in Kingston, and it somehow managed to be one of my favourite shows ever. We played the fantastic Gordon Best Theatre in Peterborough. We played a horrible show in Ottawa. Alone, and fighting a bad cold, I travelled east with Timber Timbre, playing Sherbrooke to a shockingly fantastic crowd, Sackville, lovely as always, Halifax twice, and PEI twice.
I couldn't have imagined a better spring.

DAW

2009-03-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

A fellow named Jordan asked what my recording setup was.
Jordan, this is for you.

I have a fairly exhausted, slightly senile Toshiba laptop. I have a 2 channel beginner M-Audio box. I must upgrade it. My DAW is Sonar Producer 4. This is a PC only program that doesn't get alot of attention, but I like it an awful lot. Very good reverb and EQ plug-ins built in. My secret weapon is my AKG C3000B that I bought used from the fellows at Long and McQuade. Thanks fellows. The entire record was recorded with its warm loveliness, except for the moment when I broke out the Shure SM78 to record Dwight's drums. I own a cheap pair of AKG headphones, and broken computer speakers that will soon be replaced. When I mix, I rent expensive beasts from Long and McQuade. For information, I turn to the internet. I ask lots of stupid questions on message boards.

I have never used MIDI.

I have one stand and one cable. I have an old piano my parent's got from the Shelburne Junior School before they closed it down back in the 70's. I have three banjos - my beginner Goodtime, a heavy, frighteningly shiny Sierra, and a fretless, nylon stringed fellow from, well, sometime before 1900. I have my grandfather's centenarian classical guitar, a big steel string I can't play, a broken 12 string, a broken lap steel with some out of control wolf tones, and a 60's Harmony Mars electric guitar with a bowed neck. Actually, I now have two Harmony Mars's, but I will likely sell one. Or start a band where everybody plays matching guitars. I have a wheezy 25 dollar button box accordion, an out of tune court organ and a Hohner Melodica my friend Dave gave me. This is on top of my childhood collection of plastic castanets, steel drums, and one mallet glocs.

I own a fabulous collection of steel bowls and some great mason jars. I own a snippy pair of scissors, and a two violin bows. I have pots, and also pans, and crinkly wrapping paper. I will generally have wine and beer bottles around, and someday will make a beer bottle pan flute. I have wooden blocks, sticks, pens, pencils, and good boots for stomping.

My recording setup is placed gingerly on a desk, generally festooned with bills, envelopes, and loose change. It faces a small window in an entirely red room that is not soundproofed. At all. I hang colourful quilts for sound treatment and hope for the best.

2009-02-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

April 28th is the date.
We will be releasing our first full length, The Line, into the world with the help of Fontana North.

The Line is 12 tracks long. Four of those tracks were seen in some form on 'East'.

The Line is the culmination of four years of slow and patient work, teaching myself to record and write music in order to say something specific about loss. I'm not sure if I said it, but I think I said something.

Our official CD release will be April 30th, in the Tranzac's Main Hall. Muskox & Isla Craig will play, Snowblink too, and Weird Weather of Peterborough, who are also releasing a disc. A secret team of people will be transforming the Tranzac into a forest like space. More on that later.

Death Valley

2009-02-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

I have meteorological dreams.
Last night I dreamed about Death Valley, one of the most visceral places I've been. To stand at the bottom of Death Valley is to stand on the surface of the moon. You can see for miles. It is bigger and stranger and darker than you can understand.
One of the first things that struck me about Death Valley was the sound. If you sit in the middle of the desert, in silence, your head feels stuffed with cotton wool. The silence doesn't sound like silence. Sound travels strangely and deceivingly - a voice on your left sounds like its coming from your right. The ground sounds hollow when struck. The only thing I can attribute it to is that Death Valley is one of the hottest, driest places on Earth. Perhaps the lack of moisture in the air means that the sound is hampered or modified in its travels.
Which is why I was surprised by my dream last night.
I dreamed about Death Valley in terms of moisture, dampness. The salt flats were flooded and the mountains were hemmed in with oppressive cloud. Everything was drenched in slow, heavy rain. I was sweating.
It is raining in Death Valley right now. This doesn't happen very often.

Also, there's this:
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/OddPics/Playa.html

2009-01-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Also, there's this.

2009-01-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

Photographs.
Taken by Meredith Cheesbrough at The Tranzac.

2009-01-10T18:19:00.000-08:00

Remember the Mountain Bed, by Woody Guthrie.
In other words, pretty much everything anyone could hope to say in a song.

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again

2008-11-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

I went to Romania. Which is quite possibly the strangest place I have ever been. It is like going to Europe, but a Europe in an alternate universe, where the last 50 years of history didn't happen, and all kinds of other stuff did instead. And somehow there are still castles and lost villages and gypsies and traffic jams and bizarre music videos and incomprehensible ettiquette and ruins in forests that you can just find.

I mastered the record yesterday. Or rather, the wizard known as Peter J. Moore did. He managed to pull the whole messy thing together and give it a patina, an overarching colour that I like. While also making lattes, demonstrating different mic pre-amps, offering to lend me expensive equipment, discussing mic placement, and playing me freshly recorded tracks by my favourite lost Toronto singer of the 80's.

It is strange just how happy I feel to be done this.

Snowheart

2008-09-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Album is done!!!

but not mastered...

Mixing/Construction.

2008-09-22T20:52:00.000-07:00

The house next to mine is under construction. At least, it's supposed to be under construction, but it sounds more like some kind of war is being waged. From nine in the morning to seven at night there is a constant barrage of drilling, yelling, dropping of tools, stomping around, more drilling. Sometimes the walls shake and hairline cracks appear in the plaster. Sometimes I am convinced that the drillbit is going to come through the wall and into my head.
I avoid being too close to the walls.

Sound does funny things. I'll hear someone talking, or fiddling with something, and it sounds like it's coming from my bathroom. Or the opposite wall. In fact, it's always coming from next door. Yet my brain is so fooled that I've started almost having hallucinations. I hear something, and my brain presents me with an interpretation of it. 'Someone has just come in from outside and is trying to steal your kitchen table' it says.
My dreams involve giants and backhoes.
This has been going on since July.

Nevertheless, I've been mixing the record. Or at least trying to. When my roommates aren't home and I'm not working or rehearsing or going away or running errands or in one of those weeklong segments where I hate all my songs and have no wish to play them on full volume -these are the times I am mixing. It's time consuming, mostly because I recorded the record myself, and this is something I don't necessarily know how to do. Sometimes I hear some sort of high pitched noise, or some kind of interference, and then it takes me an hour to figure out that last year, when I recorded the vocals for a song, I had my printer on in my room and it somehow communicated a completely inaudible sound to the microphone, which dutifully recorded it and passed it on, unrecognised until I got these two massive mixing speakers from Long and McQuade. They are merciless. You can hear everything on these things. Even the secret language of printers and fluourescent lights.
Did you know that the sound of the earth rotating can be detected at 4 Hz?

I have found that hearing is a matter of context. What we hear depends on what else we hear, or what we see. For instance, when you listen to somebody sing, you don't hear all the little noises they make with their mouth, because you are selective. You select what you want to hear - the voice - and block out everything else. That's why recording can be so tricky.
I often record thirty to forty tracks on my songs, mostly of random, unplanned embellishment. In the final mix, much of it will be mostly inaudible, but it adds strange colours. In one song, I swear that I can hear the sound of a tap come on, and water start to flow. This doesn't happen of course. I'm pretty sure that sound is the combination of some hiss on a percussion track and a particularly sharp note on banjo. I'm not sure. But I'm fascinated by the visual picture my brain presents me with. In another song, a phone rings in the far background of a chopped up drum track. In the context of the song, it is impossible to tell there is a phone there. If I zero in on the sound, it is a fraction of a second long, but the song suddenly seems more urgent.

It's hard to focus, here amongst the drills and power saws. And I need to re-record a few things, which is impossible given the current climate here on Bellwoods. But I will perservere. This album needs to be finished.

Next week: more on why it's taken me four years to record an album.