DAW

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.

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

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

Also, there's this.

Photographs.
Taken by Meredith Cheesbrough at The Tranzac.

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

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.