The Virtual Album

So The Sky Was Blue is finally incoming... sort of... it currently exists in the warm embrace of Canada Post. Versions of the CD are winging their way towards printers in BC, and electronic distributors in the US. CD Baby (which distributes my first album Bremner Duthie Sings Kurt Weill) will be handing the electronic side of things.


click 'here' to jump over to myspace and hear the songs


Toni Mustra, a friend and a fabulous graphic designer, handled the final step of the design work for the CD cover. I had the privilege of sitting watching him working on Adobe Photoshop, basing the cover on an image of the blue sky he took above Trinity Bellwoods park just outside his door in Toronto. It is a fabulous design - the whole of the front is shadowed and dark apart from the title of album, with wisps of cloud sneaking into the words, and then when you open up the cover you get the blue sweep of the sky. Very nice work and a nice visual metaphor for the album's songs - they're a bit dark and a bit quirky and the title is based on the first line from that bittersweet song 'Lover Come Back to Me' ("the sky was blue, and high above, the moon was new, and so was love")

I should have it in my hands somewhere around mid/late June....

beauty of a short...

a new toy

The Casio VL1 (or VL-Tone) was one of those truly bizarre products in musical history.

Thanks to ebay I have a new toy - half calculator, half 'synthesiser'... One of the four Kashio brothers who founded the company was a would-be musician as well as an electronics engineer and he had designed a simple and inexpensive LSI (Large Scale Integration) chip that could be used for musical purposes, but executives at the company weren't confident that it had enough features to sell in its own right so some bright spark at Casio had the idea to add a calculator! Obvious really! What else would you add to a small, portable musical instrument?!?? I guess that as one of the world's leaders in calculator manufacture, they had the technology for free.

As well as being a calculator, it can also be powered up in a mode that offers a handful of monophonic sounds played from the two-octave 'keyboard' (an inappropriate term for the row of unplayable and unreliable switches you can see above). Flute, Piano, Guitar and Violin. To describe these sounds as 'realistic' would be highly misleading.

It was something of a novelty gadget and sounds pretty poor through its own small speaker but played through the line output, it can sound fairly reasonable, so much so that it was used by the Human League, Devo, The Cars and others - even Stevie Wonder is alleged to have used one!

However, it was the German band 'Trio' who gave the VL-Tone its finest moment of fame in their record "DaDaDa" which was a huge huge hit (especially in Europe) and which used one of the VL-Tone's preset rhythms as its foundation. The VL-Tone was used in later years by Moby and Goldie and others. And despite its obvious limitations, the VL-Tone sold 1,000,000 units in its five year lifetime (1979-1984).

Juju...

I’m now officially addicted to this album. Its on at the gym, it makes me laugh out loud on the TTC, I’m listening to it right now on the ipod dock.





Strut Records has put out a 2nd set of Nigerian high life and Afro-Funk and it is amazing. Quirky, beautiful, complicated, so, so rootsy. I remember when highlife first hit the scene and I spent months dancing round the house to ‘Sweet Mother’ by the amazing Prince Nico Mbarga - I’d never heard the jangly high guitar sounds of this afro pop sound before and they just pulled my heart out. But eventually it seemed like that sound was everywhere and I moved on and I felt like I’d been there and done it. But this fab collection breaks the stereotypes about the sound and shows the immense range of sounds and styles that these amazing musicians were exploring. A wonderful mix of acoustic and electric instrumentations and quirky expressive vocals. Even the names of the songs and the bands are thrilling: "Everybody Likes Something Good" by Ify Jerry Krusade, "Yabis" by Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars, "Onyame" by Ashanti Afrika Jah, "Ezuku Buzo" by Bola Johnson & His Eazy Life Top Beats, "African Dialects" by Peter King, "You Are My Heart" by Rex Williams, "Hot Tears" by The Immortals, "Dododo (Ekassa No 1)" by Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros, "Happy Survival" by Ifeanyi Eddie Okwedy & His Maymores Dance Band, "Tug Of War" by The Faces, "Ire Africa" by Chief Checker, and "Eddie Quansa" by Peacocks Guitar Band. Check them out here and I think that Soundscapes on College St has the CDs.





and man, I love their outfits. I think we should all dress like that in Toronto - it would so cheer up the winter.

My Current Favouritist Album

Eccentric Soul - the Trager and Note Labels.


Imagine a time when everyone was trying to copy the great songs of Motown and the Soul explosion. When every recording studio across America was filled with wannabe groups and singers and arrangers and producers trying to find the next big thing. Well, some of them made it and some of them 'almost' made it, and sometimes they almost made it in really interesting ways. This series of recordings has been dredging through little known archives and labels to find unknown gems - and I love this particular collection. They all sound so, so, so close to the greatest soul record you ever heard, but then a sound comes slightly out of left field and you think 'what the hell was that'... a riff that would be better in a classical quintet, or a voice that stepped right out of the church pews, or a shout out that sounds like it should be in a modern pop record. Sometimes there is a note out of place, or the singer dips below the pitch, but it doesn't seem to matter at all - the songs are constantly surprising and filled with passion and conviction and they are somehow (in spite of the fact that they are desperately trying to copy the greatest hits of the time) totally original. You can hear them on Amazon.com

the auditory cloud

This extraordinary site gives you a visual cloud of popularity and associations between music and groups. I like how the names float into place as the site picks up Data. Click on any name in the cloud to continue...


http://www.music-map.com/nick+cave+and+the+bad+seeds.html

Winds

Our Barn in Burgundy got beaten by the windstorms in France on Monday. 130 mile an hour winds across the central region. Normally the little town is in a valley and seems to escape the winds, but this time no.



The damage is bad enough, but what the photos don't show is that the roof and those immense timbers are not lying beneath the open hole. They are about 100 meters away. The wind picked them up and threw up up and over our Barn and into the neighbours yard. Thankfully they fell in the yard and not on their house and so no-one was hurt.



I was in a panic driving down from Paris to see the damage, but something about the immensity of it (the entire village is missing rooftops and wood and tiles are scattered across the road) was kind of calming. I can't even pick up one of those roof beams. I can't even move it. Ridiculous amounts of power. Apart from clearing up a bit there was nothing much to do. The roofer came by and shook his head, the insurance is going to slowly work its way to offer us some solutions and by the time we see it again in the summer we hope it'll be looking more like its old self.

Rainy night in Paris on the Seine

Dropped Lisa off at her poetry reading and then took a walk down at the Seine.

One last goodbye to a very painful, long, (and very funny) trainwreck of a presidency

thank you David Letterman...

Finally truly honest service

On the flight they offered chicken or beef, when I asked how each was done the steward gave me a funny look and said ‘well, they’re both reheated’ … I took the chicken…

Miracle Drug?

Odd... for the last year (probably started by all the physical work on the show in Japan) I've been having a lot of joint pain... A lot of pain! - to the point where I was panicked about having to do the physical work on the cabaret show that I'd been planning! And it's been getting worse and worse as I rehearsed. A week ago I looked up the Sports Medicine facilities in Toronto to start some kind of rehab. I thought they would order me out of the gym and away from physical work and onto anti-inflammatory drugs or steroids or something..

Then, by coincidence, last week I took a dose of the flax seed oil that had been recommended to me for something else and that I'd been avoiding (since it tastes so awful), and overnight all the pain disappeared. All of it. Overnight.

I spent the day wondering what the hell had happened to the pain I'd be dealing with for 6 months and then finally put the two together. Since then I've been on the web and seen that flax seed oil is recommended for joint pain. So that explains it. I guess. But overnight miracle cures. That's weird. Not like I'm complaining or anything... but it's kind of weird.

Slave and Master

I'm off to spend the day in front of a set of 20,000 dollar audio speakers listening to myself - I'll be hanging out while James Paul of Rogue studios, 'masters' my album.





Wikipedia defines this as "a form of audio post-production - the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master); the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). After the advent of tape it was found that master recordings could be optimized by making fine adjustments to the balance and equalization prior to the cutting of the master disc. Mastering became a highly skilled craft and it was widely recognized that good mastering could make or break a commercial recording"

When pressed for more details James defined it as 'I give him some money, he sits in front of a set of 20,000 dollar speaker for hours, and then he gives me an album that sounds amazing'....

beyond that it seems to be witchcraft and magic...

basically as far as I can see its the process of finding a middle balance for the sound on the album so it rings true on every kind of speaker - the cheapo transistor, or the ultra high end, or the car stereo... cutting some frequencies, adding others...

it should be a fascinating and strange few hours...

Diving in

Now it's back to the Waterlogs.

I wrote the short play, The Waterlogs, just after living in NYC for a couple of years and immediately after 9/11. On March 30'th I'll be having a reading of a new draft of Waterlogs with the First Draft Readings at the Epicure Cafe on Queen St. (so I guess technically this will be a 2nd draft...) and its time for a re-write

I arrived in NYC literally as the smoke was still drifting over the city... my flight was booked for 9/12 and I flew into NYC a few days later on one of the first commercial flights. But re-reading it now I think it was too filled with that event. I had snuck through the police and army barriers just after I arrived to watch the rescue attempts in the burning building. I had sat on the west side highway and watched trucks go by filled with dirty exhausted men and women heading back and forth from downtown. And as I wandered the city everyone was breathing the acrid smoke drifting up across the city. So it wasn't difficult to be overwhelmed with the emotions of the moment. But its nice to have a chance to re-work it and see if there is a chance to step away from that event.

The play explores the hidden geography of cities through the struggles of three people who inhabit the city in very different ways. Once we all believed that sickness and health was caused by upwellings of good or bad airs from the waters and marshes. The strange, stagnant but unkillable streams, creeks and lakes that lie beneath the asphalt and concrete of a city seemed to me to be an good metaphor for how cities affect people.

Now the waterlogs seems to be adapting itself to new places and new times. I've been walking over the lost rivers of Toronto, buried beneath the grid of the city and channeled into sewers and wondering what kind of relationship Torontonians have with their city - just as complicated and fraught as New Yorkers, that I'm sure of, but perhaps less angst ridden (or more?.... still figuring that one out...). Last week I wandered up to Wychwood and walked the length of Taddle Creek that runs through downtown Toronto and comes to the surface in only one place.

Yes! Thanks Rick Mercer

Its been a while since I've seen Mercer so riled up about something. A great, succinct and passionate rant about the Gag order Harper served on parliament last week.

How We Can Act

This was forwarded to me by the group - Department of Culture.

I think it expresses the possibilities for protest and action fairly well. After listening to Harper twist the truths so barefacedly in his national address, and after his attempt to ram a series of terribly Partisan measures through on the panic of a budgetary crisis I'm now convinced that he's an ideologue and a man governing in a profoundly un-canadian way. The thought that he believes he has the right to shut down Parliament for two months to avoid a non-confidence vote, which the constitution of Canada demands he be exposed to, is deeply shocking.

I'll be at the rally in Toronto on Dec 6th at Nathan Phillips Square - Hope I see you there...


As you are undoubtedly aware, this past week has brought unprecedented change to federal politics.

We believe the proposed NDP/Liberal Coalition government is a welcome change to the ideologically driven ultra-right wing policies that Harper represents. With a formal agreement from the Bloc Quebecois and the support of the Green Party, this government now represents 63% of Canadian voters. Meanwhile Harper is trying to use his millions in fundraising advantage and ignorance of parliamentary procedure to keep power.

He can be stopped and there are several things that we encourage you to do:

1. Email the Governor General
We need to flood the Governor General’s e-mail box with support for the coalition government. Copy and paste this letter or write one of your own. Send it along with your name and address to Michaëlle Jean. DO THIS NOW. It is essential that we show the governor general that there is massive support for this plan.

Send your message to: info@gg.ca

Your Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean,

I am writing to encourage you to accept the proposal by M. Dion and Mr. Layton to form a coalition government in cooperation with M. Duceppe. The actions of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are motivated by a lust for power, not the best interests of the people of our country. I believe that the coalition — which duly represents the voices of 63% of Canadians — should be given the opportunity to form a government. I also do not think that an election is a prudent choice at this juncture. We need leadership and a cooperative process. I look forward to the days ahead with
hope; please act in the name of democracy and good government.

Best Regards,

Insert your full name and address.

2. Go to a rally in support of the coalition government.

On Saturday December 6th there are rallies right across the country. The Toronto rally will take place at the same time as a Conservative Rally at Queen’s Park. Don’t be confused by the Conservative rally at Queen’s Park. Pro Coalition people are gathering at NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE. Jack Layton and Stéphane Dion will be speaking at NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE. Musical guests will follow.

The Conservatives are using their own considerable resources and sympathetic media in an attempt to escape a confidence vote and maintain power. We must demonstrate that the majority of Canada’s citizens support the coalition by showing our numbers at rallies right across the country.

CLICK HERE for the time and location of pro -coalition rallies across the country:
http://www.makeparliamentwork.ca/makeparliamentwork/rally-listing.

MANY OF THESE RALLIES ARE ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 4th

3. Sign these petitions:

Avaaz.org

http://www.avaaz.org/en/coalition_for_canada/98.php/?CLICK_TF_TRACK

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

http://www.progressivecoalition.ca/form.php

4. Join these Facebook groups:

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27949758238

Canadians United Against Stephen Harper
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29529380865

5. Copy/Paste this message and send it to everyone you know via Facebook and email:

This situation is unprecedented. It is imperative that you act. The massive cash advantage that the Conservatives have means there are people BEING PAID to write emails and messages supporting Harper’s cling to power across the country. At this moment, each action reverberates and makes a big difference.

In Solidarity,

DoC