Sometimes I take mixes a liiiiiiitle too seriously...

I may or may not have spent about six hours over the past three days assembling an epic mix for my friend's thirtieth birthday. It came about in something of the following fashion:

"So I'm gonna make the cake, and pick up the beer, and turn on the Christmas lights [our 'grown-up' version of balloons tied to the front porch]... anything else you'd like me to take care of" 

"... Oh yeah, you could throw some music together, maybe a playlist or something...?"

Throw together a playlist, pshaw, who do you think I am? Someone who... just... throws together a playlist?!? I mean really....

Making a mix is a delicate and time consuming thing. Making a mix for someone else is doubly so, but making a mix for someone else's party, and a Big Birthday at that... well apparently that takes a very. Long. Time.

Step 1) Alphabetically go through my entire itunes library looking for songs my friend would like.

Step 2) Secretly rip several of her favourite CDs onto my computer and added some of those songs.

Step 3) Cull the list, removing any excessively represented bands (max of three songs per group)

Step 4)  Begrudgingly remove songs I knew were on there more for me than for her.

Step 5) "Randomize"

I don't perhaps give computers the respect they're due... manually randomizing things is near fracking impossible! Clicking on songs, scrolling down the list and dropping them wherever they happen to land, then repeating over and over and over again... yeah that was a good two hours right there.

Step 6) Song-to-song transitions

... the most important part of any mix-making venture. Sure the songs you pick are important, but having them flow properly, having the chords blend seamlessly or jar your ears in just the right way, having the right balance of boppy, slow, old, new, clear, grungy... that takes time. Three. Hours.

It may be fifteen point three hours long (in the words of my sister: "Sweet Jesus, when is she even going to have time to listen to all that!?!") , but I take my mix-making responsibilities seriously, especially when the fate of a thirtieth birthday hangs in the balance (or so I like to think)!

Robots!Everywhere!! Everywhere.

I've always been interested in the impact a venue/an audience/a setting has on a performance. The Kee To Bala is one of my all time favourite venues, though the Black Sheep in Wakefield is quickly catching up, and Ottawa's Raw Sugar makes every show feel like its in someone's living room... I could literally go on for pages and pages about the highs and lows of various concert-houses across the country, but today I have for you an interesting story, a case study if you will of one band, two venues. Robots!EVERYWHERE!!, everywhere.

On Family Day, instead of visiting with my actual family, I headed over to Ottawa's Gem of a pub, The Manx, to see Phil perform an acoustic set with Larissa on Glockenspiel, and my good friend Tall Josh Pruner on guitar. Phil's usual gig involves a lot of drum machine, wonderfully messy guitar, and homage to B.A. Johnson- there was of course the presence of B.A.'s ghost in the form of a brilliant cover of 'My Heart is a Blinking Nintendo' but overall in the cozy basement pub, was more of a low key affair. It was great to hear Phil's always-entertaining lyrics, and watch the three friends just have fun Playing Songs.  I have always been a fan of loud punk music, but as I've gotten older I've also developed a taste for checking out the acoustic versions of the songs, taking a moment to really hear the lyrics in their entirely before hearing their quicker and messier cousins. I'm a lyrics gal, and understanding the words the singer is singing always makes me like the song more. With such gems as "I like talking to strippers like I'm a hockey player" Robots!EVERYWHERE!! is certainly no exception.

Last night, however, I caught Robots!EVERYWHERE!! in his natural habitat, as it were: Maverick's. You may remember me mentioning Maverick's as the worst venue in Ottawa (an exaggeration, I'm sure, but not a very far stretch) but I will admit that some bands just belong there. Not belong in that they are horrible, and so belong in a horrible venue- rather the opposite! They seem to fit there in a way that makes the venue itself better, that they make Maverick's somehow make sense. Cuff the Duke does that in a way that baffles and amazes me every time, and Robots!EVERYWHERE!! did a fantastic job of the same type.

I enjoyed the acoustic show, but this is clearly where you should experience Robots!EVERYWHERE!! In his full B.A. Johnson-style glory Phil sped through song after hilarious song (accompanied by enthusiastic audience sing-a-longs), performed numerous costume changes (continuously egged on by the self-same audience to "take it off!!!"), and played several super-speed encores.

Sometimes when you see a band do an acoustic set its like a while different group, it sounds nothing like them and you come away either disappointed, or wishing they always played acoustic. Other times you just wonder who the hell this is, and how they are even remotely related to their normal incarnation. With Robots!EVERYWHERE!! it was neither of these- Phil fit the music to the venue and to the audience without sacrificing anything of the Robots!EVERYWHERE!! experience.


Excellent job Sir, keep up the fine work.


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If you are a fan of entertainingly hilarious pop-indie-punk you should definitely check out Robots!EVERYWHERE!! for free!

Rememberin the Love

The past few weeks I have had numerous nostalgia-inducing musical experiences. I know that sounds a little overly existential, but really all I mean is that I've been hearing songs (or snippets of songs) that make me think of entire albums, entire catalogs, entire sections of my life in very real, viceral, even startling ways. Ten seconds of a Rufus Wainwright song brought back the vividness of a mid-Cross-Canada trip through Northern Ontario, complete with smells (cold forest), sights (endless pine trees interrupted only by bedrock and sudden lakes), and feelings (overwhelming melencholea). This may have been heightened by the innate cinematic nature of the particular CD (Want One... or was it Want Two...?) but similar experiences (a snippet of Snow Patrol vividly recalling a giant tire dump in Cape Breton, and mid-90s Matt Good Band bringing back the first set I ever worked on) have forced me to acknowledge a trend: I am having flashbacks.

Clearly this means that I am either some sort of super hero or I am in an elaborate American soap opera (because stuff like that just doesn't happen in the British ones). Either way its a rather pleasant way to be reminded of the power of music to remind us of an otherwise unreachable experience.

I recently read an NPR articule writen by vinyl collector Ian Nagoski, in which he put forth the following idea:

"When you listen to a record what you're receiving is a kind of sonic sculpture of the air molecules that recreates that time and that place in that room where the air molecules were vibrating in the same way. You're living in a reproduction of the air molecules created by that person, in that moment of their life, and reliving not a memory, but almost experiencing it with them."

This comment so perfectly expresses by idea of music, I could not imagine even attempting to paraphrase it. Not does it describe the moment of the recording, but the collection of moments during which you have ever heard that song, album, or artist. Each time you listen to a song, it brings back each of those moments, temporarily folding time in such a way that they become temporarily accessible, something that is quite difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. It is one of the many reasons I love music- its ability to help you relive the past, to make you remember the love.

-E

PS Because I am a huge dork I have also spent the evening reliving a different kind of 'remembering the love,' that is the love of a very certain period of time in my life (third year university) via a rather odd annual tradition- the celebration of Robbie Burns Day as 'Billy Boyd Day' aka Hobbit Day aka I watch all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back while eating Hobbit food (usually an elaborately shire-like cheese, spinach and carrot soup,with some strikingly-similar-to-tea-biscuits style lambas bread) while drinking scotch and/or Guinness... Though this year the tradition has been undertaken all by my lonesome, it has not failed to bring about the usual sort of loverly nostalgia to which I have been accustomed... One might not think these warm fuzzy feelings would be the result of a scotch-laiden watching of epic battle scenes, but it doesn't stop it from being true any more than music bringing about such a state of mind.