Saturday, October 16, 2010

A Deep Breath

It has been madness for me over the last few days. I have been preparing for the Ache Records Super sale; stickering, stuffing, and packing records; loading up carloads and unloading carloads; putting the final touches on the website, etc. What I had thought to be a 4 or 5 hour task ended up taking about 16 hours and that's with calling in some extra help for the second half of it (thanks Erin and Pops!).

But it is done for the most part! All of the participating record stores in Vancouver have the stock and the website is up and ready to process your order. Go ahead, Vancouverite, and look through your couch cushions for those toonies you lost last week and drop by any of the fine folks at Red Cat, Scratch, Zulu, Audiopile, Dandelion or Zoo Zhop for a record or two. Then go home, throw on the album and bask in the music and the feeling of supporting us.

We had the first of several events go down last night. Despite functioning on 2 hours of sleep, I managed to have a blast. Thanks to Spirals, Hari Legs, David Zoo Zhop, and my fellow band mates for knocking it out of the park.

So now I'm at home after the kind of deep sleep that one wakes up from with a feeling that he or she was in a boxing match the night before. I feel rested but dazed. The sun is shinning, I'm drinking a fantastic coffee, taking a deep breath, and stretching out my muscles which ache (pun intended) from carrying so many boxes of records. This is either the eye of the storm or it has passed by and it will be smooth sailing from here on in. Who knows? But as my friend, Luc's, ominous fortune cookie once read: Hope for the best but expect the worst.

Next up is a party at the elusive Red Gate in Vancouver tonight. Babe Rainbow and my newest band, Mt Career are playing.... and exhale. Gotta run!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Caving

One of my newest musical projects, Caving, has a new (and debut) album out called U.S. Caves. It is technically released this Friday as a free download, but I've already put it up on Bandcamp because, well, who cares about a release date for a free download?

The album is essentially a rap mixtape. I've taken acapellas (some well known and some a bit more obscure) and created my own beats and music to accompany them using a lot of world music samples and digital tomfoolery. I'm really interested in getting involved in rap production and while such a venture is probably well beyond my social and professional reach, it was fun to come up with these tracks to share with you nonetheless.

T.I., Rich Boy, Pill, Drizzy, Weezy, Cool Kids, if you're out there: hit me up and we'll get crazy.


Here it is!

<a href="http://caving.bandcamp.com/album/u-s-caves">U.S. Caves by Caving</a>

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Busy time upon me.

Wow. Life keeps coming at us, hey?

I've been busy busy busy. The bulk of my busyness revolves around this Ache Super Sale I'm working on. Oh, what sale is that, you ask? Basically, the experimental record label I run is turning 10 years old this year! Wild. I've been running this thing for 1/3 of my entire life. What a thought!

So, to celebrate (and, honestly, to help make a theoretical dent in Ache's daunting debt) I'm throwing a sale. Not just one of those 10% off type sales, though. More like one of those liquidation sales you see when a business goes under or moves and it's completely chaotic because everything is so cheap. The kind of sale that evokes people to fight each other, step on each other's faces, and throw out their babies so they can fill up the carriage with more wares.

The label: Ache is a forum for different ideas about what music can be, and how it can function without any rules of genre or concern for commercial success. Each Ache release comes with a feeling of excitement and hope that it might move you and, if even slightly, change your idea of what music is. A point of pride for me is Ache's diversity. From African street music to beautiful drones to Japanese thrash, Ache's only ethos is that the music is challenging and does not function within the guidelines of the conventional music industry. If I believed that an artist was creating music purely to sell records (or what I call "playing the game"), I would not attach the Ache name to it. 

The sale: I'll be selling everything between $1 and $5 both in person around Vancouver and digitally everywhere else in the world (plus shipping, of course)

So if you've ever been curious about the music I put out, or if you are interested in hearing new, untainted musical ideas, now is the time to check out Ache. I have a streaming audio player of some tracks from the catalog for you to get acquainted with. Enjoy!

For those of you in Vancouver, I'm piecing together all sorts of celebratory events for the sale as well: A birthday party with Babe Rainbow and my new band, Mt Career; a DJ in-store at Zulu Records where I'll be playing only Ache stuff while people hang out, have a few drinks, and buy records; and even a weekly pop-up store at the Toast Collective! More info on each of these is available here

I also just finished my first CAVING mix yesterday! But I'll write more about that in another post. This one is already feeling like the It of Stephen King's career. Length-wise, I mean.