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9-16


Barry Adamson - As Above So Below (Mute) 1998

Mr. Adamson was a bassist in both Magazine and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds. When he left that group in 1987 he did some film scoring, but eventually looped back around to dark jazz-inflected rock music. Found this one in a cheapie bin in Halifax... it has most of his quirky proclivities from the spy film trumpet staps and smoothed out Tom Waits-ish clatter and rasp.
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Adem - Homesongs (Domino) 2004

Adem Ilhan started out with Kieren Hebden (who now sports the alias Four Tet) in the British trio Fridge. While Hebden followed a more electronic route out to his new career, Adem kept to a more singer/songwriter tack... though still with a machine-enhanced multi-instrumentality. Nice quiet pop songs that are a little dusty, a little sunny, a little broken-hearted. Got it as a playcopy... liked it, bought the newest one... which is still at the store being used as a playcopy and therefore not yet part of the permanent collection.
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Adorable - Against Perfection (Creation/EMI) 1993


Adorable - Fake (Creation) 1994

Against Perfection came in second hand around the year of it's release... which was smack in a glut of shoegazer bands all riding the wave My Bloody Valentine had touched off. Adorable was much less ethereal and more phlegmatic than most of the herd, especially set apart by singer Piotr Fijalkowski's cocky vocals reminiscent of Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler. The music had the prerequisite squall of feedback and circular bass lines, and was just catchy enough to demand repeated listening yet distant enough to not grow tiresome. The band never caught on either in UK or North America and the second album, Fake, was never release in Canada. I so loved the first one that I considered ordering Fake on import... but my cheapness got the better of me and I demurred. Finally I found it second hand several years later and it turned out, like so many albums I jones for long and hard, to be a little disappointing... but still with a couple of great tracks. And that was it for Adorable... the singer went on to for another group Polak... more on that later.
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Aereogramme - A Story in White (Matador) 2001

Once upon a time there was a pretty awesome Scottish instrumental post-rock group that wasn't Mogwai. It was actually called Ganger and released two great albums, the second called Hammock Time came out in North America on Merge records, and they then split up. One of the two bassists formed a new called Aereogramme that had vocals and everything. If the band had released an e.p. consisting of the first five tracks on A Story in White then their history would be unmarred. But they went on with another eight tracks on the album and three more albums after that trying to meld sub-Coldplay nonsense lyrics and pretty melodies to angry guitars and guttural shouting passages... not often a good mix. Those first five songs though....
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Afghan Whigs - Up in it (Sub Pop) 1990


Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen (Elektra) 1993


Afghan Whigs - Black Love (Elektra) 1996

I can't really remember whether I got Up In It first, or Gentlemen.... I remember finding the Sub Pop album in a last ditch sales bin at Urban Sound Exchange up on Prospect St. before it slunk away in the middle of the night under the pretense of renovations. In Fredericton "renovations" mean "let's see how much shit we can sneak out of here before the guys with the padlocks show up." But I digress. Whatever order I got them in the jewel in the Afghan Whig crown is most definitely Gentlemen. Singer/writer Greg Dulli is a hopeless romantic with a misogynist/pugilist heart and the song cycle on the 1993 major label debut proves it again and again. Especially effective is when, on the track My Curse, he turns the vocal over to Marcy Mays of Scrawl and the female perspective of the lover/slave relationship is given time. It'll break your heart... really. The Whigs continued on for a few more albums that were good in their own right. More recently Dulli has moved on to front Twilight Singers... a group that started off mixing the funky heaviness of the Afghan Whigs with a lighter tropical touch provided by Fila Brazilia... though the last work by Twilight Singers is much much closer to the Whigs at their most abrasive.

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1 Mile North - Minor Shadows (Ba Da Bing) 2003
7 tracks :: 51:19


1 Mile North/Colophon/Wind Up Bird - Conduction.Convection.Radiation (Music Fellowship) 2005
10 tracks :: 60:51

I ended up with the 1-Mile North disc through some label solicitation for the perMUTATIONS radio show I was doing on CHSR. I liked it so much I brought in Music Fellowship split release to the store. I usually leave things like that on the shelf to pique people's interest for a couple of months... and when that fails I buy 'em myself. 1-Mile North are a slow and deliberate guitar/bass/electronics outfit in the Labradford vein. The first track on their album was one of those clinchers called "in 1983 he loved to fly."
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4- Star Movie - S/T (Poster Girl) 1998
13 tracks :: 46:51

Got it as a store playcopy from the label... Poster Girl was only around 1996-2000 and also put out a full length by Cheticamp... which we also received but I turfed somewhere along the line... and a compilation featuring tracks by New Grand and Zumpano (Vancouver band from whence sprang New Pornographers) and some 7" singles including a split with Joe Pernice and Cheticamp.
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A Frames - Black Forest (Sub Pop) 2005
14 tracks :: 34:34

Store playcopy. Not an all around winner... a semi-successful grafting of The Cramps and Bauhaus. Just enough cool tracks to bother keeping around, for now.
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Aarktica - Pure Tone Audiometry (Darla) 2003
7 tracks :: 45:08

Aarktica - Bleeding Light (Darla) 2004
8 tracks :: 46:37

I have a certain affinity for dreamy/noisy pop bands. Aarktica are certainly good at this stuff, although when they go too far out on a limb experimentally they lose their austerity. Good for riding in buses or pretending to write poetry in coffee shops.
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ABBC - Tete a Tete (Wabana) 2001
10 tracks :: 46:51

The band initials refer to Naïm Amor, Thomas Belhom, Joey Burns and John Convertino. You hip folks may recognize the last two names since they are the core members of Calexico, another favourite I'll be listening to in a month or so. The other two gentlemen are their French counterparts. Together they make music that's somewhere between the earliest TexMex instrumentals the American pair are known for and gentle yet strange French swoony folk/country.
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Accelera Deck - Shadow Land (Scarecelight) 2001
14 tracks :: 42:48

C. Jeely is Accelera Deck. I received a more recent disc (filed in the electronic section of my library for some reason and therefore upcoming) of his from the tbtmo label for the radio show... though that one was mostly distorted washes of electric guitar with occasional drum machines and more ambient passages... cool shit in other words. I spotted this disc in a cheapie bin in Montreal and grabbed it... but it turned out to be mostly gentle acoustic guitar songs... quelle surprise!!! Still, despite the shock, it's moody enough to assimilate.

The 2400 Proposal

So there's a project I've set out for myself. At the end of January I was sorting and filing the music I'd dragged down into my hidey-hole pre-hibernation.... Once I'd finished plugging things into my database and tallied 'em all up the new total came to exactly 2400.

That seemed important. An epic number.

It meant that if each CD averaged out to one hour that I had 100 straight 24 hour days of listening.

Instead of stocking up on methamphetamines and snackey cakes I figured... why not slow that down to eight hour listening days and stretch it out to a 300 day party??

So here I am. Listening to my records collection. For 300 days. Drive time. No repeats.

Already I've hit a snag of sorts. Well two really. First up... my database is alphabetical, but doesn't discriminate by genre... whereas my physical filing system separates rock from jazz from electronic etc. So do I listen by the database list or just pull 8 CDs in a row every day? I've gone with option B to start with... if only because some of my "play" time is in store and some of the outer stuff could scare people away if they came in at the wrong moment. The second snag is that yesterday's snowstorm meant the lab was closed in the evening and I got the night off... therefore I couldn't do the data entry (I'm about to inflict it upon you below) on the first eight discs last night. I'm a day behind in other words. Well no matter... I have a few "wiggle room" days to still put me on schedule for years end... that's the goal. Of course it doesn't take into consideration any new acquistions in 2007 (it's not like I'm going to stop, y'know...). Oh well. No system's perfect. On ward.