I went through a recent spurt of musical activity – the results of which are now posted on the backwaters of our website over at the Chumpend Songs. That’s the spot where I post half-finished musical ideas and experiments with recording and production. I have also now added almost an hour’s-worth of what I’ll term (with more distinction than it deserves) “archival recordings” from my university days. The songs were recorded on some pretty simple equipment, one or two steps down from a cassette 4-track, but at least a step up from a standard cassette deck with built-in mic (did we really call them “ghetto blasters” back then?). They are posted on a page all their own, over at the Unearthed tapes.
While a release of Nick Drake’s early recordings kept things close to the original “lo fi” beauty (which I really appreciate a lot – I’ll have to write about that here sometime) – I took a different approach, using my digital music editing software to manipulate the old songs into what I thought were slightly more palatable offerings (or at least less embarrassing for me). Still for sure (very) lo fi – but there’s a layer of digital tinkering smoothed over the top of many of the tracks.
The music includes sounds from my friends as well, and listening to all this over the last couple of weeks has brought back many warm memories of those hungry days in downtown Winnipeg, when it was more important to spend our time creating (e.g. noise, music, or both at once) than it was to spend our time consuming (e.g. television, or food for that matter). Ahhh, those were the days!
