Garage-Folk Duo
A few weeks ago we went to our good friend Joey Bruni‘s family farm to shoot some performance videos. Here’s the first— “Tortoise” live in front of a woodpile in a cellar.
I love that trusty little Casio—not to mention Laura’s uncanny ability with an egg-shaker. Oh, and that cowboy hat is a real Stetson that belonged to Laura’s dude rancher grandfather.
Stay turned for more!
Getting ready for our upcoming tour of eastern Canada has me taking stock of what we need for the trip. My homemade Fender 5F2-A amp isn’t loud enough for most shows, so I’m working on a bigger tube amp (based on an Ampeg Jet), but it won’t be ready in time.
Enter the Tiny Giant, an amplifier design from Musicpcb.com (whose projects I fully endorse). Based around the use of laptop power supply, as there are a gazillion of them floating around without a functioning laptop to give power to, the Tiny Giant bypasses the danger of high-voltage and allows for a very compact, yet powerful amp.
This happy little dude is capable of putting out 20 watts of crystal clear clean volume (depending on the speaker) and cost me about $40 to build (including getting the power supply off eBay). We’ll be taking it on tour as a backup along with a homemade speaker cabinet I made out of an old reel-to-reel box—the pair sounds awesome!
In fact, lately I’ve been playing it through a 1/2-sized Jay Turser I got for $60 (pictured below with the homemade cabinet), so that’s an entire rig that sounds great for only about $100!
Check out the build thread at DIYstompboxes.com for more info. I’m going to try to mod mine to include a jack to supply power to a couple pedals for added portability…
This album has been a very well kept secret for a long time and our track in particular has been ready since February, but it’s finally time to unveil the excellent tribute to our good friends Construction & Destruction!
A Nova Scotia-based duo made up of David Trenaman and Colleen Collins, Construction & Destruction are a) an excellent band with over 4 albums under their belt and b) two of the kindest people on the planet. We’re also playing a bunch of shows with them in eastern Canada in May, so it’s been tough keeping this project a secret through all the email back-and-forth.
Not only does this album pay tribute to one of our favourite bands, but it also features covers of THAT band, by our OTHER favourite bands (like The Burning Hell, Shotgun Jimmie & Wax Mannequin to name but a few), so I can’t tell you how excited we are to be a part of it.
We chose the C&D tune “The Oracle,” from their most recent album, the excellent Mutatis Mutandis, as it totally knocked us off our feet when we first heard it. Lyrics like this don’t come around every day. I highly recommend checking out the original, as Colleen’s conviction and delivery is unparalleled.
Listen to our version below and pick up the whole shebang from Zunior.com…oh, and did I mention that all the money goes right to the band themselves? I don’t even think they know about the album yet, so it’ll be a nice surprise if people jump on this (as they should)!
A while back we decided it was time to update our band photos. The old ones were great, but it’s been over a year since they were taken and, with the new album coming out next month, we figured some freshening up was in order.
It helps that we can count some very talented photographers amongst our friends, including Karol Orzechowski of Decipherimages.com.
Karol had one stipulation: he would shoot us the way we wanted, as long as we indulged him in a second round of shots as a black metal band (I’ll let you pick which set is which). Suffice to say that we ended up liking the latter the most and had to include them—that’s a real medieval weapon of Laura’s, by the way (she’s full of surprises…)*.
You might recognize the teeth paintings from the Tortoise album cover we posted recently. It’s from a series that Laura was working on. Two of these shots will grace our album art (if you can pick which ones, drop us a line and I’ll give you a prize).
***UPDATE: Zunior’s got an advance digital release of Tortoise for sale right now! Get the MP3 download of the album here for $8.88 or choose the CD with MP3 option to get the best of both worlds! ***
We’ve taken our sweet time announcing this, as we wanted to make sure all our ducks were in a row, but we’re excited to finally spread the news that: our sophomore full-length album, Tortoise, is ready!
The official release date is tentatively set for May 17 2011 and will coincide with a tour of eastern Canada to be announced shortly featuring the likes of Pat LePoidevin, Construction & Destruction and Laura Peek, and culminating in a joint Toronto CD-release party with Anna Atkinson (who played on a lot of our album and will also be celebrating the release of her own debut)!
If you’ve been poking around the site over the last few months you might have come across demos for half of the songs. Here’s the official track listing:
Keep up to date with release details and the odd free track by checking back here, as well as on our Twitter and Facebook pages. Suffice to say that the album will be available at all fine digital retailers (especially Zunior.com) as well as phyiscally through various independent record stores and mail order right here.
Thanks for all the support. We’re very proud of this album and can’t wait to get it out there!
There are shows that are tough; there are shows that are fraught with problems and technical difficulties; there are shows where no one is there to play to. There are also shows where not only does it all work out, but you have a damn good time too. Saturday night at The Central was a prime example of the latter.
Our good friends in Tiny Mountains were celebrating front-man Robb Mirsky’s birthday and were kind enough to ask us to play. The Central is the perfect little spot for such a shindig—big enough to fit a small crowd, but small enough to be cozy, with great beer on tap and good eats too.
The first club show with my new Godin 5th Avenue Kingpin, this was also one of the first shows we’ve actually played with our trusty Roland Jazz Chorus JC-77 amp—felt good to have a reliable and loud tank up on stage with me. Of course, my homemade pedals were acting up as always—no fault of their own, mind you. I simply forgot to plug good ol’ Santa Wahs in at all. Technical difficulties keep us mega-rockstars humble.
As always, Laura was rock solid and even got a few verbal jabs at me between songs (she owes me more than a few by now). This was also the first show with her kick drum mic (a great Craigslist score), something we’ll be using a lot.
Photographer Karol Orzechowski (http://decipherimages.com) almost caught a tambourine to the chin in my exuberance, but still managed to take these great shots:
We’ve finally gotten off our butts and made t-shirts! This first run is an ultra-limited edition white on navy that is going like wearable hot-cakes.
We got these made locally at a very friendly place in our neighbourhood. They are cotton and use eco-friendly inks!
The idea is to do a one-time batch of this colour/design, then do something different next round. That means once these guys are gone, they’re gone!
As a bonus, if you order online we’ll throw in download codes for BOTH of our previous releases (codes emailed after purchase)!
International: $15
Plus Shipping
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This is also an excuse to test out some fancy-shmancy new features that will allow us to start selling things like albums & downloads directly from our own site. Give us feedback on the process!
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I have to admit, we had no idea Saturday’s show was to coincide with Earth Hour until that morning. Anna emailed asking if we should light some candles and play acoustic. Selfishly, my initial thought was “crap! I’ve been itching to try this great new electric guitar I just bought…” In the end, the earthly sentiment prevailed and the first half of the show was played in acoustic intimacy of a candlelit Broadview Espresso.
As usual, Anna Atkinson commanded the crowd with her unique brand of quirky charm and undeniable talent. We’ve tried backing her up before, but she doesn’t need it at all. Laura and I, on the other hand, benefit greatly from her viola and backing vocals, so she joined us for a good chunk of our set.
In the end, the unplugged immediacy of Earth Hour left it’s mark, as we switched back and fourth between full-on electric and microphone free. I was just giddy to be trying my brand new Godin 5th Avenue Kingpin II guitar (sounds great through an amp or acoustic and looks real perrrtty).
This show also gave us the opportunity to test a few of our more recent tunes to an audience of friends before the new album comes out. “Laura’s Song,” for instance, was played live for the first time and went over well even without my waltzing with a small Casio in the background. Of course, no show of ours would be complete without forgetting to play a song we were excited about. In this case it was “She Said,” but we’ll rectify that at The Central this weekend!
Speaking of songs we forgot to play, here’s a live clip from this show of the one we forgot to play last time, “Young Enough.”
Oh, and this was our first show with band t-shirts! More on those to come very soon…
Here’s a page of chicken scratch album notes from my dog-eared, coffee-stained notebook.
It probably looks like nonsense, but here’s what I can tell you for sure:
One of those two sketches represents a painting by Laura that will be the actual cover of the album. Also, all the track names with check marks beside them will definitely be on the album (barring two name changes), though not in that order.
Rounding out the 10 songs chosen will be 2 tracks not on that list in any way (one being She Said and the other, Laura’s Song).
The scribbled black shapes are just my way of working out composition visually (that’s what a BFA gets you, kids).
Stay tuned for a big announcement including full track listing, cover, new press shots, release date and a tour! Holy crap!
Here’s a strange admission: None of our previous recordings have featured a bass guitar.
The low-end was always supplied by either a synth (the Realistic MG-1 is a personal favourite) or an electric guitar EQ’d down an octave.
That’s all changing on Tortoise, as a while back I stumbled across a real beauty of a bass guitar. It was a gamble, as the price reflected that it didn’t actually work, but that’s never stopped me before. A wire connecting the pickup windings had disconnected, which made for an easy fix.
The end result is a real nice 1970s Univox quasi-P-Bass copy that plays like a dream (not that I know much about dreamy bass guitars…).
Get yourselves acquainted, as this bad boy provides the bottom thump for half the songs on the new album…
