Parlour Steps

NXNE Madness and Canada Day Show!

2009-06-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

We just returned from rainy Toronto and its massive and incredible North By Northeast Festival of Music and Film. I think we've all finally caught up on our sleep after the ear-splitting, ass-shaking, alcohol-fuelled, sweaty good times.
With 500 bands in attendance for the festival, spotting the tight-panted, beardo-brodown, rockstar hipsters wasn't hard - they littered the city's core, eager and overwhelmed. Hand-pumping, flyer distro-ing, beer swilling madness!
Our first show at The Hyatt Regency on Thursday afternoon was a strange one. Yes, we rocked it hard. Yes, we got to blast the ears of a few unsuspecting conference-goers who wouldn't have seen us otherwise. But tearing out a new one for some really sober people in a brightly lit hotel ballroom was a little strange.
Our evening show was much more pleasing. The Cameron House is a cabaret theatre style venue, intimate and wonderful sounding (thanks Frank!). We packed it, sharing the evening with some amazing performers (Twilight Hotel, The Abramson Singers, Language-Arts). We love the Toronto night life - they do it so well!
We spent the remainder of the weekend frolicking about, using our all-access passes to hop from band to band, drink to drink, wet street to wet street. Some notables of our adventures:
Mark Berube getting his crowd so worked up, so intensely focused.
Dan Mangan wading into a tightly packed room to serenade the adoring crowd acappella.
The Dudes front man rocking it hard with a drug-addled, broken collarbone. That is fuckin PUNK!
Sure the traffic the horrendous, you can't park anywhere in the city, and there's no woods to get away to, but Toronto knows how to open its city up to an incredible festival of new music and good people.

In other news, we're playing the Man Stage this Canada Day, July 1st at Cananda Conference and Convention Centre (Canada Place, @ the end of Howe Street) . It's free, there'll be all the usual clowning about, fireworks etc. We're on at 1:30pm sharp!

Love,
Yr Parlour Steps

Recording our new Recordalbum and a Historic Offer!

2009-06-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

North By Northeast Festival of Music Showcase!
Parlour Steps play The Cameron House (408 Queen Street West, Toronto) Thursday, June 18th at midnight.

While we continue chipping away at this massive granite block stamped "The Next Parlour Steps Album", we have noticed that over our amazing 9 (!) years in this crazy business of making music we've amassed a small treasure of rare and live recordings, b-sides, and curious demos. In writing this next chapter of the P Steps experiment, we've realized an opportunity to provide you with our back story; our prologue up to this point, if you will.

So, we are putting together a little digital ZIP file compilation of our first 3 albums plus a bundle of illuminating goodies that haven't been available until now, plus some embarrassing videos and other P Steps oddities. In two weeks you'll be able to buy it here. Check back!

Get the latest P Steps tweets at
twitter.com/parloursteps

Now we pull back the sheets on our latest recording endeavour...

The sun blazes in the windows down here at Ogre Studios in Vancouver, glazing the live room in glorious orange shafts. This is exceptional in its re-writing of the recording experience, an activity overwhelmingly associated with cave-like structures inhabited by pale-skinned engineers and light adverse, hungover musicians. No, we drink tea and break for sushi on the lawn between takes.

Ogre Studios is tucked away in an industrial workshop row of luthiers and paint splattered artist's studios. It's owned and run by one very amicable John Raham, who administers an excellent mic selection and sagely advice in wrestling with the archaic Ampex tape machine buried in the chest of this place. Approaching a respectable 40 year middle age, the analog 2 inch tape machine is a massive, heavy, heat-sink of a beast, requiring more attention and TLC than an infirm, bed-ridden patient. Instead of full bedpans, this thing, if not watched and stopped after its 16 minute maximum run time, will swiftly spool off your 2 inch tape into a mighty expensive and concerning nest on the machine room floor. This requires a strenuous attention to the clock, how much time we have on the tape, whether this next song would fit, who's turn it is to bound down the stairs and stop the tape machine...

This would be a frustrating and, to an outside observer, ridiculously frivolous and esoteric exercise were it not for the sound coming out of those speakers during playback.

Oh, the sound! Our music, our creations in all their bombastic glory, magnetically imprinted on this discontinued tape stock is like hearing the God of Rock and Roll whispering in our ear. The way the tape embraces our sounds in heavenly and positively recasts the experience. What BALLS! Tape gives our music weight and a physical presence over purely digital, as if we were creating a real imprint in the aural plane, not just some computer representation.

The live room, where we situate Rob to record his drums, fills with his thunderous, jazz-incensed aural exorcisms. You'll hear it in the recordings, a great sense of dimensional space and air - a real drum kit in a real room, pounded on by a real drummer.

Julie lays her grooves down with the drums, unhinging such bounce and drive we feel it moving our nether regions.

Later I will "prepare" the baby grand piano in this room, placing a snare drum on the sounding board, a small cymbal on the larger bass strings, all for the effect of a wonderful "SPACK" sound when hit. I braid loose pieces of paper into the strings to encourage a buzz and resonance.

We amass a covenant of guitars and effects, borrowed and begged for: Gibson Les Paul, Fender Telecaster, Gretsch Nashville, vintage 1960's Fender Stratocaster, Ibanez Artcore... For amplifiers we enlist the valuable technical assistance of one Mike Zobac and the wonderful people at Backline Musician Services, who loan us the ingredients to that ever-elusive guitar sound of our dreams - Orange amp and cab, a vintage Vox AC30, a meticulously maintained Rhodes keyboard... We rattle the walls, shake the floor, startle visitors, and illicit excited expletives from the building's other residents.

Now I find myself nearly naked, robed only in a Brazilian sarong, singing into a crazy expensive microphone in my bedroom. This is where we've continued this project - The K Lab. I overturn the bed's mattress and hang blankets from the walls to try and deaden the horrible flutter that accompanies apartment recording. I'm nearly naked cause a hot spell has hit Vancouver, and I'm a nudist in my own bedroom. If Ryen wasn't threatening to drop by to film some of this, I'd be fully buck, singing with my junk out.

These songs are starting to gel and solidify, becoming real under our hands. They will start to take on life and personality, demanding different things for themselves, developing personality before it's mixdown time in July. Next week we lay some saucy horns on them. Cool.

More later...

Much Love,
Caleb
June 1, 2009
The K Lab, Vancouver

Eastern Tour Spring 2008

2008-05-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Our Eastern tour of the cities most Sonically Hungry!!

We are flying, driving, rawking, and rolling through some of the best clubs in Ontario and the eastern/central US. Below is our itinerary. We hope you can make it out to see us in our finest, most contemporary form.

June 13-14th
We schmooze the saucy industry types and those who love them at NXNE,
Toronto, ON
June 15
Zaphod's Beeblebrox, Ottawa, ON - 9pm w/ Summerlad
June 17
The Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge (Boston), MA
WERS Radio performance @ 3pm
June 18
Club Cafe, Pittsburgh, PA, 7pm w/ Love Tara
June 20
Lager House, Detroit, MI, 8pm
June 21
Phog Lounge, Windsor, ON, 9pm
June 22
Trepid House, Waterloo, ON, 8pm
June 23
Salt Lounge, London, ON, 8pm
June 24
Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, ON, 7pm
June 25
The Casbah, Hamilton, ON, 9pm
CIUT (Toronto) Radio performance @ 8am

We hope in our little rocknroll hearts that if you are around, you will participate in our jovial ongoing exercise in aural communication. We'll rock your rocks off!!

Love, Yr Parlour Steps

Parlour Steps " Thieves of Memory" Video!

2008-03-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, Dear Steppers,

We have finally P Stepped into the video age!

" Thieves of Memory" was made with the gracious help of Ryen Froggatt (DOP), Deborah Sidney (make-up), Steve Therrien, Delia Brett (the Woman in White), and a devilish chap going by the name EvenSteven.

Please enjoy and spread about fruitfully!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A07ATVdACiw

For those concerned, the book He tears up is a Reader's Digest Condensed; the records are Barbara Streisand and Boney M. Some sacrifices for Art had to be made.

Love,

Yr Parlour Steps

Industrial Music Machine

2007-11-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2007

They've found us!

The nameless monsters of the grinding musical industrial machine! They want to powder our bones and chamber their instruments with our skins!

Well, maybe not so dramatically...
The nameless monsters, well, they have names actually - Nine Mile Records. And they're not monsters, they're quite lovely - considerate, passionate, and creative people who love music and want to put their money where their articulate little mouths are.

Nine Mile Records, lead by the courageous Mr. Rick Pierik, have signed us to their record label. Based in Massachusetts, in that evil empire to the south (inhabited, paradoxically, by some of the coolest and most creative people), NMR is set to internationally release and distribute our latest record, Ambiguoso. This tickles us pink. This makes us dizzy and giddy (wanna make out with us?). Those poor Belgians will no longer have to live in a dim, Parlour Steps-less world.

NMR is also intent on us touring the belly of the beast more often, bringing the most able-bodied Thought-Rock available to our American brethren. We love them and wish them a quick return to health. For this process we will provide a dreamy soundtrack. Watch here for dates/ venues.

Call Out to Video Makers, Vid-iots, and Crazed New Media Creators!!
Send us yr brash, stirring, and visceral video/visual ideas for one of our songs - yr choice. Maybe we'll get together over a few whiskeys and write a grant proposal. Maybe we'll play a game of naked Scattagories - who knows! info@parloursteps.com.

Other local, Vancouver news sees us rawkin' The Railway Club with Hot Little Rocket this Saturday November 17th; hosting Victoria's Justin Hewitt and other greats at The Backstage Lounge December 7th; and bashing in the optimistic New Year, December 31st , at RIME with Mother Mother.

Central Canadian Tour Summer, 2007

2007-05-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

Tour Dates, 2007

June 21 - Hamilton, The Pepperjack Cafe
22 - Toronto, Mitzi's Sister w/ The Metal Kites
24 - Windsor, Phog Lounge
25 - Ottawa, The Rainbow w/ Eisenhauer
26 - Montreal, Cafe Chaos
28 - Montreal, L'Absinthe
29 - Toronto, Ciao Edie

We're out playing to all open ears, in support of our newly released album, Ambiguoso.
Highways, croquette, truckstops, and burrito shacks.

Recording our new record, Ambiguoso!

2007-02-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

The Recording of Our Most Contemporary Humours,

Or How I Learned to Love the Most Blessed Language of Digital Discourse

We book three days in Vogville Recording, across the tracks in Port Coquitlam, cozily located near Riverview Hospital, with an intent to start in on our record. Nels, God Bless him, is there for our set-up to assist my indulgences. My first order of business, while Rob tunes his drums, is to find the whistling sound in the chamber, finally, after years of recording it, thinking it was the SSL computer fans. Nope, it was air getting sucked into the air conditioner. I tape a peice of cardboard in a bridge over it, diverting the air and creating a hushed drum chamber. Wicked.

Lyrics are gathered and embellished and whittled and starved and fattened up…Songs are deconstructed and trimmed and dieted. Brevity is considered.

Drums go so smoothly, Rob Linton filling greedily his 15 tracks of digital space. We go with the astronomical, file-size hungry resolution of 24 bit, 88.2 kHz. The air of our instruments, the ensuing acoustic flourishes of the rooms and chambers we used, are given a generous and open sound stage. Yum.

Minimal editing was done to Rob’s drum tracks. They didn't need it: masterful, human in their movement, groovy as hell. I decided early that we would allow the performances the space to breath and move a bit; there was no beat detector; there was no B Rock ProTools Extraveganza. As you will hear on the record, it sounds like a real man playing that DW trap set. The following is the signal flow for our set-up:

Kick: D112 in, Re20 in, NS10 cone out – each through API pre’s, with Distressors and Avalon compressors inserted.

Snare: sm57 over, AKG 451 under – each through API pre’s and dsitressors compressors.

Toms: Senn 421’s through Vintech 1073 pre’s and Summit Tube compressors.

HiHats: SM7 through the SSL

Ride: Octavia pencil through SSL

Overheads: Neumann KM184’s through SSL pre’s, Amek compressors

Mono Rooms: an sm57 taped to the floor, Rode K2 out front, each through Vintech 1073’s, squashed through UA 1176 compressors.

Chambers: Neumann TLM 103’s through API’s, Joe Meek SC1 inserted.

(Mono rooms sent through a MXR envelope filter at times)

After we have drum takes we are grooving on, as well as all the scratch guides of vocals and guitars, we move on to bass. Julie’s Squire short scale is surprisingly massive sounding.

Bass:Squire shortscale through Millenia STT solid-state pre (with transformer engaged), through UA LA-2A compressor set to limit. Huge!

Again, very little editing. Rob and Julie lock well, the bass lending a bouncy and flexible juice to the strident drum grooves. I fear there may be way too much low end building up, a challenge layed out for me and the mixing stages.

Guitars are next, staring at us from the corner of the control room, stood upright and set-up, new strings gleaming in the track lights, each offering their voices to Rees and I.

Guitars: Gretsch 6120 Nashville, Fender Telecaster (modded with double humbuckers), GnL Stratocaster, Epiphone SG.

Amps: Fender Twin 100 watt through Mesa 4x12, VHT Pitbull all-tube, Amplitube VST

Signal chain: a mixture of sm57, Senn 421, and sm7 through API, Vintech 1073 pres, with 1176’s and Amek compressors inserted.

Room sounds: Neumann TLM 103 through API and Joe Meek

The guitars are a blast, throwing enough acoustic energy into the live room to rattle the windows and scare the piss out of anyone unknowingly ambling through the rawk zone. We have the heads/amps in the control room for better communication with the player, with the amps feeding the Mesa Boogie 4x12 cab in the live room. We use the Gretsch and the modded Tele the most, favouring their ballsy, large sound.

That took us to the end of our weekend of play. About 40+ hours later, we had some definite songs emerging from the ether. I slept greedily and dream of tube squeal.

We take a few days off (went back to day jobs, husbands and lovers, jogging through the park) and then fired up our process in The K Lab, the den of inspiration that is my one-bedroom apartment. There I start to fill out our skeletal songs with some synths and organs and keyboards, moving between what analog models I could get my hands on, and digital replicas. Everything went through the Millennia STT tube pre. It was pricey so I try to use it a lot.

I cart my recording rig over to Mark Berube’s house and record him on his upright piano, hammering keys or plucking the strings like a monster banjo. We had him resuscitating his Accordian. We had our friend Aijineen come over to the K Lab and bow a little violin.

We decide to involve the illustrious past and rent the venerable Neumann U47 microphone off of Jonathan Fluevog, who bought it off of The Hit Factory in New York. This is the very mic that Ray Charles, Mick Jagger, and countless others sang through when they hit NYC for vocal recording. At least that is what I tell myself as I stare into it for a few days.

We lay down some Gretsch acoustic first, tracked through the Millennia STT solid-state pre, producing a wonderfully vibrant, almost harpsichord, sound. It cuts through everything like a chiming tickle of clarity.

After I amass the clutch of lose-leaf lyrics and over-worked notebooks, I start singing. Julie and I get to gaze out my bedroom window at the twinkling lights of Grouse and the North Shore range. Much tea and scotch is consumed while sending our voices through the U47 into the Millennia tube-pre. It was as warm as a desert sunset and satisfied my deepest audio gear fetishism. When we weren’t using the mic, it’s historical weight and considerable (!) cost motivated me to hide it under my bed when I slept.

So we now had most of the songs sounding nearly complete. I started ornamenting them with tambourine, shaker, and more synth flourishes. It is these trinkets and baubles of sound that make it sound all big-budgety, no?

Compared to the our previous albums and their glacial production schedules (Hours of Tremor took a year and a half to complete: Great Perhaps the better part of a year), this five weeks was fast and furious and huge.

Mixing over five days, again back at Vogville Studios, I was moved to glutony, using nearly every compressor, EQ, and effects processor in the rack, delighting in the expensive lights and flickering displays, twitching VU meters and LED’s…

Nels can testify that I eat far too many donairs during this time. I get OCD with the donair place down the street. Nels buys them for me, the helpful enabler.

Five days for mixing is a luxury not afforded every project I work on, so I take some time. I set up a PA system in the live room to feed various sounds into the chamber, bouncing a guitar here, a vocal there, around inside this room. The mics in the chamber pick up a bunch of unwanted noise as well - roadcrews digging deep into the ground, woodworkers next door cutting wood, and sometimes these mysterious snaps and crackles that our assistant Nels gets spooked by.

Then it was time to mix, amassing all the recorded elements and helping them find a home in the greater sonic city of the song (ah, urban planning as a metaphor). Pablo Picasso once said that a piece was done when you couldn’t take anything more away. Mixing was very much a process of peeling and trimming and fermenting into the song’s fittest self. Oh, alright, we left a few pleasure pounds hanging around the middle.

So, I ‘ve just sent the mixes off to Boulder, Colorado to Airshow Mastering and our man there, Dominick Maita. UPS screwed me over a desk under some seriously bright and unsexy lighting. But they will get there. Boulder. The mountain air creates especially talented mastering engineers, with lots of red blood cells.

We'll be sure to let y'all hear some of the tracks soon. Yup, WHEN YOU BUY EM, YA PIRATES!

Just kidding. Rob doesn't want to sound too political.

Much Love,

Caleb and Parlour Steps

January 11.07 @ SYNC, Nettwerk's little stage that could!

2006-12-12T16:48:00.000-08:00

We have been given these following opportunities to make some raucious music in public spaces, Ducklings! Well, semi-public...

Jan 11 at SYNC, Nettwerk offices (1648 W 2nd Ave.)
A free, early (6pm), and easy way to get it on with us! www.nettwerk.com/sync

Jan 25 at Railway Club (Dunsmuir and Seymour)
With Pawnshop Diamond and Hefe. Pawnshop Diamond release their debut album (produced by Caleb), and make even heartache sound like cause for a celebration. Hefe gets up there and rawks. That's what they do, they RAWK! Plus they have lyrics about love and international food.

Watch here for updates on our recording adventure with the new album, working title is something like Ass Over Teakettle: Ta - Da!!

Crow Love

2006-10-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Katie Ormiston, of the Vancouver folk-rock outfit Pawn Shop Diamond, was inspired by the challenges faced by her brother, who lives with mental illness, to act out. A decided lack of resources and a general de-prioritizing of mental health issues in the city of Vancouver motivated her to strike up a deal with some like-minded local musicians - a fundraiser!

A compilation album and performance, bringing together some of Vancity's finest musicians and visual artists to try and help out The Portland Hotel Society, would be cemented together by the black Crow. anyone living along the commute line of these surprising birds can attest to their daily inclusion in the city's bussle.
Black Crow Myspace Page

The performance will be held November 27th at The Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

It was from this invigorating collective of local musicians that we, yr humble Parlour Steps, felt inspired to take to Vogville Studios and record " A Pagan and a Cook" on a cool Saturday in September. It was also an excuse to work with the immense talent of Mark Berube, as he tickled some keys for us in grand style, unveiling wonderous possibilities where none existed before (that's him hand-plucking the piano strings in the second verse).

The pictures of our studio explorations can be viewed on our page. The song was young when we went in, hardly written, and what took shape was glorious for us. We bloomed and it was good. We hope you enjoy it as well.

If the planets adequately align we will have a new album for yr pleasure by Christ's Mass. It will be the collest soundtrack for crucifixion ever!

Love, Parlour Steps

Sweaty Passages and News of the Inner Machinations!

2006-07-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Grand and illustrious happenings are afoot for the well-oiled machine called Parlour Steps, all of us furiously running the hamster-wheels of Thought-Rock for friend and foe alike. Drink plenty of fluids and take in the following sweaty passages:

July 22nd, Caleb's art-rawkin solo incarnation plays the best dive bar in New York's lower east side. 169 Bar @ 8:30pm, 169 East Broadway, New York City. His big apple debut! With Joe Faulder
www.joefaulder.com

August 4th, Parlour Steps rawk Seattle with Eric Miller and Levi Fuller @ The SS Marie Antoinette, 1235 Westlake Ave. Early show 7:30!

August 19th, @ The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir) with our new favourite locals, MOTHER. See them now before everyone wants the humps from these sexy and skewed art-rockers! With Tyson Naylor.

September 8th @ The Railway Club with The Feminists and You Say Party We Say Die!

Did you see that oh-so-Canadian hormone drama Whistler on CTV yet? We were played all over the 3rd episode and it was cool and creepy at the same time. I've never seen our music put to footage of skinny, good-looking people in soft blue light before.

We Love You. Wanna swim naked in a lake with us?
Parlour Steps

A Musical Rant!

2006-05-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

For over against the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.

- Lewis Mumford

We have a term in audio engineering to decry the compounding effect that prolonged exposure to sound and music, usually at considerable volumes, can have on the listening skills of the listener. We call this "ear fatigue", when the audio becomes less defined, less clear, indiscernible from other materials, and finally incoherent. The effect, in contrast to actual hearing loss, is not proportional to actually volume, nor is it permanent. A few hours away from the sound source usually reinstates the listeners auditory intelligences.

What I've come to experience in my years working on many platforms and mediums of recordable media, as well as various forms of delivery of this media, is the certain and universally definite effects of these various media and how they differ from one another. I started engineering on 2" magnetic tape, about as "analogue" as one can get for first generation recording media. Running at 30 inches per second over the machine heads, the sound of tape was very distinct. The language to describe these impressions can be nothing but inadequate and abstract, as this is like trying to describe a colour. We have but the impressions it leaves on us to communicate it with.

Well, 2" tape felt wonderful. Full, bright without harshness, deep bass, well handled transients. Tape took an analogous impression of the music and imprinted it on the magnetic particles. For some reason, our brain's liked these waveforms. Ear fatigue for tape hovered around a very reasonable 12+ hours for most material. That means we could be making very minute comparisons and enacting critical decisions with the material for this length of time.

Then came the modular digital revolution. Using comparatively inexpensive digital tape, we started recording everything to 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio (or 48 kHz for broadcast). You will recognize these resolutions as "CD quality" - this is what CDs sound like. That means that between the softest and the loudest part of the music, there is a whole 16 steps. The kHz rating refers to how often per second the digital converters sample the audio( at 44.1 kHz, the converters are sampling 44,100 times per second). This is where the digital encoder takes an analogue wave (as we hear raw, real-world sounds) and converts it to a digital "word". Many factors have a bearing on the "quality" of this translation - digital clock, converters, system integrity, jitter.

While audio impressions can vary wildly over a group of people, there are a few pieces of received wisdom that can mostly be agreed upon. 16 bit, while having a larger dynamic range than the magnetic tape of the time, didn't "feel" as good. The cold translation of digital wasn't as pleasing to our ears. Ear fatigue was hit at about the 6 hour mark. And it was hit hard. 16 bit would start to sound brittle and unforgiving. I remember watching people in some recording sessions grow noticeably agitated over prolonged periods of listening. Their bodies were responding to the gaps between the samples, I abstractly surmised.

Just as Marshall McLuhan believed television was more a tactile experience than a visual one, sound recordings create physical responses in listeners. When working with low resolution digital audio our brains were reacting to the lack of real-world analogous linearity. We were rejecting the digital interpretation of the real-world. But hey, it was a helluva lot cheaper that tape and no one without a degree in digital studies could really explain why we were feeling this way. It sounded clear, didn't it? Tape was left behind, for the most part.

Digital technology moved ahead at a breakneck speed, as the market interest in it accelerated research and development. After a few years everyone was recording 24 bit digital "words" and sampling their sounds at upwards of 96,000 times per second. This was having a profound effect on the perception of the audio. Dynamic range increased immensely, clarity sharpened, ear fatigue rose to an acceptable 8-10 hours. The gaps between the samples was closing fast, creating closer translations to our beloved analogue. Keep in mind that these innovations were exclusively brought about on the creator side of things, wholly separate from the market/consumer side of the equation.

Industry professionals and audiophiles marched behind the banners of progress. Everyone would soon be buying Hi-Fi systems and running everything at increasingly higher resolutions - things would sound better, people's ears would become more discerning, the music would be uncompromised. It never happened.

The market, as one would call all of us, the consuming public, steered the technological trends in a decidedly different direction. MP3's and their similar ilk were the future. Professionals were aghast! People were taking already inferior digital translations (CDs) and further translating them to lower and lower (hence smaller and smaller) qualities for mass consumption. Our ears bristled to hear the grainy, piping and harsh new recordings that were sacrificed in the interest of file size and electronic mobility. This trend was in the interest of access, a very important and powerful requisite to the modern world's musical habits. This one aspect, access, would change the world's music forever; how it was listened to, delivered, created, shared, bought, sold, stolen...

This trend, this reality of people amassing thousands upon thousands of ill-translated sound recordings has had some very powerful effects on us as a listening public. The first I would write to is the psycho-acoustic and psycho-physical fall-out. As I remarked before, digital recordings illicite noticeable discomforts in listeners, mostly under the conscious awareness of the listener; agitation, ear-fatigue, loss of attention, even a physiological shutting down of the sensory organs. I believe the worse the digital translation, the worse these effects become.

Ears are shutting down and bodies are being repelled very subtly from these recordings. It is creating communication calluses to protect our very sensitive physiology from these increasingly harsher and more degraded translations. We are slowly shutting down and our appreciation of music, in all its auditory and tactile depths, can only suffer because of it.

Secondly, there is the commodification of the music. I'm not speaking of the monetary value that has been attached to music for some time now - it is well established and accepted almost to a fault; music costs money to create, record, reproduce, and own. No, I'm speaking of the collecting and filing away, mostly through copying and "stealing", of music. I won't speak to the ethics of file sharing and illegal downloading - this isn't the point. The loss of importance, of sacrifice, of and for this music is what interests me. The average downloader/file amassing consumer spends only a few seconds downloading a song. That, in relation to its commodity value, is very, very cheap. Does one then value that song as much as one did the vinyl LP one saved up for fifteen years ago? It would be impossible to create the relationship inherent in the physical experience of what music consumption used to be with what is now. Back then, we would travel to the record store, buy an album, tear off the wrapper, look at artwork, read the lyrics, absorb visual cues, and listen to the album linearly as the artist had intended.

What a striking contrast to the modern act of downloading a song. Think of all the tactile and sensory information, the stuff essential to creating a lasting and valuable experience, that is lost.

The value chain, as it began with the download, grows steadily cheaper and less valued. When one has upwards of 10,000 songs, each song's importance shrinks inversely proportionate to the choice given. Too much choice, it has been clinically documented, overwhelms consumers and contributes to apathy. What once was an open mind in the face of a steady stream of new sensations becomes a desensitization to the avalanche of similarity. "I can like anything" becomes "I like everything". Why choose? Why have preferences when you can have everything? This is where "like" and "dislike" become just an aspect of playlists and a subtle itch to skip ahead nearly everything you hear to get to what's next.

This desensitization is inherent in our television watching habits as well; too much choice of mediocre programming births the classic channel surfer. We can't stay on one thing for too long. We need to see what else is there, ever after the sexier, more sensational, more extreme next thing. Could this auditory callus I spoke of have anything to do with this as well? Doesn't desensitized skin require more pressure and more forceful stimulation to become excited? Why do downloaders who haven't actually listened to a fraction of the songs they have amassed continue to acquire new electronic music? If this is the fetishizing of our music, the addiction to possessing over actual respective enjoyment, I believe we can do without it.

As a side note, this desensitization of our sensory world extends outwards, dictating how we interact, or don't interact, with eachother. How many people are plugged into these MP3 players on the bus now? They are secluding themselves from common experience, isolating themselves from whatever sensations sitting quietly on an active city bus might afford. This speaks to our phobia in regards to boredom. We have sacrificed so much possibility, so much chance and synchronicity, undercut our own auspicious sensitivities, all in fear of one moment of boredom. But that is another rant for another day.

The electronic revolution and its effect on recorded music also just extends an already prevalent force in the capture of any media that isn't the direct experience itself, i.e., recordings for live performances, poster reproductions for original paintings, documentaries for live experience. This force is, to steal from McLuhan's lexicon once more, the cooling of music. The temperature of the artifact we perceive as art (the song, the painting, the poem) cools. It loses creative heat as its travels farther from the forces that created it. By temperature, I'm speaking rather abstractly about vitality, the essence of the wordless, language-deficient act of creation. When something is created, something new born into our sensory world, a type of vibration is created. I call this heat. As the artifact travels from creator to receptor (from artist to us) , from translation to translation (from live performance to MP3), its invariably cools. It is reasonable to assume watching an Iraqi man die on a pixilated internet browser window is quite different from being present at that event. The artifact has cooled.

Well, the digitization and devaluing of music further cools it from its intensely

thermal moment of creation. We are so far removed from its original intended delivery, its original and intended sensory package, it is no wonder we have grown indifferent. It just doesn't feel authentic.

I don't want to communicate the impression that I'm some crusty luddite who hears the (digital) death knell of musical relevance. Far from it, I think this important concept of access has opened up a whole world of promotional, networking, and communication opportunities for artists all over the world. We can now hear and trade and turn ourselves, and each other, onto dizzying amounts of new art. But if that process doesn't come around and complete the circle and become a thermal, authentic, tactile, and thereby valuable experience, we will increasingly feel more detached from beauty, from the act of creating beauty, from the communication we all so desperately crave.

To the extent that the last works of art still communicate, they denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay.

Max Horkheimer, 1941

Unfurled petals and tight-wound metals: the Spring Horniness

2006-04-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen describes the paradox of observed reality as this:
Tragedy is when I fall down a well; comedy is when you fall down a well. This speaks to our seperation and our individual experiences, found of the same observed moments; our inherent narssacism; our competative cruelty.

The Weakerthans claim to have found the safest place to keep all our tenderness, keep all those bad ideas, and keep all our hope. It's there in the smallest bones, the feet and the inner ear. (It's such an enormous thing to walk and to listen).

They're tearing up Cambie Street near our homes- a huge monster of gears and hydrolics has eaten the soil - thousands of tons of earth (worms and all) and spat it out somewhere out of sight - displaced it and replaced it with a tunnal spattered with wet concrete vomited from a tube. In a few years ( years countable on one hand) , they promise, we will all be gleefully blurring by, the grey walls keeping all the pushing, moving earth at bay. The train will be fast- a speed that lends to passing glances and lightening thoughts. Too quick to think about dirt or worms. Too quick to think about what is moving underneath you. Maybe I will ride this fabled train of the future, maybe I won't. Walking will take much more time. More time to think and sing to myself.

Did you know there are people bleaching the dark spot out of their puckered assholes? Did you know that a laser can now whittle away a labia to look like a virginal lily? Did you know there is a woman who has had over 40 operations to turn herself into a cat? Yes, she married her plastic surgion. They don't work in the garden together, they work on her.

Okay, enough oddity and non-sequitors. This is supposed to be about Parlour Steps, I know, but the world is too fascinating right now to just dwell on some promotional dream batter about an abstract band of music makers. This is the churning, murmering realities that puddle under the paint of our music. These are the worms in our garden and they help us sprout the unfurling flowers of our records, of our live performances. Well, they do me anyway - the rest of the PSteps will find this a tad lofty, I'm sure. Tough. I possess the password to the blog.

This Monday, May 1st, we ply our sound waves into the Seattle air for the first time, playing El Corazon ( 109 Eastlake Ave. East, Seattle, tel. 206-262-0483) with locals Birds of Prey. Seattle has a heart beating loudly, nestled deep in a web of spun freeways.

The music feel good now - full and dense and hopeful. I'm trying to spend more time with my hands on my instruments and less time with my hands on this dirty keyboard.

If there wasn't struggle we wouldn't get to feel our muscles.
Challenge your better selves.

With Love,
Parlour Steps

2nd Place for Rawk Excellence!

2006-04-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

We are oh so pleased to scream out into the cyber-air the following bit of spicy news:
Our little tune that could, Thieves of Memory, has placed 2nd in the Rock category of the International Songwriting Competition, beating out nearly 15,000 other songs. Wow, we are pleased that the sometimes vaccuous money hole known as Songwriting Competitions, to which hopeful artists do pour their all-too-scarce dineros into, has born fruit. And to think, Tom Waits and Isaac Brock probably listened to our little tune. Bogglin'!
Just click the link and head for "winners" (that's us, dude!). It looks like we're in line for a few prezzies.
In other exhibitionist news, we have these shows to announce:

Thursday, April 6 @ The Railway Club, we're helping launch a new local magazine called One Cool Word witha bunch of other cool local acts. It'll be fun and loaded with quality scenester opportunities. Come check it!

Friday, April 14th @ Pat's Pub we howl away the evening with one of our favourite local bands, The Buttless Chaps. Come and swig one with us at the venerable, nitty-gritty-with-the-city pub.

Monday, May 1 @ El Corazon in Seattle, we play nwith some fine Washington State talent ( Birds of Prey and others) in our Seattle debut. We're stoked.

With Love and snoogles,
Parlour Steps

California Stars.

2006-03-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

Parlour Steps descend a freeway staircase into California for the blessed mistress Rawk and Roll!

5 Days on the road

Total Kilometers: 4,106

We head out on a moist, grey duvet-cloud covered Thursday morning, March 23^rd, 2006. Spring smells ripe in the air. Two cars, one with gear and newly minted Yankee, passport carrying Caleb, the other car with the sneaky Canadian contingent of the P. Steps. Yes, there was some lying demanded by this rawk itch of ours - a script pre-meditated, said straight into the eyes of Customs and Immigration. Tight Honda Civic filled to bursting with guitars, drums, sleeping bags, back-packs, egg-shell white Vancouverites - go, Civic, go! Our blessed chariot.

The border opened to us like golden gates of obese opportunity, promising an arterial working of freeways and overpasses, truck stops and endlessly pegged power lines, strung like threads of highway sutures. We find the sun in Washington, awoken from our naps by its cooking. "What the hell is that orange orb in the sky?" We are aflutter as we try and follow it south, to the American Dream.

We arrive into the welcoming arms of Rees' aunt and uncle, Jim and Lois, in cul de sac Eugene. Soft beds and breakfast, the offer of their spare 2002 Isuzu SUV. Rob and I are reluctant to accept the green beast until we find out it has a working CD player, a dignified upgrade from our battery-powered speaker rig in the Civic. Air conditioned, leather seats, lumbar support, power windows ( that become indispensable after three days of taco joints). Heaven, blissful gas-guzzling heaven.

It is only day two when Julie threatens us with untold retribution if we keep up the Taco Bell visits. Rees, for the remainder of the trip, displays an uncannily keen sense for sighting every taco/ Mexican restaurant we come across.

San Francisco greets us with an explosion of a million glowing break lights, traffic like an apocalyptic exodus, and warm gushing rain. God Bless the HOV lanes as we scurry past drivers seen reading, chatting on cell-phones, drinking beer, singing loud and proud, bouncing to hip-hop pulses. We find Edinburgh Castle, our first venue, and its back-room grunge vibe. Check-in to the Monarch hotel up the block, fill our bellies with marvelous Thai curries and noodles, and hit the stage early. We try our best to russle in the crowd from the pool shooters and after work drinkers, wrangling a tight supportive crowd. The grounding is erroneous and arcs into our teeth through the microphone. Jenn Leibhart emerges from the dark and gives me a swig of her Maker's Mark and all is right with the world. We commence getting drunk on questionable draft and cool California conversation. Jenn introduces us to her friends, Mark and Emily. Words swirl about, we play some pool and pinball, we decifer that most everybody in the group has fine oral hygiene, and the rank smell of the bar turns comforting and normal. Tonight we are all just punkers. See some photos.

Little sleep later, to the heavy-machinations of San Fran waking up Saturday morning, I feel rough and alive, keenly aware of a pulsing head and a glorious sun meeting our eyes. In the greasy spoon diner owned by a cute Japanese couple, our slow brains are easily entranced by an old fella in 1930's golf attire sleighting his way through some solid card tricks. We're taken with the beautiful facades of the Mission district and its old-timer card tricksters. Los Angeles and the highway leading to its heart beckons us.

Four lanes turns to eight. A meditative state overtakes our road-weary brains. This starts to seem all so normal, somehow.

Lava Lounge in Los Angeles is a rockabilly heaven of tikki wall hangings and warm red lights. We play our little hearts out to a packed room and get good vibes rushing back at us. I fall in love with Que Sera guitar player's Fender Twin amp. We make some quick friends and head for well deserved bed at Rees' friend, Paul's, apartment.

We start the 2000 kilometer drive back with a belly full of coffee and dreams of our own beds. The rest was delirious word games, song written about each other, gibberish and lots of pavement. We give major thanks to all that gave us aid, a place to stay, and words of direction and advice. You leave us hopeful for this world that seems to have shrunken a tiny bit.

Love, Parlour Steps