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Golden Melody Awards

by Golden Melody Awards

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1.
Promenade 09:39
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Apollonaise 05:33
8.
Quatorzo 04:44
9.
Gentle Lover 06:03

about

Golden Melody Awards Liner Notes
By Kurt Newman

This music, here, documents some activities in which Ryan Driver and I were involved, about 20 years ago, in Toronto, Canada. We were in our early 20s. Ryan and I had known each other for some time. He had been involved in improvised and experimental music in town earlier than me. By the turn of the millennium, we had both spent some time working with the composer Martin Arnold in the chamber group Marmots. At some point, I had moved into Martin’s apartment on College Street. That beautifully weird sprawling apartment, overflowing with unusual instruments and electronic gear, would be the site of the Golden Melody Awards’ investigations into song, and the place where this music made its way onto tape.

What were we up to? It’s a little bit hard to say. Have a listen? It wasn’t anything so very planned-out or narrow. (Which seems a little bit hard for me to believe, listening back: the music sounds very deliberate and even streamlined). Ryan and I were immersed in the world of experimental music, listening to records, improvising, going to concerts, trying to learn more about the history of all those odd men and women who had chased new kinds of sonic experiences over the course of the 20th century. Probably, we both understood our collective task as taking the spirit of experimental music and using it to guide us as we explored (lovingly––I hope that’s clear) certain dimensions of popular song form. In many cases, the wagers were straightforward. What would it sound like if an analog synthesizer and 5-string banjo played a very simple melody in unison, and kept going as attention wavered and technique deteriorated? What would it sound like to summon the affective world of drunken pre-Beatles lounge music, and then have the lap steel and synth drift apart from each other in very small microtonal increments? What would it sound like to take the brutal simplicity of Joe Meek instrumentals, and simplify them even further? What would it be like to hone in on the textures at work in the studio experiments of the later-era Byrds, working up an arrangement behind an unwritten vocal melody that would never be sung or heard?

These wonderings, for the most part, did not lead to anything too rigidly disciplined. In each case, I think, the various strategic cues led us to melodies that we really liked, and to songs that we enjoyed playing as much as any enthusiastic weekend cover band enjoys playing Bon Jovi songs or whatever. There are some solo sections that are straightforwardly self-indulgent (“thank goodness,” I think, listening back) and a few songs that defy my attempts to retroactively reconstruct any governing logic… Ryan and I must have just had an idea and liked it enough to show the other.

I am not sure why neither Ryan nor I had gotten it together, at the time, to buy a 4-track or book some studio time (the answer, no doubt, is that we were broke). Our lack of multitracking resources, and the comparative rarity, at the time, of computer Digital Audio Workstations, meant that we recorded almost all of this music live into a stereo microphone into a minidisc recorder. There was no post facto dubbing, or re-amping, or effects-lathering. With the exception of “Quatorzo,” we played everything together, in a room, quietly, most of the time running Ryan’s keyboards and my guitar through a single signal-chain of oddball effects pedals into a small Danelectro nifty-fifty amplifier. That seems impossible to me, listening back. If, today, we were to make music like this, we would probably take pen to paper and write some charts and notate the melodies. But we didn’t do that, then. We just wrote these peculiar songs in our heads or on our instruments, and learned them and taught them to each other, and played them.

Why did we never release this music? I’m sure that it had to do with my own quarter-life-crisis, leaving Toronto for Austin, Texas and a different life altogether. (In the years since I have returned to Toronto, and Ryan and I continue to work together in a variety of musical projects, which is a delightful turn of events). Now seems as good a time as any to have it make its way into the world. It makes me happy to think of people listening to it.

credits

released July 16, 2021

Kurt Newman: 12-String Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Banjo, Lap Steel
Ryan Driver: Synth, Organ, Voice, Sleigh Bells, Flute

Doug Tielli: Trumpets on Quatorzo
Eric Chenaux: Additional synth on O Charm Of Music

All compositions by Kurt Newman and Ryan Driver
Recorded Winter 2001 in Toronto, Canada
Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 recorded by Eric Chenaux
Tracks 5, 8, and 9 recorded and mixed by Doug Tielli
Lightly mastered by Doug Tielli
Cover art by Ryan Driver

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Rat-drifting Toronto, Ontario

Rat-drifting music searches for specificity, celebrates detail. It experiments with radical particularity and wonders about the possibilities and potentials of those experiments. If the music drifts, it does so in the hopes that the listener drifts with it—her/his imagination experimenting with the possibilities of the music as well, as they find their own route through their own experience. ... more

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