How Things Happen, by Josh Thorpe

How Things Happen

by Josh Thorpe

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Cagey Doves, Asterballoo 22, Enamel • for Scott Thomson, solo trombone & Harmon mute, Hen's Teeth, How Things Happen, The Imaginary Brass Band, In The Same Room, Impossible Burger, and 26 more. , and , .

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1.	How Things Happen 17:09	buy track
2.	Where Things Go 11:49	buy track
3.	Where Is Rita and George 07:03	buy track
4.	Telefono 07:13	buy track

about

The song “How Things Happen” began with the sound of my partner and I jokingly calling our imaginary dog into the room. (An actual dog has since appeared in our lives, same name.) Fragments of spoken language like this, and how they so easily become melody, often start these things. And, while waiting for a concert to start (Deerhoof or Richard Dawson), I had written some notes about walking around Glasgow. Then my friend Ruth Skinner asked me for a text to be performed in response to a series of photos she’d found of a dog sitting on an air mattress on a swimming pool in London, Ontario. Somehow “How Things Happen” made sense as a response, and all these elements came together. Similarly I think “Where Is Rita and George” began with that word and the sound of it I liked so much, “telefono.” And also just the cuckoo-type figures we use when we call each other’s names sometimes.

Rory and Owen made a wonderful rhythm section; their playing, so light and so relaxed, makes the spirit of the title track. And Ailbhe and Doug each have such wonderful melodic sense, phrasing, intonation, and touch. Based on my somewhat wonky speech-song, they carved out the most beautiful and unusual parts.

credits

released November 29, 2022

Josh Thorpe
How Things Happen

Josh Thorpe: voice, guitar, piano, keyboard, ukulele
Rory Haye: bass vi
Owen Curtis Williams: drums
Doug Tielli: trombone
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh: viola

Track 1 recorded in Glasgow by roddymacaudio; tracks 2-3 recorded remotely by the band.

Mastered by Sandro Perri.

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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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