Friday 28 February 2014

Funeral Factory/Tau Ceti Art and Clippings (1986-90)

One of the things that has been sitting on a shelf in the CCPS offices awaiting the right time (ie: waiting for us to get off our asses and pay it some attention) is a folder of photos that was originally passed to Golden Rock which found its way into our hands when we staged a hostile takeover graciously accepted their offer to pick up their archives. This is a great set of stuff from local designer and photographer Grant Hutchinson, made up primarily of works he produced for Mike Bezzeg's Small Horse Big Apple.

The collection includes a bunch of great photos - like the ones of the Funeral Factory and Tau Ceti above - as well as press pieces and newspaper clippings. Our favourite thing, though is this:

That photo of James Muretich makes us feel all warm inside. Which, on a cold ass day like today, is important.

The full collection is on the CCPS Facebook.

Sunday 23 February 2014

D.Jewel Davidson - Trials (1992)


Here's another DJewel tape, courtesy of Joe McCaffery. This one's a bit weird - in a good way. This is a collection of spoken word pieces that DJewel did in the early 90s. DJewel has thrown together a sort of audio collage - some tracks are just his voice, others have what sounds like live recordings of a DJewel-fronted band in one channel.

What this highlights for us is DJewel's skill with words. We understand that Kris Demeanor's stint as Calgary's poet laureate is coming to an end soon - we would like to take this opportunity to nominate DJewel as the next person for that post. Although, dammit, we literally just missed the nomination deadline.

Ah, well. You can enjoy these trials instead.

Saturday 22 February 2014

D. Jewel/The Will/Contradictions (1985-1987)


We're going to go on record with this: Don (DJewel) Davidson is probably on the best front men this city has ever seen. Plus, he's an amazing DJ. So, we're super excited to have this great compilation of DJewel-related tracks from the mid1980s, which comes to us via Quitters Joe McCaffery and Christopher Truch.

Joe tells us that The Will went through a pile of changes after they released their 12" record, which essentially involved something mighty close to an early line up of the Quitters, bringing McCaffery and Truch playing together for the first time.

A couple of the tracks on here are without vocals ("Love Cut With Hate" is just the bed track, bass and drums only). BUT there are a pile of other tracks that we hadn't heard before AND that we really like. "The Science Of Magic" is like the Ex-Boyfriends on quaaludes - which is a pretty amazing thing.

While we sit here in a stupor imagining Djewel fronting the Quitters, you can grab the compilation here.

Friday 21 February 2014

If I Look Strong; You Look Strong - PHYSIOLOGY ISN'T DESTINY (2013)



Even though we're sitting on a pile of really cool, old tapes, we keep getting distracted by shiny, new tapes. Like this one, which isn't all that new - it looks like it was released some time last year. But as we're still early in 2014, we're going to consider this acceptably late. This one man band, led by Noah Michael, lives somewhere in a fringe that we're going to call (for lack of anything better - and for the purposes of being purposefully obscure) bedroom math rock.



We picked the tape up at Sloth; you can also download it from the If I Look Strong; You Look Strong bandcamp.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

CCPS Miscellany: Lost & Profound - Lost & Profound (1991)


While we're talking about Terry Tompkins, here's another Lost & Profound tape, courtesy of Joe McCaffery. Coincidentally, it looks like Tompkins and Lisa Boudreau have recently re-started the band, and have been recording new material.

Get lost.

Sunday 16 February 2014

Now Feeling - Demo (1985)



Of all the tapes we've been entrusted with over the years, the batch containing this one is probably one of the most significant. Last month, Mary-Lynn Wardle contacted us and offered a small collection of tapes that used to belong to James Muretich. Now, handling these tapes is like handling the most holy of holy... uh, holy things. There's a lot of great stuff of James' that we get to share with you over the next while, and we're going to start with this, another Now Feeling tape.

This is a demo that looks like it was recorded around the same time as the radio session we featured yesterday. We're not going to guess at the membership, beyond Andrew Pearce and Terry Tomkins. We're pretty sure these are different recordings from the ones on their From Haloes to Lampshades tape...

Get it here-ish.

Saturday 15 February 2014

Now Feeling - Live at the National (1985)


We've been slow to post over the past few weeks, mostly because we're sitting on a pile of tapes and can't quite figure out how or where to start. So, we're just going to plunge in with this, a live recording of Terry Tompkins and Andrew Pearce's Now Feeling.

This comes to us via latter-day Now Feeling guitarist Joe McCaffery, who saw this was recorded after Allen Baekeland left the band but before McCaffery joined. The lineup is rounded out with Chuck Gogan on bass and Sean Scott on vocals and guitar.

Of note, "Green Eggs and Ham" features Andrew Pearce on vocals, and was written by none other than Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall.

It sounds like this was recorded for broadcast on (we assume) CJSW, with Greg Curtis providing the intro and outdo for the session.