Spread the love

Please allow me to introduce you to a heroic blogger, someone who should be given the Order of Canada: Beau Levitt of Toronto, whose blog 5 Bucks on By-Tor chronicles constant listening to the almost-unheard, the always-ignored, the has-beens, the never-wases, the couldn't-have-beens and other relics of the vinyl era in Canada. Where else are you going to find tracks by Thorsby, Alberta's Bob Ruzicka?

As a casual collector of weird, under-the-radar Canadian vinyl myself, something I really appreciate is Levitt's tolerance for musical genres outside the rock-country-folk axis. (A tolerance I lack. A lot.) He's a generous listener and a good writer, and if there's a blog heaven he's assured a place in it.

Be sure to check out his other websites: It Came From Canada and The Thrifty Digger.

Aubadecast 1.4: The Good Times Are Killing Me

While you were driving around trying to avoid that damn Kid Rock song all summer, I had this playlist on deck at all times. The songs I'd randomly selected for it seemed to arrange themselves naturally into a kind of Pilgrim's Progress storyline (don't ask me what Kara Keith and Arthur Alexander did to horn themselves into the sequence; I'm just the conduit).

Ladies and germs, The Good Times Are Killing Me.

Good Times Charlie Robison
Kick This City Kara Keith
Something For The Weekend Super Furry Animals
Please Go Home The Rolling Stones
Paisley Pattern Ground The Black Hollies
Crash Pad Number Marc Carroll
Heaven The Gerry Alvarez Odyssey
Sunday morning Pet Politics
Rock Bottom, Pop. 1 Robbie Fulks
O.K. With My Decay Grandaddy
Orphans Wooden Stars
Take Care Of Us The Star Spangles
Pretty Girls Everywhere Arthur Alexander
If Looks Could Kill Camera Obscura
Death of the Life of the Party Drag The River

option+click & "save as" to download Aubadecast 1.4.

or listen and download at podomatic.

A little love

I begin to lurch back into the land of the internet people

After a summer of trauma, much relieved by Clint's generous loan of his laptop, we stagger into autumn on a G4 tower upgraded with memory galore but creaking through a newer, bigger OS on a slow and remarkably unreliable 1999 processor. But we are up and ... if not running, at least walking, ladies and germs. Thank you for your patience.

Aubadecast 1.4 is mere days away from being posted. In the meantime, feel free to visit Aubade at http://aubade.podomatic.com where you can glom onto an RSS feed of this 'cast and even request its presence at iTunes. Which I'm pretty sure will violate every RIAA regulation going.

In the meantime: Do you want commentary on these things, as though I'm your late-night FM radio host, or do you prefer the "traditional mixtape" feel of the uninterrupted sequence? Please let me know your preference in the comments section. Gold stars for robot boys and girls who drop a line.

No news. Not good.

A friendly piece of advice for all you out there in computerland. If you don't have an external hard drive that backs up all your important stuff -- and I mean all your files -- then please go out & get one immediately.

Something we often forget (I do, anyhow) is that our computers are designed to fail eventually. They're not made to go the distance. We don't buy them so much as rent. Etcetera.

You can intuit the reason I haven't posted new mixes in a while, eh?

I have one ready to go as soon as I can recover all my files. It won't be too long now, I don't think, but I don't have a grand to throw away on another Mac just at the moment. If anyone knows someone with a used Mac laptop for sale, you know where you can find me.

Aubadecast 1.3

A themed 'cast, of a sort; at least, one that stays within a mood rather than leapscotching and hopfrogging all around the stylistic chessboard. It was created as the soundtrack for the gloomy months of March and April.

So of course I publish it as the sun and green buds emerge, and when Zephyrus with his sweete breth eek remarke on ev'ry holt and heath...

This'll be up for about a week or so (direct-linked, I mean; the Megaupload one will be semi-permanently archived there), then I'll post May's "party-time" podcast.

Aubadecast 1.3

Fall Into The Night Eliza Gilkyson
Taps Reversed Christine Fellows & John K. Samson
song for the angels (miracle version) Great Lake Swimmers
Doctor Blind Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
Crooked Legs The Acorn
Santa Clara The National
Hope For Us All Nick Lowe
Falling For Catriona Al Tuck
Billy Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
The Ballad of Love and Hate The Avett Brothers
Beautiful Way Beck (feat. Beth Orton)
Little Waltz Basia Bulat
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) Nancy Sinatra
If Silence Means That Much To You Emma Pollock
Here We Are Patrick Park
Old Song AM
Hail, Mary Shearwater
Quiet Creek Old Man Luedecke

option+click & "save as" for the streaming single-file version

Click here to receive a zip file containing the individual songs (via Megaupload; ignore the purdy gals, enter the code, wait 45 seconds and download)

Aubadecast 1.2

Well! Time does surely fly, and I can't believe it's already the beginning of February and time for another edition of—

What? Nearly the end of March, you say? Well, shit. I wondered why the weather was so uncharacteristically nice.

Without further ado, then, allow me to trot out the Aubade Podcast version 1.2. This month's installment features some very fine musics.

Track 1 is for David. I began two consecutive mixtapes for him in the late '90s which began with the studio version of this song, after which he wrote me something to the effect of "Please don't put this song on any more mixtapes for me. I like it, but it makes me want to go out and kill my kin."

Track 20 is for Jason.

Track 14 is extremely interesting in that I know of no other band who has ripped off the sound of Ringo Starr's solo albums. Don't you just adore it?

Track 18 is for those of you who got the idea from Aubadecast 1 that Oneida are some kind of techno band.

1. Caleb Meyer Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
2. Real Love American Princes
3. Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar (live) Bob Dylan
4. 100 Million Little Bombs Buddy Miller
5. Devastation The Besnard Lakes
6. Fourth Time Around (Bob Dylan cover) Yo La Tengo
7. New Orange Bike Sister Suvi
8. Nobody's Dirty Business Mississippi John Hurt
9. I Left My Heart in Iran Forgotten Rebels
10. Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke cover) Britt Daniel
11. Aly, Walk With Me The Raveonettes
12. Stranger Than Fools Jesse Malin
13. Route 23 Chatham County Line
14. Who Cares What The Question Is? The Bees
15. Sidewalk Chalk The A Sides
16. Personal Stars
17. Heart It Races (Architecture in Helsinki cover) Dr. Dog
18. All Arounder Oneida
19. Can't Stand It (live with Andrew Bird and horns) Wilco
20. A World Of Hurt Drive-By Truckers

By popular demand, the 'cast is available in two formats.

Click here for the popular "uncrackable" 80-minute file for optimum list'nin pleasure.

Click here to receive a zip file containing the individual songs (via Megaupload; ignore the "find the girl of your dreams" advertisements, enter the code, wait 45 seconds and then feel the rock)

EDIT: P.S. Don't forget: this pawdcast is eggs-splicitly designed to be cramm'd onto an 80-minute blank CD.

Can you lend me 3 million bucks?

No, I'm serious. Can anyone out there lend me three million bucks? I'll pay you back, no problem.

There's something I need to buy.

Aubadecast 1.1

Well, after knocking myself out making mixed CDs all last year (which will, in a while, be archived on this site for those who feel they're missing out, or who have scratched theirs up, or something) I came to the conclusion that there must be a more efficient way of going about this whole business of sorting through and sharing music. Hence the first installment in an experimental series of podcasts. Each one is designed to be burned on an 80 minute CD and listened to like a regular mixtape, but there are no track breaks. This gets around the problem of you white-eyed devils who take my mixes, cram them track-by-track onto your iPods, and never hear them in their immaculately sequenced glory. Take that.

The first immaculately sequenced podcast is an only-ever-so-slightly-tweaked version of eighty minutes in the life of my iPod on shuffle.

This is what happened: during the course of getting the first Quarterly Report disc of 2008 ready (all the songs were in the playlist; I was winnowing the last 20 minutes of extraneous tunes out and assembling a sequence) iTunes crashed and lost my library file. All playlists: gone. "Last played" tracking back only to last September. In other words: royally hooped.

Gamely (I thought), once the weeping subsided I took this radical disorganization of my digital music collection as an opportunity to revisit some stuff I hadn't paid much attention to first time 'round. iPod: autofill randomly! Press play and...

The next two hours were spent with my hands in an electical panel (not live) and my ears on cloud nine. Tons of great stuff I hadn't given two thoughts about were laid out end to end like Dorothy Parker's girls at Brandeis in a pleasing and often surprising sequence.

Or maybe it's just me.

Download the inaugural Aubade podcast (via Megaupload; ignore the "girl of your dreams" ads, enter the code, wait 45 seconds, then cram the rawk into your hard-drive).

****

Track listing:

French Film Blurred Wire • Driver Surprise Me The National • War Pigs Cake • People Gonna Talk James Hunter • Billy Gillian Welch • Étienne D'août (version radio) Malajube • I'll Fly Away Goose Creek Symphony • All Over Again Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings • Hockey Monkey The Zambonis featuring James Kochalka Superstar • The Fool Neutral Milk Hotel • Dearest Forsaken Iron & Wine • Reservations Jeff Tweedy • The Youth Are Getting Restless Bad Brains • Stand Down Margaret English Beat • All The Old Showstoppers The New Pornographers • Lullabye Cracker • Up With People Oneida • Dark Star The Mabuses • Things Don't Change The Reivers • Get Ready To Ride The Lion Culture • Faraway You Marah

Cramm'd full

A woefully un-hung-over New Year's morning — er, afternoon — and still no sign of intelligent life in the universe... no, wait: what about this?

*edit* Wait! rbally is back! So there is some kind of providence.