Spring Tour with Land of Talk

We have a little spring tour that’s starting to shape up. So far there are only a few dates confirmed but more should be added eventually. The confirmed dates are with the loverly Land of Talk. They look a little something like this:

April 6: Guelph, Ontario – Ebar w/ Land of Talk
April 7: Toronto, Ontario – Lee’s Palace w/ Land of Talk
April 8: Kingston, Ontario – The Grad Club w/ Land of Talk
April 9: Wakefield, Quebec – Black Sheep Inn w/ Land of Talk

Also, we’re playing in Montreal really soon at Il Motore for the first night of the 3-night Blue Skies Turn Black 10-year anniversary party. Here’s the massive lineup for the night:

Feb 25: Montreal, Quebec – Il Motore (Facebook event)

No Joy
Snailhouse
Adam and the Amethysts
Little Scream (with Becky Foon)
Shapes & Sizes
The Besnard lakes

Fun times!

xo a

Return to the Blogosphere

Whoa, sorry I had been absent from this thing for the past month and a bit. I’ve been deeply entrenched in work on the record and intensive French class.  Since I’ve been absent from the internet, I’ve also been to Thunder Bay for the holidays. As always it was a relaxing and regenerative experience. My sister Carly and I took a walk near our old neighborhood and these are some photos that she took. There are more of these and some repeats on her blog. The last one of Carly was taken by me. Click to enlarge.

Another highlight of visiting Thunder Bay was performing at a house concert with my current favorite Thunder Bay band The Ukeladies. They’re a synth and ukulele duo that play sad, sweet, and strange pop music. They don’t have a lot of recordings yet, but they do have at least one song on their Myspace page, which has been written up on Said the Gramophone. Here’s a video of them performing at the house party:

That’s all for now. Take care, folks.

xo a

The Adam & The Amethysts Blogotheque Session (That Never Was)

Back in October, illustrious Parisian filmmaker and all-around sexy man Vincent Moon was in town filming a series of Take-Away Shows of Montreal bands for the super-amazing blog, La Blogotheque. The Take-Away Shows are an ongoing series of guerrilla-style live videos of bands performing in unlikely, often public, often intimate spaces. The most famous Take-Away show is probably this one. Long story short, we filmed an Adam & The Amethysts performance in my favorite pierogi restaurant/Polish deli, but the footage apparently turned out not-so-good and the session was never released. They assured me that it wasn’t my fault…

Luckily, the also-illustrious Ryan Muir took some beautiful photos. It was a really interesting experience to sing and play guitar and maybe make people feel kind of uncomfortable at a place where I go to eat pierogis about once or twice a week. The whole time I thought I was really pissing off the staff who had to weave around us to deliver people their orders as we played, but in the end, I got some really nice comments from them about my singing voice, and I think it was a special experience for them too (and hopefully for the  customers who expected pierogis and cabbage rolls and borscht, not a folk band).

Hopefully the awkwardness of the situation was laced with some whimsy. I think it was. It’s not every day you spontaneously get serenaded by a cello and bumped into by a Parisian film crew while you’re trying to eat your Sunday borscht.

All photos © Ryan Muir

xo a

Pretty Photos and Write-up of Sala Rossa Show

photos by Leanne Craigmyle

Thanks to the nice folks at Meet You at the Show for these kind words and nice photos from the Dec 12 concert at La Sala Rossa in Montreal. The show went really well and all the bands were great. Pat from My People Sleeping was a real trooper and played drums on a few of our songs without any practicing, which went well and took things up a notch. Thanks to everyone who came out!

photos by Leanne Craigmyle

More photos at MYATS (scroll down to bottom of article for gallery).

Building Theremins is Fun

Back in October fellow Thunder Bay ex-pat Dave Shaw and I conducted a Theremin-building workshop at Articule gallery in Montreal in association with Pop Montreal’s Symposium. It was fun! Best of all, everyone’s instrument worked in the end (about a dozen of them). Well, almost all of them worked. Jenny’s made insane evil droning sounds that weren’t quite right, but cool anyway.

(Adam & The Amethysts trivia: the song “Sonic Youth Centre” from Amethyst Amulet features a Burns B3 Theremin.)

For the workshop we used the Harrison Instruments Minimum Theremin Kit. I really recommend this kit if you have an interest in building a Theremin but don’t have tons of experience with electronics, or if you do and just want a quick and easy project. It only has one antenna for pitch (no volume antenna), but aside from that limitation, it actually sounds amazing and has a decent range, depending on what you use for your antenna. Everyone in the workshop made their own custom enclosure and antenna for their Theremin circuit, which made it really fun. There were cigar box Theremins, film canister Theremins, spoon antennas, and Dave built his into a wireless router and actually used the antennas of the router for the instrument’s pitch control!

Here are some photos from the event.

Builders hard at work

Sean's cigar box and standing spoon Theremin

My finished Theremin in sleek dollar store wooden box

Dave and his amazing wireless router Theremin (and matching sweater)

Ah, memories. The workshop was followed by pitchers of coke and mozzarella sticks at an all-night family restaurant. Perfect.

Also, thanks to everyone who came to the show we played opening for Mew last week at Cabaret Juste Pour Rire. What a lovely crowd.

Adam & The Amethysts (this time: Rory, Rebecca, and I) are playing tomorrow at La Sala Rossa in MTL. Details in my last post. It’s going to be a total love-in of friendly awesomeness, so show up!

The Amethysts Playing with Mew Dec 5 + MPS Album Launch Dec 11

Hey gang,

Some live show announcements. Both are really soon!

Sat, Dec 5, 2009
Mew (Denmark) featuring Adam & The Amethysts
Cabaret Juste Pour Rire (2111 St. Laurent)
Montreal, QC

This is going to be fun.

Fri, Dec 11, 2009
My People Sleeping Album Launch featuring My People Sleeping, Adam & The Amethysts, North My Love (Katherine Peacock & Friends), Mountain Man Pat Jordache (Patrick Gregoire)
La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent)
Montreal, QC

My good friends in MPS have come up with a beautiful record so you should definitely stop by to claim your copy and celebrate with all of us. Both Katherine and Patrick are showcasing their new music on the stage as well.  It’s going to be a lovely evening me thinks.

xo a

Let’s Get Together

Some Documents of Recent Performances

Photo by Carly Waito

Hey gang,

Someone recorded Rebecca and I playing “Bumble Bee” at the Toronto Island show last month and posted it on his blog, Mechanical Forest Sound. It sounds like a soundboard recording. A little bit shabby, and Rebecca’s cello is thin and almost inaudible, but it’s an interesting document of this intimate show. Check it out. You can also check out his review of the show.

There’s also a video floating around that someone shot of us playing at Pop Montreal last October. It depicts us gleefully butchering a brand-new song from the new record called “I’m a Medium.” It’s pretty dark but luckily there are a lot of camera flashes. Here it is:

Also, we might be playing a pretty cool show here in Montreal in early December. I’ll let you know once it’s confirmed.

Digest of Wonder: Tree-Climbing Goats, Mummies, and Dirty Projectors Covers

Today’s post is going to be short on talk, but will feature a medley of wondrous images and hyperlinks for you to enjoy.

Here are some things from the internet that have recently inspired wonder in me. May they also bestow feelings of amazement upon you.

Tree-Climbing Goats of Morroco – Seriously. You have to see this. Also on Youtube.

10 of the World’s Most Amazing Mummies – Another great post from Atlas Obscura. Incredible.

Solange Knowles covers Dirty Projectors – First she ostensibly gets her sister Beyonce and Jay-Z into Grizzly Bear. Now this.  Somehow, every time a big hip-hop or R&B star (especially a Knowles) flirts with indie rock, which has been happening lately, my dream of one day stealing Beyonce away from Jay-Z seems slightly less absurd. [UPDATE: check out this article from August. Jay-Z on indie rock]. But seriously, Solange’s version of “Stillness is the Move” is so good and based around the same sample as Dr Dre’s xxplosive. Thank you, Pitchfork. (note: Pitchfork’s mp3 was taken down, but this one should still work). Also, if you haven’t seen it, the Dirty Projectors’ incredible original “Stillness is the Move” has a lovely video. I’ll be seeing you Montrealers at the Dirty Projectors show this Sunday at Le National with our good buddy Tuneyards. Should be epic.

In other news, my herbal detox is going well. I’ve pretty much gotten over feeling hungry all the time, but the other night I had a very impassioned dream in which I ate an entire plate of nachos. That was all that happened. Notably, the nachos had pesto on them, which is something I will have to try after this cleanse is finished.

Also, look out for an Adam & The Amethysts Montreal show or two in the coming months, because, why not?

Back in Business

We were offline-ish for a little while there, as the tech team was working on redesigning the website a little bit. Now in addition to the blog we have some other pages about the band for you to browse.

In other news, the new record is coming along. I’m really excited about how some of the new songs are sounding. It’s shaping up to be less ethereal, more immediate-sounding. But still with cool sounds and spring-verb on everything (I can’t help it). I guess that all could change as the mixes evolve. The picture to the left is of this cool old public address tube amplifier (Made in Chicago) from the ’50s that’s been modded to act as either a guitar head or a pre-amp.  The tubes are all original RCA coke bottle shaped beasts that are on the verge of death which sounds noisy and amazing. I picked it up for cheap in Toronto last year and it’s been a staple piece of versatile gear for me since. Great for making guitar sound bad ass, or a tambourine sound like crap. Awesome crap.

I’d never recorded a cello before, but the sessions I did with Rebecca sounded amazing, and hopefully she’ll come by again soon to sprinkle some more brooding sad fairy dust all over this record.

I’m also starting a seven-day herbal cleanse this week. No salt, sugar, alcohol, refined grains, processed foods, coffee, etc. plus a bunch of herbal mumbo-jumbo supplements.  I want my colon to be in tip-top shape while I work on this record. Wish me luck.

xo a

Carl Spidla is a man/Country Blue is his blog

Carl Spidla is a singer/songwriter here in Montreal who is worth checking out. If his voice were a fine wine, it would have a nose that evokes wet grass and Mile End bachelor pad, a Bob Dylanny attack, an evolution marked by smokey cedar and plum, with a decidedly Bruce Springsteenish finish. It would also be surprisingly inexpensive and even more surprisingly manufactured in Ontario.

 

Turns out, Carl also has a nifty blues music blog called Country Blue. It is also worth checking out. Do it, dammit!

On an unrelated note, I hope everyone had a pleasant Halloween. I combined two Halloween cliches and went as a tacky tourist/mummy (as did m). The mummy part got a little uncomfortable so I removed my wrappings partway through the evening, leaving me just a lowly regular tacky tourist. Which was fine by me.

xo a

Aurora Australis

Photo: Paul Moss

Everyone’s heard of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, and anyone who’s seen them will attest to their surreal beauty.  I can remember one time lying on my back in the backyard of some family friends in Thunder Bay when I was a kid watching the greenish electric dance in the sky.

Well, the southern hemisphere has sky lights too, called Aurora Australis, and they aren’t too shabby. The incredible photos in this post are borrowed from Environmental Graffiti.

Photo: Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation

Rather than trying to paraphrase Wikipedia:

Auroras are the result of the emissions of photons in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, above 80 km (50 miles), from ionized nitrogen atoms regaining an electron, and oxygen and nitrogen atoms returning from an excited state to ground state. They are ionized or excited by the collision of solar wind particles being funnelled down, and accelerated along, the Earth’s magnetic field lines; excitation energy is lost by the emission of a photon of light, or by collision with another atom or molecule.

 

Photo: Samuel Blanc

Check out more 12 more images of majestic awesomeness here.

The Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

Do you know this album? No? Thanks to the internet, you can easily steal it for free! But be sure to buy it if you love it. I’m so into it right now.

This is the third album recorded by the Incredible String Band, recorded in late 1967 and released in early 1968, at the height of the psychedelic movement in popular music. Combining instruments and melodies from the far corners of the earth with lyrics unequalled in their day (and rarely since) reflecting on eveything from humankind to the natural world, from love to violence, from ancient mysticism to modern realities, the ISB made music like no one else. It spoke — and still speaks — to the heart, the soul, the mind and the body.

For a taste, here’s a lo-fi youtube version of an amazing epic and long-winded but awesome song from the album in two parts.

You can download this entire album at PHROCK Blog, one of my favourite online sources for psychedelic rock and acid folk.

xo a

Snow Falling on Green Leaves in October / Wood Stove

It’s October 22nd and it’s snowing in Montreal. Wish I could stay in tonight, but I have fish to fry elsewhere. Hopefully I won’t die in a slush-related bicycling accident.

Stuart Gordon’s HP Lovecraft Adaptations

Since Halloween is fast approaching, I thought I’d get us into the mood with a spooky post.

I am a huge fan of the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft. If you’ve never read him before, and appreciate cosmic nihilism, macabre occultist rites, as well as long-winded and archaic diction, you just gotta check him out. I recommend the Library of America’s H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, because it’s hardcover, very extensive with almost 900 onion-skin pages, and has one of those built-in ribbon bookmarks. Perfect for curling up by the fire with a cup of tea and contemplating one’s insignificance in a vast and hostile universe.

And if you’re like me and also love perverse and disgusting horror films, you will fall in love with director Stuart Gordon’s adaptations of HP Lovecraft, in particular Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), and Castle Freak (1995). All three of them feature Jeffrey Combs, one of those amazing underrated working-class actors who exclusively does B-movies and television and frequents the horror and science fiction convention circuit with his Sharpie marker. He’s actually been in eight Lovecraft adaptations, including ones not by Gordon. Anyway, these three films actually share a lot of actors in common, which is fun. I guess Gordon likes to work with his favourites.

Stuart Gordon is an old hippie turned master of the cinematically nefarious. Here’s his bio lifted directly from Wikipedia:

Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin and soon after formed Screw Theater. In March 1968 Gordon’s Screw Theater produced The Game Show at the UW Memorial Union. The goal of the production was to get the audience to leave. To that end the heat was turned to 90, ushers chained the doors behind the audience, the show’s start time delayed and the content of The Game Show made as inane as possible. The audience finally demanded to leave one hour and fifty minutes into the two hour production. In the fall of 1968, he produced a version of Peter Pan that got him and his future wife arrested for obscenity. The story made national headlines until the charges were dropped in November 1968.

After the University of Wisconsin demanded future theatrical productions by Screw Theater be overseen by a University Professor, Gordon cut his University ties to form Broom Street Theater. Its first production, the new translation of the risque Lysistrata, premiered in May 1969. Gordon is married to Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, whom he frequently casts in his movies. Together in 1970, they founded the Chicago Organic Theater Company, for which Gordon also served as artistic director. With the company, he did several plays, such as Warp!, Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Bleacher Bums, ER, Bloody Bess. Warp! was later adapted into a comic book by First Comics. He is also the proud father of three daughters- Suzanna, Jillian, and Margaret.

And here are some goolish trailers for your enjoyment!

First, a hideous pseudo-Frankenstienian tale of science gone wrong:

Secondly, another tale of science gone wrong. I love the insane fluorescent pink and purple color palette of this movie. So 1986!

And last but not least, a classic macabre tale of a gruesome subhuman creature stalking people in a castle:

So much gruesome dismemberment, so many great memories. Dismembories?

xo a