lotsa stuffs

ok, lots of stuff going on, so i’m going to use point form:

• we were on the cover of the hour in montreal a couple weeks ago, which is super nice.
• been getting some nice pre-album-release love from some places including album of the week in the montreal mirror. more. love.
• played 2 incredible pop montreal shows. here and here are some photos from the first one. if anyone took some pictures at the second one (at la tour prisme), get in touch because that room was beautiful. i wanna see ‘em.
• album comes out in 4 days, and we’re playing an instore at our fave neighbourhood record store Phonopolis in mile end to celebrate at 6 pm (tues. oct 4) (FB event). our drummer works there.
• look out for a music video by yuula benivolski (that’s a screen shot up there)
• patchy string of fun canadian tourdates begins wednesday oct 5 with our record launch in toronto at the piston with pink moth. full tour dates here.

very excited about everything! and we’re booking more tourdates for november so stay tuned.

love,

adam

toronto show + some new amethysts tour dates + sexxxy pic

HEY!

Some patchy Eastern Canadian tour dates for you to mark in your pocket agenda, wall calendar, or personal digital assistant. As you can see, there are a lot of gaps, but they’ll all hopefully be filled soon with more confirmed shows. But I thought it would be good to put these out there as a little preview… (BTW, thanks to everyone who came out to our Ottawa show. It was lots of fun! Pictures here) We’re also hoping to confirm some more westerly dates and will let you know when we do! Note that we are playing THIS THURSDAY AUG 25 in Toronto at the Tranzac.

Aug 25th – TORONTO, ON (Tranzac) (facebook event)
Sept 22nd – MONTREAL, QC (O Patro Vys – Pop Montreal MEGAPHONO Showcase)
Sept 23rd – MONTREAL, QC (Prism Tower – Pop Montreal Loft Party) *
Oct 5th – TORONTO, ON (The Piston) **
Oct 6th – LONDON, ON (APK Live) **
Oct 8th – OTTAWA, ON (Dom Polski SPK – Kelp Fall Classic)
Oct 13th – HAMILTON, ON (Casbah)
Oct 15th – WINDSOR, ON (Phog Lounge)
Oct 20th – FREDERICTON, NB (Capital) ***
Oct 21st – HALIFAX, NS (Company House – Halifax Pop Explosion)

* w/ The Weather Station | ** w/ Pink Moth | *** w/ Library Voices

And here’s one of the new super sexxxy band portraits we recently took with dear friend and incredible artist/photographer Celia Perrin Sidarous for you to print out and tack to your bedroom wall or tape up in your gym locker.

Adam & The Amethysts @ CMW = a nite 2 remember

We’re playing the Pop Montreal CMW showcase at the Drake Hotel in Toronto Friday, March 11. Other acts include our buddies Pat Jordache and Holger from Brazil. Thanks, Pop! More details TBA. We might play some more shows around that time so stay tuned. In the mean time don’t forget our show with Julie Doiron in MTL Feb 5.

Adam & The Amethysts @ Pop Montreal

POP MONTREAL PRESENTS:
Adam & The Amethysts w/ Iroquois Falls, Dada Trash Collage, Netherfriends

A sparkly line-up of emerging weird lo-fi pop acts joins Montreal’s own nostalgia-core folk wunderkinds Adam & The Amethysts for a night to remember.

01:00 Adam & The Amethysts:
“Crazy how a blow to the head can change someone. We had heard about Adam many times. His album was recommended to us, deliciously retro psychedelic, the type of music you would have loved to discover one evening during the summer of 1969, that works just as well for this summer.” — La Blogotheque

23:55 Iroquois Falls:
This collective from the west end of Toronto mixes experimental sound noise with grunge-era guitar and heavy PJ Harvey-esque vocals. Their sound is thick-shifting, jarringly avant-garde. — bh

23:00 Dada Trash Collage:
Minneapolis has, like, more violent crime per capita than New York or LA by a wide margin. It’s basically like Baltimore. The fact that Dada Trash Collage comes out of it with such inspiring electronic-african-dance-chanty-singing-pop is amazing. It’s like if Baltimore gave us Animal Collective or something. — jt

22:00 Netherfriends:
Emerging from the rooftops of Chicago in 2007, Netherfriends are that bastard-psych-pop-catchy as hell band that you’ve been searching for. –myspace

~~~~

We’re on at 1:00 am, so you can hop on your bike after Van Dyke Parks or Arbutus Records Showcase, or any of the other great shows happening that evening and zip up to Playhouse to finish your night in style. If all that other stuff doesn’t interest you, I highly recommend coming to see the whole show. The other acts should be great.

Night Dancer

Hi all. A few items of business. Firstly, Adam & The Amethysts will be playing Pop Montreal this year, but the details are still being hashed out. I’ll keep you posted. I can say that one of the shows will be later in the evening on Sept 29th.

Another thing, I posted a new song from the upcoming record on Myspace the other day that you can listen to. It’s called “Adam Called Me Over Christmas” and is kinda sad. Sorry to post a sad one.

carly waito

I’d say the record is about 95% finished. I really thought that it would be done before the end of August, but it’s not, and such is life. I always end up accidentally writing new songs while recording the other ones. It should be finished in the next two weeks or so, but who knows when or how it will be released. I guess that depends on a lot of things.

One thing you can count on, though, is that I will be posting more new songs soon for download. Another thing I can tell you about the record is that I will be collaborating with my amazing sister Carly on the artwork. Carly, if you’re reading this, we need to get on this

Also, I think it is going to be called Primrose & Pinecones and will contain about 11 or 12  tracks. Excitement and uncertainty abounds!

New Blogotheque Video & Street Pop: Sat, Aug 28

Here’s another Take-Away Show shot in May by the Blogotheque folks, this one for the song Bumble Bee. It’s my favorite of the three that we shot and was filmed at Mont Royal Cemetery. It’s kind of bizarre for me to watch, actually, because of the weird state I was in when it was filmed. There is a cute raccoon in it, too.

ALSO: Be sure to come by Parc Des Ameriques (St Laurent & Rachel) this Saturday at 7:00 to see us perform outdoors as a part of Street Pop. My homeslice JRC from Sunset Rubdown is going to be offering his drumming services, which will be fun. Another new addition to the fold will be an incredibly handsome man named Scott contributing to a few songs.

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

(July 1, 2010 – Update: We did another Take Away show!)

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

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!

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.

Photos: Green Room, Pop Montreal, Oct 2, 2009

Photos by Ming Wu

Adam & The Amethysts at Pop Montreal 2009. Notice in full size mode the hilarious zombified expressions on Graham and my faces.

More photos at Flickr.

Jerusalem in My Heart Behind the Scenes!

Jerusalem in My Heart was a huge hit I think. Although the artistic event was quite serious in nature, the preparation was a rollicking bromance. Here’s some insider footage of the macho tomfoolery that occurred just moments before the moving politico-psychedelic performance.

xo a

Footage of Pop Montreal Show

The show went down pretty well, despite our lack of rehearsal. Here’s some video someone caught of the end of one of our new songs.

Pop Montreal 2009

This weekend, I will have my grubby hands in a lot of Pop MTL pots, so to speak.

Phonopolis Record Store

Thursday: 4:00pm – Firstly, I will be performing in the basement of MTL record store Phonopolis (5303 Parc Ave). It’s going to be a very intimate acoustic performance with the fantastic Rebecca Lessard accompanying on cello. What’s even more exciting is that Tune Yards will also be playing, as well as Brave Radar and Dearling Physique. (Facebook event)

Friday: 8:45pm – Adam & The Amethysts will be performing at the Green Room (5386 St. Laurent) as a part of Passovah’s showcase with Diamond Rings and Golden Isles. The Amethysts band has recently undergone some changes. The special line-up for the evening will be Keiko Devaux (ex The Acorn) on keys, Jessie Stein (The Luyas) on bass, Graham Van Pelt (Miracle Fortress, Think About Life) on drums, and Rebecca Lessard (Code Pie) on cello, and myself on guitar and vocals. Probably the only time you’ll have a chance to see this rag-tag group of misfits playing my songs in a hilariously unrehearsed fashion, so don’t miss it! (Facebook event)

Jerusalem in My Heart

Saturday: 9:30pm – I am going to be at the luxurious Theatre Outremont (1240 Bernard)  in a group of 40 shirtless, painted white, macho Mile-End boys banging on the floor and grunting in a crazy shock and awe Arabic psychedelic performance art piece by Jerusalem in My Heart. Tickets are expensive. I’ll let you know how it goes. (Facebook event)

Sunday: 4:00pm – Along with Dave Shaw, I will be facilitating a DIY build your own simple Theremin workshop as a part of the Pop Symposium. It’s going down at 6600 Hutchison. I think it’s already full though… sorry. (Facebook event)

And then I will likely collapse from exhaustion.

I’ll also be video blogging throughout the festival on the Pop Montreal website. So check that shit out for some video LOLs.

Maybe I’ll see you around!

xo a

Teaching Keiko Keyboard Parts

As the seasons change, The Amethysts are undergoing a radical change in personnel.  Rory Seydel (Shapes & Sizes) has signed on to playing bass guitar, and Keiko Devaux (ex The Acorn) is playing keyboards. And there’s going to be a totally random cast of locals performing as The Amethysts at Pop Montreal this year. No Rory (he has two other shows that night–typical), but Jessie Stein will be playing bass. And GVP will be playing drums.

Anyway, this means that everybody but me has to learn the songs from scratch.

Here’s a video of Keiko and me at my house learning keyboard parts for the second half of Stupid Ocean. It kind of depicts an amusing eureka moment. Well, amusing to us, anyway.