The Bottle Garden

We were the guests on CBC Radio One’s Cinq à Six on Saturday March 26th talking about analogue production and some music recorded at The Bottle Garden. Jeanette Kelly was a great and affable host. And it turns out she has ace razor-blade editing skills from her early days in radio production.

We were guests for the full hour and played music by artists who recorded or mixed at the studio, including: Lantern, Sheer Agony, TOPS, Jef Barbara, Moss Lime, and Exit Someone. We also played ‘Song For Insane Times’ by Kevin Ayers as a example of a recording that we love.

There were a lot of other things we worked on that we hoped to play, including Brave Radar, Each Other, Ursula, Bickleigh Ghost, Tess Roby, No Family, The Nymphets, Holding Hands, Cheap Wig, Sigh Down One, Cool TV, Pretty Boys, Kurvi Tasch, Avia Kit, P.S.A, Traces, etc… but we ran out of time and/or your band was deemed too raucous for daytime public radio.

Listen to the full show here.

We had a little shindig at the Bottle Garden back in April where Brave Radar, Sheer Agony, the Strange Hobbies (their first ever show), and Freelove Fenner played sets. We just threw some mics up and recorded the sets to 8-track analog tape at 7.5 inches per second (using the Otari MX70).Video was taken by a few different people in attendance; Caitlin Loney edited the footage together and synced it to the analog audio. The show/party was fun, we hope to do something like this again in the near future.

Jared and Johanna, of the estimable rock n roll combo The Nymphets, just created a cool magazine. Read it here.

In other news, a lifelong veil of confusion was just lifted when I learned that Mick was singing about sealing wax. I guess those are the kind of girls you meet when you go to the LSE.

The Concordian just published a fascinating interview with Mavo, a local band, wherein frontman Mitz Takahashi offers some sage advice to our youth.

Mavo, who’ve recorded a couple songs here at the Bottle Garden, are a great band. To me they sound a bit like early Dream Syndicate mixed with the Voidoids. What’s more, they’re a fairly new band and they keep evolving (changing for the better, in fact) each time I see them play live.