THE WEATHER STATION AT LA FRETTE

A year ago I visited La Frette recording studio, located just outside of Paris, to visit with Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station) as she recorded her new album "Loyalty" with Afie Jurvanen and Robbie Lackritz.  After much anticipation, the fruits of their labour will be released this month on May 12 by Paradise of Bachelors.

La Frette is a wonderful combination of old world luxury and forgotten technology, layered with relics from the 1980's and yesterday's cigarettes.   Look to their website for a catalogue of the incredible gear available for artists to use while in residence - I was more interested in the sisal carpeting, bathroom tiles and majestic staircase. There certainly is a palpable magic to this place that translates into the music; listening to Tamara's etherial and haunting voice on Way it is, Way it could be, brings me back to the garden of La Frette and her transluscent beauty glowing in the cold afternoon light.

The Weather Station will be playing in Toronto at the Great Hall on May 14th.

GERHARD RICHTER : CAGE (1) - (6)

Room 14 at the Tate Modern houses Gerhard Richter's painting Cage (1) - (6) from 2006.  The works were painted to, and named after, the music of John Cage.  The room, overwhelmed by the massive paintings, was a pleasure to inhabit even when swarmed with jaunty British schoolchildren.  I did yearn to hear a track of Cage's to accompany the experience.  Here is one for you if you'd like to partake while viewing these detail shots : link

(Richter) has long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence, and has approvingly quoted his statement ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it’. Richter is also drawn to Cage’s rejection of intuition as well as total randomness, planning his compositions through structures and chance procedures. While there are no direct links between any particular work in this series and any composition by Cage, some critics have suggested affinities between the two figures’ approaches and between the constant flux in Cage’s music and the space created by Richter’s paintings.

-from the Tate Modern site

RANDY'S STUDIO 17

When sites of great historical and cultural import are left to decay, the chance to glimpse their former greatness is often lost in the rot. Not so with Randy’s Studio 17. It is, it would seem, its rot which gives it life. Located at 16-17 North Parade in the heart of downtown Kingston, Jamaica, what was once Randy’s Studio sits above an empty shop that was once Randy’s Record Mart. Used now only as a storage room, the array of old recording equipment and abandoned instruments warped and cracked by decades of tropical humidity stand as reminders of the seminal recordings once made in this room – a room that measures barely 20’ x 20’. My host Carl points to a dusty organ in the corner with broken keys and partly obscured by a sagging cardboard box. “You see that? That’s the one that made the sound on the Wailers’ ‘Mr. Brown.’” 

Opened in 1969 by Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneur Vincent “Randy” Chin, Randy’s Studio 17 would produce hits by Bob Marley, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Big Youth, Toots and the Maytals, Dennis Brown, Augustus Pablo and countless others, before closing its doors in 1979. On a daily basis, musicians hoping for a shot at local stardom, or at least a chance to be hired as session players, congregated daily in the laneway beside Randy’s, a laneway that soon took the name "Idler’s Rest." While North Parade still bustles with fruit sellers, taxis, and the odd pick-pocket, music no longer booms from the speakers of Randy’s record shop and Idler’s Rest offers few clues of the greats and the aspiring unknowns who once leaned up against its walls. Yet in the back room, on the second floor at #16-17, surely the ghosts still dance and sing.

-Guest contributor T Jardim

STILL COOL : BOB DYLAN

There's a lot of Dylan talk amongst our male associates come Friday night and I guess, after years, it had to wear off on us.  Our current jam is Infidels, recorded in 1983 with Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits) on guitar.  The sound is driving and emotional, yet relaxed with profound poetry clashing alongside cheesy 80's moments.  This album feels good.  It was the right sound for summer and as fall rolls on we're still flipping A to B and back.  

Dylan's unparalleled career makes for new discoveries in the back catalogue for all but the most devoted.   Thinking about his different phases and sounds is like remembering a cast of different musicians spanning and interpreting the 20th and 21st centuries.  After over 50 years, he's still at it, creating music that tomorrow or in 20 years may be the sound for the season.