Living Under a Rock

Sometimes you get your head so far up your own rear end that you miss things... really cool things. A friend emailed me a blog link which lead me to "discover" the amazing Zoe Keating. I'm in love.

Seems I'm late to the party... oh well, least I made it.

Rebirth

Somewhere along the way I "grew up". I gave up playing music in
favour of pursuing a career (in technology) that would support a
family. Not that music couldn't have done that it's just that I never
figured out how... that and the realization that I probably just
wasn't that good.

Fast forward many years and I got my first Mac computer. I had the
thing for over a year when one Sunday afternoon I decided to fire up a
program that's been included with Macs for a number of years now.

Within a couple of hours I was hooked. I had created my first track
in decades. And what a revelation. All this time, on my little 12"
Powerbook, I had a multitrack recorder, synths, drum machines and a
sample/loop library.

Holy crap! back in the Two Infant Children days, we had an 8-track
reel-to-reel rig, a drum machine, our instruments and whatever we
could think to rent... It could take a week to finish a song...
Mobility, forget it. Editing. Not so much. Uphill both ways. (And
we loved it!)

Anyway, the track I made that afternoon was made up of stock Apple
drum loop slowed down a ton to 74bpm. I then played around with some
synth presets settling on Circuit Dialog and Samoa Sweep. Recorded
that. Then I started looking for other loops to see what stuck. They
were Disco Pickbass 01 & 02, Funky Electric Guitar 03, Orchestra
Strings 03 and Nordic Keyed Fiddle 02.

The track isn't that great but it sure beat spending the afternoon
getting a high score in a video game and it marks the start of the
current leg of my journey.

Of course so excited by my creation was I and so eager to foist it onto an unsuspecting public that I didn't bother coming up with a decent title. Instead, I called it 'you decide' and you can hear it here:

you decide

It All Started One Night

It's a little fuzzy... all those years ago... I would've been 17. I
remember going to a party. Hooking up with a girl, Peggy; she had a
voice; we went with a friend of mine, Mo to his friend Ralph's house
after some kind of sleep deprivation... Ralph was (and still is) a
guitar player and had a four track (yeah, one of those cassette jobs)
so we recorded, we jammed (I played flute, she sang).

Peggy disappeared as suddenly as she appeared but wanting to be more
involved, somehow I volunteered to learn how to play bass...

Soon after we were all at a cottage (belonging to Ralph's parents)
outside the city making noise, perhaps music. One of the bigger
decisions we faced was what to call ourselves. Mo and Ralph went for
an evening walk, exploring while I did whatever. On their walk they
found a small graveyard, very old. There they found two unnamed
graves. One marked, "Mother" and the other, "Two Infant Children".

They rushed back to the cottage to tell me the story. Such a
ridiculous rock-n-roll cliche, we had to go with it.

And thus the band, Two Infant Children, was born.