Yesterday/last Friday/some point in the past, I posted to Mastodon, “All right, it's time to move on from the J Warden era of digitallofi.com. Not sure what I'm going to write about... I wonder if I have anything in the tank.”

Author’s Note

This is the essay I was working on when J died. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of this site had become a conversation between Jason Warden (ne Tom Q./SpaceAce/Robotron, or as I refer to him when speaking and writing, J¹) and myself, talking about music via our vinyl record collections. While I was never going to be able to replicate his deep dives into obscure musical acts he thought deserved more attention, my autobiographical rambling had an engaged audience of at least one person. The records I’m discussing here would have another bonding moment. Not saying he would’ve liked all the bands, records I’m writing about, but he loved to talk shop. Also, we both lived through and came up in roughly the same era of pop, punk, and alternative/college rock—one of our early bonding moments was discovering a shared love and deep knowledge of Robyn Hitchcock.² His taste was a lot more wide ranging than mine but we had so much in common musically. We got each other’s references.

Not only was I hoping to get him to contribute a companion post (discussed below in the Boston hardcore section), one of our shared jokes was the story in the first part of the Preface.

So I’m going to be directly addressing this to J. I hope the conceit isn’t ghoulish or strained. But, sincerely, most days I find myself thinking of conversing with him.

This one’s for you, J.

As anyone who follows me on Mastodon is surely already aware, my esteemed co-blogger, Tom Q., has taken leave of this plane of existence.

It is Canada Day today. I spent the first couple dozen years of my life in Canada before fleeing, and whatever my mixed feelings are the whole country is a part of me. Canada Day when I was a kid (leans back in chair) wabas a chance to go see a bunch of performances on an outdoor stage, everything from Native songs to Scottish dancing to kung fu demonstrations, and then there’d be fireworks when it got dark and it was a lot of fun. Nowadays Canada Day has a lot of different overtones to it. There are people who say the day shouldn’t really be celebrated, and the reasons they give for that I don’t really have an answer to.¹ I grew up Canadian and I grew up with Canada Day a big deal, and as someone who fled the country it makes me a little nostalgic, so forgive me.

I still like to go up to Canada, just not really my home province of Alberta, and recently made a trip to the Maritimes which ended up with me buying an album on Bandcamp from P.E.I., just because I bought a CD from P.E.I. but not vinyl. And that record was so good it made me imagine what it would be like to go on Bandcamp and get a record from each province/territory, what a wide range of music and people I bet I would hear. And so I did just that and this is the result.

Bandcamp, like Canada, has it’s share of detractors these days. However as a world music shopping emporium I believe it’s second to none. You can filter by any location – a country, a province/state, a city – and filter by format you want. This was about records, precious records, so I looked for vinyl. I also was very careful with each province and randomized the results so I wouldn’t have the most popular at the top. I wanted a wide variety of music, not just the most popular, and my tastes vary a lot. I then shopped like one would shop – I clicked on songs, thought “pass” after 30 seconds, went to the next record, until I found (almost but you’ll have to keep reading) a piece of vinyl from every province and territory in Canada. I didn't go for anything like the most typical music of the province - no Albertan country music, no Atlantic fiddle music. I definitely wanted a French language record but didn't get one - however two of the records I picked they do a song en Francais. I was spending my own money (and a lot on shipping!) so I got music I liked. For a couple weeks there, there was a special thrill going to get my mail and seeing all the different postmarks. It was a lot of fun. I also learned some important lessons about buying from Bandcamp artists! Again, read on to find that shit out.

Two of my favorite bands have new albums this year.

In January. Poi Dog Pondering released a CD/digital download, Keep on Loving Each Other. In August, The Armed will release Perfect Strangers. These are wildly different bands. Yet still, they loosely occupy the same space in my creative imagination.

Whatever I was watching at the time is now forgotten. Some streaming show no doubt. But something reminded me of a friend from when I lived in New York City in the 90s. She was a moderately successful actress who I met walking our dogs. So we would see each other at least once a day, every day, at the park, walking dogs. And soon we became friends who would spend time together irrespective of our dogs, though the dogs remained good friends as well. I don’t know if we were very similar. She was 5 years older than me, with a different set of concerns. But for about a year Mary and I spent a lot of time together.