A look into the mind of Rich Aucoin

In advance of next month’s album release for Ephemeral, Aucoin lets us have a peek at that most personal of digital spaces, his desktop

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1. "FOUR MORE YEARS" IN FRENCH: I'm currently translating [Ephemeral's] "Four More Years" into as many languages as possible with the hope to release the song and video on a Tumblr where the song is in up to 20 languages. I've sung the song so far live in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and Icelandic.

2. SWEET CATS, MONA LISA & PUFFY, SKELETOR SULKING, ROB FORD ON SEESAW: I'm always collecting interesting and/or ridiculous images to use in the live show or for other visual counterparts.

3. AJ OPENING CREDITS: A screenshot of a personalized compliment in the opening credits I made for a friend who curated the Pemberton Festival; one of thousands I've written personally to open each show over the past four years.

4. LYRIC SLIDES CHER: Local artist Cher Hann made me several images and GIFs for the portion of my show where I'm teaching the audience the lyrics before the song so that we can all sing together—even if you've never heard my music before—in a sort of "crowd karaoke."

5. EPHEMERAL TRAILER: I really like the idea of movie-style trailers being made for albums. I made this one in Final Cut Pro (which I make all my shows in, along with Ableton Live). You can see it here:

6. POTENTIAL ALBUM COVER IMAGE: I picked the moon footprint for the cover of Ephemeral because of a couple of reasons: First, a footprint is a pretty ephemeral thing. Here we have what supposedly will be our longest-lasting footprint and yet its existence is still just a spec of time in the history of the universe. Second, the term "footprint" is also used to describe our "mark" and what we leave behind, what we've achieved. This may be humanity's greatest achievement in terms of interaction with the rest of the universe. Third, it ties in nicely with the elements of space travel in Le Petit Prince as well.

7. SYNC TEST W. LITTLE PRINCE: Tests for the soon to be released sync of Ephemeral with the 1979 claymation version of The Little Prince by Will Vinton. Like all my records, I wrote this record to sync with a film in the same way Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon syncs with The Wizard Of Oz.

8. FREDERICTON FENCE, WAYNE COYNE INTRO FOR THE RECORD AND OTHER FIELD RECORDINGS: I spent the past four years making field recordings for the record on my iPhone from recording weird fence noises to the quote from Wayne that the record begins with.

9. SORRY GAME CARD: One in a series of images to correlate with each song on the record. This is for the song "I Am Sorry."

10. SGT PEPPER - WADTL: A visual that I still haven't completed from the last record where I replace all the characters on The Beatles' classic record Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with the 300 or so people who individually played on [2011's] We're All Dying to Live and, like everything on my desktop, it's a reminder of an idea that's left unfinished.

(PS. My current desktop background is a beautiful painting by the former Haligonian artist Laura Dawe.)

Rich Aucoin, Ephemeral (Bonsound)
September 9
http://richaucoin.ca