There is artful music and musical art. The Famines, a minimalist noise duo from Edmonton, playing in Halifax this week, will make liner-note junkies very happy, with the release of their cassette tape (yes tape), which comes accompanied by a pocket-sized 268-page black-and-white book, tucked into a paper sleeve. The cassette-shaped publication exhaustively documents the minutia from the day of the recording, July 14, 2008, including equipment choices, maps, lyrics and even fingerprints of all involved. The book was designed by singer-guitarist Raymond E. Biesinger, who runs The Belgravian Press. Buy a tiny piece of art and recording history, May 18 at Reflections, and again on May 19 at Gus’ Pub. Ten bucks.
Biesinger sent us some thoughts from the road.
Q: One of the things that I miss now that I get a lot of music digitally is the amount of time spent looking at liner notes. I love that you've gone to the extreme to document this day. What was your motivation in creating such an extreme version of the liner notes?
Well, the initial recording was by an Edmonton arts weekly three days before our first show, done in a single very off-the-cuff session. With a few microphones, much sweat and not much time. It's a rough beast, and upon hearing it we knew that although it wasn't a studio record—it was very much a document of a time and place, showing the blemishes and scrapes that the band had at the time. It wore the date heavily. And I'd just started publishing and making books at the time, and I knew that through the Belgravian Press we could make a visual and textual parallel to that document, to fortify the context. I'll admit, as an amateur historian, that kind of thing turns me on, as did (as a graphic artist) the challenge of inventing a new package format for cassettes.
Q: Are you guys usually list makers?
Not Garrett (Heath Kruger, drummer), but I am. I think he enjoys the thrill of forgetting things. By, that, I mean he's exciting to be re-surprised by things later.
The cassette tape is also a visually pleasing object-why did you decide to distribute on tape? Was it more of a music or a design decision?
If a person has a screw driver in hand, all he or she sees are loose screws. When a band stumbles upon a Copyette cassette-dubbing machine and a source for inexpensive cassettes, all it can see are limited-edition cassette releases.
Q: Was The Belgravian Press developed with music in mind, or how do you pick your publishing projects?
I hate to get into economics, but what's magic about the Press is that it deals with all parts of making books, from printing to binding to trimming, and by doing that it can keep per-book costs low. That lets me follow my whims, do short print runs, and have little regard for what sells and what doesn't. And certainly, three out of four BP books are music-related right now, but I'd very much like to expand into more visual art and non-fiction. Hopefully, too, I'll quit being selfish and publish more things that have nothing to do with the Famines and I.
