Cabinet Pin, college radio, Mirror review, data recovery

A few things to report…We submitted a track for a compilation cd just last week and now it’s available on the net. Cabinet Pin is a non-label that puts out a CD of songs made on the 20th day of each month. The comps are distributed to everyone who contributes a track and posted to the Cabinet Pin website. Brave Radar has a few songs on earlier 20ths from before I was in the band. Some of these are available in the Cabinet Pin archives and a few ended up on Conor’s earlier cds in revised form.

This time round, Cabinet Pin put together a 2007 comp not on the 20th. You can listen to the entire CD as mp3s here. Or download a zip file with choose-your-own album art at the same link. We finished our track very last minute (sneaking out during a party at our apartment to send it off) so the mixing job is rushed and will be amended if we do anything else with the song. But! Fun time putting it together, and now we get to hear what everyone else threw into the circle.

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At the end of November, we did some cd mailouts for our latest release, Distracting Strangers. Our dear friend Mitz used to be station manager at the Uni of Lethbridge radio station and he helped us send 30 or so CDs to college and community radio stations in Canada. A list of mailing addresses is available here.

These stations report to earshot who collects the charts and posts them weekly for each station as well as collecting them into a weekly top 50 and monthly top 50 and top 200. The college monthly top 50 is published in the back of Exclaim magazine.

We’ve been getting some nice radio play in Edmonton, Windsor, Halifax, Lethbridge, Laval, and Prince George (not that I’m keeping track). And charted on a few college stations’ weeklies, as well as the earshot top 50 for one week!

In Australia, where our distribution is handled by Conor’s dad, we’ve apparently been played a bunch on fbi, which Conor says is good.

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This week we got our very first album review for Distracting Strangers in the Montreal Mirror:

“Who knew you could be twee and noisy, pop and sketchy, simultaneously? From Sydney, Australia, and Halifax, respectively, Montreal-based Conor Prendergast and Tessa Smith deliver a debut album that jingles and jangles and feeds back politely over a three-minute outro. If only because it heightens the Velvet Underground texture of their guitars, the old-school, dirt-cheap recording techniques serve the duo well. His soft vocals lead the way on most tracks, while her clipped, girlish stylings, not unlike Julie Doiron, top a few and otherwise harmonize. Whether this will lead to more fully formed work remains to be seen.” - 7/10 (Lorraine Carpenter)

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In other news, after spilling tea on our computer a few days ago and fearing the worst for the 30-odd tracks we’ve started for our next album, everything appears to be working fine again. Let it dry for 16 hours and then turn it back on. That is our advice. Also, back up your hard drive (as everyone says after they almost lose all their data).