Hello everyone,
‘Tis the hunker-down season. Unless you’re conspicuously taken by the beauties of winter, these coming months are about remaining sanely indoors. At the home of Brown and Dickson, we’re busy working on our home office, arranging years worth of neglected files and boxes. We love this kind of work, as all you need to do is put on some rad 80s music playlist and get to work, organizing the paper trail of living into something that resembles coherence. Perhaps this is the whole point of indoor winter projects. Make a small claim on the future by improving some tiny bit of your life, while making sense of the year that is blessedly over. Our year is represented by a bookbus in our driveway and PILES of boxes in our basement. It’s a beautiful sight.
While we’ve been doing this work we’ve been digging deep into the music of the Numero Group, a reissue label out of Chicago that releases forgotten gems from the byways of vinyl bins. These are the antiquarian treasure hunters of the record world. They drive around America buying up reel-to-reels of regional labels and personal collections, reissuing them in well researched and remastered records. One of our favourites is made up of recordings from restaurants, casinos, lobbies, and cocktail bar lounges of late-night amateur singer/songwriters lost (sometimes fairly) to the mists of time. Numero’s liner notes are full of day trips to off-road America, where would-be superstars laid down a few tracks in a local recording studio, unexpectedly capturing lightening in a bottle. We feel this urge. In our dreams we are driving around in our bookbus from town to town finding those arcane expressions of rural life. There are treasures out there still to be found.
Jason turns 47 this year so perhaps it is time that he becomes obsessed with vinyl reissues. Next come tight jeans, a leather jacket and BLAZING white orthopedic shoes. Passions should not be mocked, however, just the results of passion. And it looks like we can get used to him coming out of the office proclaiming, “Did you know that there was a mail-order mystic from California who made records meant to teach you the occult secrets of ambient music? There’s a whole record of these songs. Imma gonna get it!” No one in our house cares as much as he does. But he’s so cute when he cares too. So why mock him? The gap in life must be filled with SOMETHING, doesn’t it? At least it’s not an e-bike. As the bloom of the warmer Canadian months drain into a sunless, bleached Death Metal cover out our window, it’s good that the time has come to find strange and fulfilling things, some of which, suitably, are in this week’s New Arrivals email.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
