The Barking Bird series of albums is an experiment in autonomous recording that’s the result of a project that took nearly half a century to complete.
Sometime in the mid-1960’s in a distant (from other a lot of other places) city called Winnipeg a teenager who would eventually, and through no fault of his own, come to be called Roldo set out on his personal journey. This included playing music, as was natural enough for the son of a jazz drummer and a tap dancer who’d met in vaudeville, and he soon drifted into the burgeoning folk scene of church basement coffee-houses and middle-of-the-night psychedelic jam sessions. He flirted, briefly, with the Rock scene, joining an electric ensemble, but found that he felt more comfortable in the more casual company of the acoustic world.
At this time he played a little bit of guitar and a fair bit of blues harp, and soon found a steady gig with a local jug band. There he added jug, kazoo, and washboard to his accomplishments. As time flowed gently on, he discovered other forms of music and other instruments. He also discovered that he could not hear a new musical sound but that he was seized by a powerful desire to have the instrument that made it so that he might make it too. He was in love with sound.
Years kept on passing. He kept on playing. New sounds kept being heard. New instruments keep being added. New people with their influences – and influences without people – kept him moving along. By the early ‘70’s he was writing songs and playing in a fairly consistent regular band, which he considered a perfectly sound reason collect more instruments. And he did.
Around this time he began to get an idea. Recording techniques were evolving apace and home recording devices were becoming available. “What if”, he thought, “I was to record my songs using multi-track recording so I could add my instruments? It would be like painting with sound! “
This inspired him to accelerate his instrument collecting. Anything that could be strummed, plucked, blown, bowed, beaten, shaken, rattled or rolled was welcome at “Roldo’s Home For Aged And Infirm Musical Instruments”, as his various abodes came to be known.
Now he had a goal. All he had to do was wait for home recording equipment to develop and meanwhile he could add more instruments, write more songs, explore new musical genres.
And he did. The 20th century ended. While reaching for his toothbrush one morning he noticed a strange gray-bearded, bald-headed wrinkle-wrought face in the mirror.
But it was done. The Benevolent Tao, or perhaps some stochastic serendipity, had arranged his trip so that as the new Century and the New Millennium began, he and his instruments had a house which he more or less owned and a 32 track digital recording machine that he’d been given the loan of and he had recorded almost every song he’d ever written. He had learned, with only the most minimal kicking and screaming, to use a computer well enough to tweak the recordings in post-production.
The songs themselves are eclectic and diverse. A jig here, some electric rock there, a jug band tune followed by some Indian jugalbandi, fiddles and banjos play a somehow Chinese melody, a Bulbul Tarang celebrates Emperor Norton.
Nor are the lyrics secondary to the music. They’re carefully crafted and considered, and some have even called them poetic. And now it’s time to offer these songs to anyone who might want to hear them.
So here is the first of the Rarking Bird collection. Enjoy.
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