Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A Completist's Guide to Ex Libris Webcasts

Periodically over the last few years, my sitting room and rehearsal spaces have been privy to friends and label-mates visiting with records, live performances and lots of entertaining rambles about their thoughts on music.  



It was an excellent way to spend an evening.  People would jump in and perform live acoustic versions of their own songs, interspersed with offerings from a track listing of the host's choice.  Invariably things would become more ramshackle and distracted as the night progressed; most notably Elodie's cake tasting and discussion forum that you can hear at the start of Part 2 of her entry.

Naturally it was my duty to record these evenings using high gain field recording equipment, and they are now all up online here.  Alternatively, peruse below:






















In a gross act of Getting Distracted By Things I Probably Shouldn't, I found myself drawn to the original live recordings that were sprinkled throughout the webcasts.  A compilation began to emerge, strengthened by material from other sources of acoustic, unplugged displays of speech and song from the Libris stable.

Before I knew it, I had fallen into the giant, completist hole of arranging an Imperfect Document.  A great deal of time was spent researching the dates of when certain performances took place, and where. There should be lots of tasteful crossfades, as well as consistent metadata.

Behold then, the first Libris release in over four years:  a collection of outstanding moments that fill a virtual disc which will long outlast the patience of the listener.  Get clicking below: