Listen to Ev's remix of "Stranger to the Blade," one of the stranger songs on Aquarius.
This one goes out to Paul and Nadine from Radio K!
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Listen to the Aquarius LP as one massive mp3!
A veritable monolith of tunage from the 90s.
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AQUARIUS was released in 1999 by The New Fidelity Records, yes.
It is now presented here as one monolithic MP3 for your listening pleasure.
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Exclamation point poster
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cufflinks and plectrum.
This album began as the follow-up to the Steel Shank Bidding War EP of 1996, which was produced by Matt Wilson of Trip Shakespeare, and "released" on BrittleStars, a small label out of Washington, D.C., run by my former Whippoorwill bandmate, Will Eastman, who now runs the U Street Music Hall in DC. It ended up as something else.
I loved working with Matt Wilson on the Steel Shank record, and honestly he had done us an huge favor by even giving us the time of day to produce us, but his time was tight, and I felt like I had a zillion songs that I wanted to recordtion. So we looked elsewhere to record the next group of songs. Mike Wisti at Albatross Studios was finishing up Lifter Puller Half Dead and Dynamite at the time we entered his basement recording facility. He was charging ten bucks an hour and we had thousands of hours to burn, or at least I did.
I had felt so constrained by the 5 song limit of the Bidding War EP that I insisted on laying down basic tracks for 21 songs. This was insanity. I did not take into consideration that an album would only be 10 or 11 songs, and how long all of this was going to take. Recording on a one-inch 8-track analog reel to reel tape, we spent hundreds of hours just waiting for the tape to rewind! In the end, it ended up taking long enough that our bassist--PAV, who leads the band Two Harbors these days-- was able to quit the band for two years and return in time to play the CD release show, by which time we had changed the band name to The Spring Collection.
There is an unreleased EP by The Spring Collection which should see the light of day at some point. But for now, this will have to do. What you have here is 14 of those 21 songs. Fifty-two minutes and seventeen seconds of my soul, digitized to a lossy format. Plus the Ev remix.
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