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Rain Antidotes

When spring doesn't spring, try Vancouver's Abernethy and Ed Askew.

Adrian Mack 15 May 2008TheTyee.ca

Adrian Mack writes regularly about music for The Tyee.

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Weather-friendly oddball.

One of the best albums to come out of Vancouver last year was Abernethy's romantically sick College Grove. Sounding like it emerged from the fever dream of a consumptive poet, College Grove has been a personal 3 a.m. favourite throughout the unremitting wet and cold of winter '07, although the deceptive, uncharacteristic buoyancy of opening track "Astronaut" is what initially dragged me in. Hopefully it'll do the same for you, assuming you're not already living with Joe Abernethy's bracingly downbeat musical vision.

Abernethy is also the man behind Vancouver micro-label Spinning Gold Records, and he recently contacted me to announce the impending release (in June) of the album Rainy Day Songs, by a character named Ed Askew.

And who the hell is Ed Askew?

Curiously enough, Abernethy's e-mail came precisely one day after I scored a copy of The Acid Archives, which is the expanded, hard-copy version of this website. (Acid Archives is a marvellous starting-point if you're intent on immersing yourself in obscure, regional, psychedelic, folk, acid, outsider and heavy rock music from the '60s and '70s, along with a few other marginalized genres visible only to nerds and their special glasses.)

And bless synchronicity, but there, on page 20 of the Archives, is an entry on Ed Askew's 1968 debut, Ask the Unicorn. It reads, "The songs are odd enough (and good enough) to keep the listener's interest despite the sparse arrangements... Askew has a bizarre sense of romanticism that fits his street poet mentality... this is really one of the best albums of its type, and is recommended highly to fans of loner folk and oddball singer-songwriters."

Are you a fan of loner folk and oddball singer-songwriters? Me too!

After graduating from Yale art school in 1966, Askew recorded two albums for the mercurial ESP label in New York. The second, called Little Eyes, was shelved until its belated release on vinyl in 2003.

Askew continued to make music, however, eventually graduating from tiple to piano (the tiple is a notoriously challenging 10- to 12-string thing, which, as Askew lore has it, contributed to the quality of his early work due to the physical endurance it required, and the resulting strain expressed through his voice).

His homemade tapes have been circulating among collectors ever since, but Rainy Day Songs will mark his third official release in 42 years, and Spinning Gold is offering a very tantalizing preview.

It takes roughly 14 seconds for "Blue Eyed Baby" to deliver the first of its deep, perfectly paced shivers, when Askew breaks from one of his typically circular patterns of dappled and painterly piano to exclaim, "Look at them eyes...."

Let's take it as further occasion of synchronicity that Mr. Askew's strange tale should now include a co-ordinate here in Rain City, via an album called Rainy Day Songs. Which is not to diminish the mysterious beauty of "Blue Eyed Baby," of course. Askew's odd and beguiling muse would cast its spell under any circumstance, and in any weather.

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