The New LoFi

Ten Years
Mixtapes
Merch
Menu
×


Rich Aucoin

 

I just stumbled across this album yesterday and spent a good part of my night researching who Rich Aucoin was. First off, it’s incredible to me that Rich and his 2011 album “We’re All Dying To Live” hasn’t gotten more press. Hype Machine has a handful of tracks from him, typically with only 20-50 likes. Mind blowing!

As I dug around for more info, very little surfaced but what I found was interesting. Apparently Rich, a Halifax-native has some 7,000 Facebook fans, has been touring in France lately and spends many many hours syncing music to films. He also just won a Prism Prize and $5,000 for his “Brian Wilson is A.L.I.V.E” video, beating out Arcade Fire, Drake and Grimes. A few other tidbits of info surfaced too, like the fact that he toured in support of his first EP “Personal Publication” on a bicycle around Canada while fundraising for Childhood Cancer Canada. Did I mention Personal Publication synchs up to Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas? One of the most interesting things I found was he recorded Personal Publication on his own, then recorded his follow up LP with 500 musicians including multiple choirs. Talk about taking a step in a new direction. Which leads me to the point of this post.

We’re All Dying To Live was written to sync up to a film made from 40 individual films in the public domain. Apparently Rich cut together the 40 films and placed them into Pro Tools where the music was written to correspond lyrically, thematically and percussively with his newly spliced film. The process took 1 year to write / cut-up, 1 year to record and 1 year to edit. The end result? A monumental musical scrapbook about making big life decisions and how to live life. It’s orchestral arrangements, electronic undertones and rich vocals pick up where bands like Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, I’m from Barcelona, The Flaming Lips, Spiritualized and The Polyphonic Spree left off. From what I’ve read, he comes with a traveling party / circus live show that shouldn’t be missed.

You can pick up the vinyl from Sonic Records. Keep an eye out for Rich Aucoin and his motivational karaoke circus – I think we’ll be hearing more from him in the next few years.