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We Are Augustines Chapel Song

 

Honestly, I’ve been out of the loop for the last month. I haven’t looked for, found or gotten into anything new because I’ve been working my butt off and have had zero time to scour the music blogosphere for fresh sounds. Luckily for me (and all of you), my friend Winnie sends me these great “check these out” text messages. Without a doubt, her suggestions are always something that I end up really loving. One of her most recent texts said “we are augustines, song – chapel song. you heard it?” The answer was no, I never hear of the band and I never heard the song, which brings me to my next point.

There are so many ways for us to discover new music online. Sometimes I wonder to myself, why keep up with this blogging thing? Do people actually care about my opinion and/or what I’m listening to? After all, who the fuck I am to be giving you suggestions on what to listen to?

The New Lo-Fi started out as a way for two friends to share music with each other. That was it. J-Oats and I used to share a desk / office at work. As we clicked away, pushing pixels all day, we would say to each other “check this band out” “listen to this remix” “look what I just found”. Eventually we decided that in addition to sharing our musical findings with each other, we would share them with our friends as well; a little coding later and The New LoFi was born. Then J-Oats left and found a new job. Duecher! But the New Lo-Fi continued to be a place for us to keep each other up to date with things on each others radar.

The time of “the old lo-fi” was when music was listened to on reel to reel, 8-tracks, vinyl albums, 45s and mix tapes on cassettes, etc. To make a long story short, The New Lo-Fi was and is a technically enhanced way for a few friends to do what people have been doing for decades. A la Greg and Marsha Brady style we’re saying “come over to my place, I just got a few new records you have to hear”. Yes, that was back in time, even historical by todays standards but it’s still relevant.

Fast forward to 2011 (pun intended) and today we have all sorts of means by which to discover new music. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge fan of services like shufflr.fm, pandora, rdio, etc for the convenience. It’s easy to put on, pick your mood or to select “bands that sound like this”, and get some background music. There’s something very impersonal about it though. In line with that, I recently sent the new Ghostly Discover / Play feature to a colleague of mine. His response was really interesting

“This algorithmic music recommendation stuff treats music like a liquid commodity that you can custom-order. You CAN do that, no question but picture having that kind of a thing for recommending real, true, good friends? A database and variables and sliders and recommendations for friends. Isn’t that reductive and cheap and a misguided way to think of friendship?

Can you picture a fan of, i don’t know, the beatles, saying she loves the beatles because they’re at the exact points x, y, and z on these linear variables that describe their music? It’s absurd. Ghostly’s fine for background music of a certain style, but that’s just texture. If i get into something, I want it to feel unique and like it’s a thing of it’s own. It’s the same as the differences between acquaintances and friends, if you know what i mean?

I know the argument then is that the algorithmic recommenders are just sample platters where you get exposed to stuff you might want to get deeper into, but i don’t buy that. There’s this weird impersonal dehumanizing sociopathic speed-dating quality to it. I don’t care for at all.”

So I guess my point is, the NEW lo-fi is a nod to “the old lo-fi”. We’re aiming to keep this thing real, on the level and human. We are real people suggesting music to other real people; music that sounds good to our ears and makes us feel an emotion of some kind. Music, that in the end, is still made by humans for humans.

Wow, I just really went on a tangent?! The point of this post was to say: what up bitches!? Check out We Are Augustines “Chapel Song”. Thank you my human friend Winnie for passing this track over to me. I’ll pass it along to my other human friends and maybe they will do the same . . .

Cheers,

D-Hall

PS. Here is a little about We Are Augustines from Bad Fotography (edit 4/14)

We Are Augustines rose from the ashes of Pela, a band who’ve shared the stage with the likes of Sonic Youth and The Faming Lips and broke up in 2009. Now armed with the production genius of Dave Newfeld (Broken Social Scene), Billy McCarthy and Eric Sanderson unveil the first video from their upcoming album Rise Ye Sunken Ships.