May 1, 2009
The Little Playmate presents 20 Reasons
In a former life I used to run a zine called The Little Playmate. It lasted all of 5 or 6 issues, but I was able to satisfy the Jack Black record store asshole in me by curating and releasing a CD compilation of Michigan based bands through the zine in one of the final issues.
Click to listen to Redlined “Dealing With Rejection”
It was quite a chore, as some of the songs had to be taken from cassette and transfered to digital (not such an easy task in 1999) like the Redlined track above, mastered to sound right with the digital recordings of most of the bands, and burned to disc (on a 2x burner = 20 minutes per).
Click to listen to Elemental Groove “Statica”
Everything was worth it though, as I did get to meet quite a few fantastic people, like Joe (aka Elemental Groove) who ended up being my suitemate in the dorms at EMU the next year.
Click to listen to Lurch “The Grave of Bella Lugosi”
We even ended up having a release show for it, featuring an over-the-top dark metal band that didn’t even have anything to do with the release. Heh. Yeah, the Michigan Theatre’s manager decided that a cd release show should get this band called Lucifer’s Hammer on the bill because they’d ben bugging him for a show for a long time. Anyhow, the show went off, without many people at it, because the same manager also decided that it had to be on prom night for the local high school during the early evening (6pm doors). So, the event was a dreadful failure compared to what it could have been, but we did get to pair Lurch (listen above) and Circuitree (another electronic project of the old suitemate) with said black metal band, which left the night being one of the few shows I can recall that had all completely different genres performing (and no, I don’t count things like twee-pop and indie-pop as different genres).
Anyhow, I’m rambling on about the past maybe a little too much. Instead, just check out the compilation in it’s entirety, with all high quality mp3 files. It’s a doozy of a zip file (129Mb), but I swear it’s worth it.