Here's a single from Sudbury prog-rock family band The Birthday Cakes. We recorded and mixed three songs over a sweaty summer weekend at 6 Nassau right before the studio was shuttered.
These kind and humble words from the Clayton Drake sum things up far better than I could -
At the start of this summer, my brothers Carter and Cameron decided they wanted to record some new music with The Birthday Cakes. It had been six years since we'd released anything, and we had amassed around 20 unreleased songs. Through the patented Drake process of constant argument, we decided on three songs to record.
After some deliberation, we settled on A. David MacKinnon as our engineer and recorded it at his (how defunct) 6 Nassau studio in Toronto. Dave's patience, diverse musical vocabulary, and try-anything attitude made him the perfect engineer for the Birthday Cakes. We recorded these songs live off the floor, which embedded the life and spirit of the band into the songs.
I've been mixing these songs with Dave since the summer, and I can say with complete confidence that this is the best-sounding music I've released in my entire "career" as a musician. I hope you appreciate the detail, nuance and passion in these songs as we release them in the upcoming months.
I'd like to thank Matti Lehtelä for his hard work on the artwork for the trading cards that we created to accompany the release of the song. I feel like we really captured the spirit of the Birthday Cakes with the cards, and the song isn't complete without the cards.
I'd also like to thank Brain Tape for agreeing to release the songs even though they're not on a traditional cassette. This label is working hard to capture the current wave of music that is passing over the city, and I think their discography will ultimately be a potent snapshot of an extremely fruitful creative period for Sudbury music.
The Birthday Cakes is the purest expression of my creative impulses, and our music could only be generated by an insane devotion to our craft. My brothers Cameron and Carter have been the ultimate creative partners over the past decade of our band's existence, working with open hearts and blunt honesty to create something far better collectively than any of us could ever manage as individuals.
Streaming below is Hologram, which is the first song of a trilogy that will be released in the upcoming months on a series of six trading cards. I hope you like it! If you do, please consider buying the trading card Booster Pack #1 from the Merch section on our bandcamp. It will arrive eventually.
The Birthday Cakes will never die.