12 bit Blues, Birthdays, The Birth of Vinyl Vaudeville

Hello Everyone! 

First of all! I wanted to thank you for your continued support here on Patreon! It's been such a wonderful trip connecting with you here and also in real life at the shows now that things are starting touring is starting to happen again!

Anyhow! Turns out that today is the 10th anniversary of the release of the 12 bit Blues Album! Thank you to my patron, Yoshi for reminding me of this fact!  

Wow, time flies, I remember this launch like it was yesterday but I thought I'd share some pics taken around the time of the launch.  

The fisheye studio picture above was taken by my friend Paul Labonté. He wrote the liner notes on the Short Attention Span Theatre DVD and was also travelling with us documenting the tours for many years!

If you look closely you can see he's standing on the ladder in the mirror! This was my studio circa 2012 and it was located in what used to be a small neighbourhood hardware store. 

Here are some never before seen photos from that era. I found some pictures of us working on building things prior to the release of the album and the Vinyl Vaudeville Tour. Here's Louisa and Corinne building some of the oversized puppets for the tour.

For one of the acts, I wanted to make the stage look a little like a theatrical recording studio. So I thought it would be fun to have a vocal booth with a recording engineer shaking his head in the control room. Here's Louisa posing with the recording engineer puppet.

Those of you with the Nufonia Must Fall book, may recognize him as the studio engineer from page 108 (on the left) when the robot rents out a studio to record his love song and burns it on a CD.

Here's Louisa again building some other puppets. You can also see the vocal booth window prop behind the light.

Here Louisa is working on the Nufonia robot puppet who would make a cameo in the Vinyl Vaudeville show. To the left of her, puppet builder Deborah Sullivan is working on one of the giant number puppets that we would use for one of the choruses for 8 bit blues during the show. 

There was also an oversized version of the cardboard gramophone kit which came with the original pressing of the 12 bit album. The vaudeville dancers (Adira, Maresa and Jessi) would assemble this gramophone on stage for one of the numbers!

Corinne (on the right) is working on the Negatron puppet. Another character who dates back to the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome comic book. He also made a cameo in the Vinyl Vaudeville show. Meanwhile Louisa is stitching something on the robot's head. 

Louisa is painting the monosynth puppet which would appear in the show when we performed the track '6 bit Blues'. To the left you see a map that we used in the show during choreography of '8 bit Blues'.

All the props were designed to fit into the touring cases. In fact, the touring case it self was used as part of the staging for the Vinyl Vaudeville show. We would lay it on it's side and store all the puppets for the different acts in it. Adira, Jessi and Maresa would also operate the puppets from behind the case at times. Here you see the monosynth as well as the studio prop for the stage. Behold! A giant volume knob that one of the puppets would turn up during the crescendo/climax of the track.

Vinyl Vaudeville would go through many iterations throughout the years. I believe we are on Version 8 now, maybe?? who's counting?? LOL. One day I'll do a post about the evolution of Vinyl Vaudeville throughout the tours. But that's for another time. Today, to celebrate the 12 bit birthday, we'll just focus on where it started... Just a bunch of friends working away in a little hardware store in Montreal. 

Thanks for reading/listening! And thank you for your support!

E