At various points in a life one realizes how many times they actually do something. Sounds cryptic but consider this: how much time is spent having to sit on transit to and from a job or an institute of learning, you’ll be astounded at the time it adds up. I keep thinking of those quirky science articles about how much of our life is spent doing something like blinking or as trivial as that.

With listening to or writing music, it’s obvious this has hungrily chomped out a huge, lovely portion of my life. Not a complaint in the slightest and the time consumed is obvious. However, I’ve realized in the last year how much time I’ve spent listening to some records, like Labradford’s “A Stable Reference” without even knowing it. It’s not a hype record, it wasn’t notable or a cult record as far as historical music press (or press at the time) was concerned. The band had a few releases on the Kranky Records label mainly throughout the 1990s and then trickling into the 2000s. Musically, the record is relatively isolated from the body of music that I regularily listen to but at the same time is quite representative. A lazy description of this record scrawled out by myself would likely state “The dronier end of Dead Can Dance and Brian Eno meets Ennio Morrocone” or something like that. Single note passages of arpeggiated eighth notes of an interlocked guitar and bass creating more sound from the dense cavernous reverb than the actual source sound of the strings vibrating themselves, only to be meet with the large gap of floating through a textured void before the same passage starts again. On top of this would be the warm humming of analogue synth strings and organs creating some sort of chordal mass of sound in the high shelves around these chiming passages. Somewhere in the distance someone is singing or talking, you can’t really tell, let alone understand what the voice is saying.

Back in the days when my more youthful mind focused on amassing some sort of cumbersome yet coveted record collection, I’d singled this one out a couple of years after it’s initial release — released in 1996, purchased sometime in 1998. Put the black slab on the turntable. Ok… pleasant but whatever. I’d get in the habit of taping all of these records onto cassette for use in a mechanically troubled cassette-playing walkman. I still refused to buy a “discman”… too fucking unreliable.

Anyway, the real light was shed on this long player of an album was three hours into red-eye drive from Vancouver to Calgary in June 1998. The band I was in at the time had a show in Calgary that required a twelve hour drive to get there. As some of the band members had to work the night before the show, we got excited about the romance of leaving Vancouver in the cover of late night/early morning and driving through the sunrise and all through the day to get there. The intial few hours of the drive we were all excited with the trip; the buzz of being on the road. The following hours we all one by one nodded off to sleep except for myself who had volunteered to take next shift at the wheel of the van. As everyone else was “sawing logs” in the back, the highway left the small town at the far eastern end of the detritus of Vancouver’s satellite cities called Hope and started to climb up into the vast expanse of unsettled mountains to reach the high plateaus of central British Columbia. Evening out through the long, winding inclines of the road I could see the morning sun starting to tint the edges of the sky. The reality of the lack of sleep of an all-nighter came to me and I needed some music to mask the drone of the road but not wake up the others in the back.

I had brought some cassettes, one being “A Stable Reference” taped off the LP. The first track, a concrete drone number went un-noticed under the noise of the van’s humming engine, and then when the first passages of “El Lago” kicked in, it all started to make sense…

LABRADFORD “El Lago” (1996)