New Album: Cascadian Diaspora: Completed For RPM Challenge 2009
Rubaboo has just completed their follow-up to the Amor de Cosmos In
Lotusland EP:
Cascadian Diaspora
:their entry into the 2009 RPM Challenge and their third album of
recorded music in a year! Rubaboo’s debut recording project Realistic
Barnyard Friends, an organic, lazily conceptual psych-folk operetta
about revolting chickens rising up against a tyrannical farmer, was
completed in February 2008 as part of the annual RPM Challenge, in
which musicians attempt to record an entire album during the short
month of February.
Cascadian Diaspora finds the artists this time split apart by the
Rocky Mountain Trench, with half the band daydreaming in their hazy
Victoria Lotusland, and the other half shit-kickin’ roughnecks in
Calgary chinooks (nah, more like We’t Coast hippies searching for home
on the oilpatch at the commencement of the “Second Great Depression.”)
A pastiche of melancholy + wistful sentiment: a faded photo album,
perhaps, evoking dusty memories of a vaguely sad past: memories worth
preserving for their therapeutic value, yet tempered by punctuations
of sunny optimism and a reverence for love and human connection.
Quiet, lo-fi, mellow, moody psych-folk songs seamlessly bleed into
gently-cacophonous ambient raw-emotion infused sound art collage
dreamscapes as the artists traverse the Continental Divide. Cascadian
Diaspora is perhaps a search for love, friendship, understanding, and
sunshine, in the face of loneliness, madness, depression, the ennui of
postmodern existence, geography, economy, history… it recognizes the
beauty in imperfection, and celebrates every ray of light while
engulfed in darkness. Cascadian Diaspora is [perhaps]
[a] [languid contemplation over life’s mores whilst sharing warm
herbal tea with a thoughtful friend, snug indoors on a rainy winter
afternoon]
[b] [a heartbreakingly loving embrace from a long-forgotten relative
at a funeral]
[c] [a sepia-toned snapshot of an abandoned rural whistle stop
overtaken by weeds, a site, you romantically muse, haunted by ghosts
of the Industrial Age]
[d] [a page of a Golden Age comic ripped out and set upon a dry
prairie wind, rolling through ditch-beds of dusted chamomile in the
hot morning sun]
[f] [a shadowy belladonna delusion drowned by Seroquel, recalled and
expressed in a blue-hued oil painting during an absinth binge]
[g] [an oasis: green space, a park: sheltering urbanites (temporarily,
semi-effectively) from the din of the surrounding metropolis: a
beautiful cedar grove bruised by the detritus of consumer culture: a
mushroom growing on a discarded banana peel]
[h] [homemade art: folk art with avant-garde sensibilities informing
genuine, soul(-ful or –wrenching) expression: a document of human
feelings, situated within its natural context of place and time in our
culture and history]
1. Po' Boy (Living on the Dole)
2. The Hermitage
3. Searching the Badlands
4. King James Revisited
5. Camping On A Clearcut
6. Last Call For Seroquel
7. Wild Hose Country (Scared & Lonely)
8. You Too Can Draw Maps on a Napkin
9. Trickster’s Mask Of Wisdom
10. A Bemused Hipster-Indie Outfit
11. Happiness is Sunshine