A Spectre Is Haunting Europe

Hello and thanks to all of you who’ve pre-ordered the vinyl edition of our latest LP Embers. We appreciate that you’ve been waiting for a little while, but we haven’t forgotten you – there have just been some changes in the world of vinyl (e.g., it’s not possible to press a record in Canada anymore, so we have to negotiate a deal with an international plant) that have delayed the production of this artefact.

& as you know, the whole album (like all of our albums and singles) is available for FREE on Last.fm or Reverbnation (as 128 kbps MP3s – see the links in the sidebar). That’s not changing. If you’re just fine with the free downloads, then we’re just fine with that. Go ahead and take them. We’re still trying to get enough money to get the vinyl pressed, however. Remember, the vinyl edition will only come to fruition if our fans help make it happen. We need to pre-sell 100 copies to make this work. To date, we’ve sold 5. No hype, all transparency here. 5 records.

So if you really want the vinyl and know other people who might want it too, refer them to this page, or the merch page on this blog. You will only ever be able to buy this album directly from us – not through iTunes, not through CDBaby, Amazon, or anything else like that. And it will be a limited edition release (only 300 copies will ever be pressed).

As part of our commitment to you we intend to keep you updated with how close we’re getting to our goal of 100 records pre-ordered. Stay tuned to our Twitter presence (@asihe) to keep this on your radar!

And, as promised, if we don’t make the 100 mark we will refund everyone’s money and call it a day. But let’s give this record one more gigantic push. OK?

-A Spectre Is Haunting Europe

To preorder, click the secure Paypal button below:

Sorry to bear bad news, but our show in Abbotsford this Saturday has been canceled by the promoters. We hope to get out there soon!

In the meantime, we’ll be adding more and more new features to this site, aggregating in media and your comments and input from all over the web. Stay tuned!

And also – we’re heading into the studio again this month, as we’ve got a bunch of new material we need to record before Ciaran heads off to Japan.

Yep, we’re @asihe if you didn’t already know. Follow our breakfast cereal consumption and commentary there. Individual band members on twitter are also: @jeanh, @LumenSecond, and more to come…also check out the cute little widget to the right (below the Reverbnation widget) which contains all of our fucking tweets.

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe is back in the business of playing shows, it appears. So there are two chances in August to check us out live, as per:

Mon Aug 3 – Vancouver – The Cobalt (917 Main), w/Stiff Valentine, Vancouver Killing Spree

Sat Aug 8 – Abbotsford – Matsqui Community Hall (33676 St.Olaf Avenue), w/Lillix (ALL AGES SHOW)

See ya there! More to come!

For those interested in our latest album, please hold the phone while we go about remastering the ten tracks. They’re pretty quiet as they are, and much of the density is not being brought to life with the raw mixes. We promise to make these tracks sound as good and as loud as possible.

And for those interested in keeping the unmastered tracks for posterity, download them while you still can. Within a week everything will be nudged, tweaked, and gain-boosted to “acceptable modern standards for popular music”.

crap sound, false starts, (but the live streaming worked! straight out of the pocket!), fun times:

The final track recounts a badly damaged festival environment, put on by an overbearing and delusional CEO of a small tech startup, demonstrating labour exploitation in the high tech sector since its early 2000s deregulation in British Columbia, a crucial factor in our local tech/social media boom over the past several years. However, as this is poetry or theatre of a sort, the license to exaggerate has been also fully exploited. Here developers sign contracts in blood, get actual strings attached to their fingers so that their keystrokes will not deviate from what their bosses and clients desire, and are eventually cannibalized in front of their children, invited for a special Saturday ‘hot dog day’ in the plaza outside the commercial high rise.

With that we bring you “BBQMS“, the tenth and final track, concluding the album Embers with the full-on Arrival of Late Capital, washing ashore with its Colonial overtones in Act One, rapidly dehumanizing and hyperindividuating through Act Two, and eventually eating its own means of production, workers, or tail. Don’t say we didn’t give a fair, accurate and timely account of the utter demise of Western Techno-capital. Hope you have enjoyed the party.

The social media divide rhetorical styles and common understandings as much as they mash us together into the same stylesheet. Here we have an example of dialogue gone wrong at the edge of the chasm, an argument going nowhere, as no one is listening. Instead we are diverging, multiplying, becoming dialectic, polar, weird to each other. And with this comes apathy. Depressing, isn’t it?

Track 9 from Embers, “Arts and Entertainment“.

…and the logjam of higher education breaks, recalling an ennui of gargantuan proportions. Besieged by youthful desperation on one side, and blank faced bureaucracy on the other, you better take it in your hand before you lose control, or get trampled under the Airstream Trailers of God parked outside the community college campus…

Track 8 from Embers, “Remote Controls“.

Hey,

We’re playing our first live show since 2006 at the New Balmoral in Vancouver on Dec 5th, 2008. Here’s the Facebook event. Here’s the Last.fm event. Here’s a map. & when you go and take picture of the show, please tag them on Flickr with this: “lastfm:event=838633″.

This will be an exciting show for us – our 1st show performing the new material from Embers, and the 1st show with the new lineup. Nicely, things are coming together very rapidly these days!

See you there! We’ll have records and buttons for sale! Priced to clear, at Depression-era prices!

ASIHE live @ Balmoral Dec 5th