The New Brunswick Music Awards were handed out online last week, despite last minute challenges posed by the Moncton region’s two-week orange phase, which ended Friday.
Big winners included Saint John’s Joey Comeau and the Crooked Teeth, and indie-folk trio Les Hay Babies, who each took home three awards.
Local talent Jon McKiel was also recognized with a win, in the solo-recording category.
But McKiel’s winning album Bobby Joe Hope is not quite solo, because it features eerie contributions from a stranger who once sold McKiel a reel-to-reel recorder online.
Here’s the story, as told by Jesse Locke on Bandcamp Daily:
In 2015, cult Canadian indie-rocker Jon McKiel purchased a Teac A-2340 reel-to-reel recorder from a stranger online. After setting up the machine, he discovered one of the 30 tapes it came with contained recordings made by a previous owner. These included snippets of single instruments, vocals, and one nearly fully formed song. Four years later, McKiel teamed up with producer Jay Crocker (Constellation Records’ experimental electronic artist JOYFULTALK) to transfer all the material they could excavate from the reels to a hard drive. McKiel then chopped the sounds into 10-second loops, and used those samples as a foundation for a series of eerie, psychedelic pop songs. The project was credited to a character who was partially McKiel, and partially the stranger who sold him the machine: Bobby Joe Hope.
Bobby Joe Hope is available from You’ve Changed Records.
Hear Mourning Dove, from Bobby Joe Hope, here:
