Wendyfix M/F / Clarion

Release Preview

About

In the earliest days of Wendyfix, extended, minimalist winter jams were the order of the day, partly out of necessity. These were not virtuosic players; Chicago’s cold turned band practice into hibernation. Their first live set consisted entirely of a single twenty-minute cover of New Order’s Temptation.

Here, that approach serves both sides of the original lineup’s early personality: the tense, terse, arm’s-length side (“M/F”) and the optimistic-enough-to-switch-on-the-chorus-pedal side (“Clarion”).

This is the quiet, raw sound of three teenagers placing bets on what they thought was supposed to come next.

Artist Bio

In the early to mid 90s I was attending university in Chicago and consuming music voraciously.  My friends and I all djed at our college’s (Northwestern) radio station WNUR.  My freshman year I was doing a jazz, rock and freeform show.  I remember one day a week worked out where I was doing shows from 5am to 10am, and then again from 1-4pm and then 7-10pm!  Not sure how I did it.

By sophomore year I wanted to contribute more.  My two flatmates and I decided to form a band.  It was named wendyfix after a local high school tennis star.  I played drums….with the children’s drum kit I got when I was around 10 years old.   I had started taking drum lessons when I was 8 after banging on the couch one too many times listening to my brother’s lp copy of Rush “Permanent Waves”.

Wendyfix existed for about 3 years until graduation.  My junior year I also started playing drums in a band called Remy with two other WNUR music obsessives.  And by my senior year I was also drumming in a band with my girlfriend at the time called Not Without My Daughter.  Busy times!

After graduation I wandered around trying to figure out what to do.  I lived in New York and Chicago each for a year.  I worked in record shops (Reckless in Chicago, Kim’s West in New York). I PA’ed on TV commercials. I obtained a post graduate degree studying popular music with Simon Frith in Glasgow in the late 90s.

The idea of starting a record label periodically would enter my mind.  But I kept telling myself that my tastes were always changing too fast to do that.  I thought record labels had to have a “sound”.  And I didn’t want my brain to feel stuck in a certain genre.

That changed when I moved back to New York from Glasgow in late 1998 though.  I was working at the now defunct shop Etherea in the East Village.  A bunch of us who worked there created an experimental electronic night at Brownies called Invisible Cities.  We had Wednesday nights from 11-4am.

At first we thought we’d just be djing, but there were so many folks looking to play that couldn’t find a spot, we eventually started having a “live” laptop set every week.  This was at a time when performing with a laptop computer was becoming possible for the first time.

I met so many interesting musicians through this experience that I decided that it was finally a good time to start a record label.  And Carpark was born!

Experimental electronic music seems a far cry from the introspective indie rock of Wendyfix and Remy but it all made sense to me.  Anyway one of the things I learned running Carpark was that I didn’t have to stick with a certain sound.  So after doing the electronic thing with Carpark for a few years I started branching out and now just put out whatever I think sounds good/interesting etc.

A year or two ago I thought it would be a good idea to dust off the half inch tapes and make this music available again.  Hope you enjoy!