Mark Harrington
Very polished songwriting craft from this Canadian, Mark Harrington. Always presented in a very professional manner, Harrington’s music was similarly crisp and direct. Solid, but not baroque production values, combined with a folk rock approach that oft times got pop.
In 1988, I was attending York University (for Visual Art) in Toronto. I had recently begun writing songs, and had crudely recorded an ‘album’ on cassette (on a beat-box with one live overdub). Shortly after, I met a fellow art student who was creating a ‘label’ (even though he and a friend represented the entire talent roster). He invited me to re-record my cassette on a 4-track cassette unit. A year later, I found myself starting my own ‘label’ with a friend: Toronto Experimental Artists . We gladly embraced cheap consumer instruments, such as a ‘toy’ Casio keyboard.
In the couple of years following, I traded some tapes with other students at the university whom I knew. The tapes I was most interested in were actually music, though some were noise experiments under the moniker of ‘industrial music’. What comes to mind is how different the approaches were that we were using to get and end result. Also, we all spent such care and attention to the packaging of our tapes. Fast forward to 1993, when I was exposed to a fanzine (I still have it somewhere) that either directly mentioned Don Campau, or had his name on a list of would-be tape recipients. So, I sent off my Capricorn Flakes CD (of earlier that year), and I had become part of something much larger!
