I Like Mike

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I heart Record of the Week Club. The latest brainchild from producer/musician Mike Petkau, ROTWC has been putting up fascinating song creations for the past nine weeks. This week's hit my inbox just after 4am featuring an unlikely and stunning collaboration between Tele's Matt Worobec, Anthem Red's Jo Snyder, and D.Rangers' Jaxon Haldane. I started my morning with the fantastically melancholic but upbeat ditty complete with gypsy guitar, harmonium, epic electric guitar, and Snyder and Worobec singing in ways I've never heard from them before.

Petkau's project creates threeway collaborations by artists handpicked from a pile of self-submissions. They gather together on a Wednesday night -- unaware of who they'll be playing with until they arrive -- working with Petkau to create a track that's composed, recorded, mixed, and distributed in one night. 

Petkau's been great and putting together surprising threesomes. There've been classical violinists, roots singers, funk DJs, electronic artists, jazz drummers, indie popsters, rock singers and more in lots of different combinations. Some of them work brilliantly, some of them could use a little more refining, but that's part of the point. Or at least for me it is, as a listener. I feel like a voyeur watching a secret creative moment.  I can't imagine what it's like in the room with these people every week and how some of these songs came about. Petkau thankfully offers brief weekly descriptions of the process, which is interesting, and promises a future video of the sessions.

The project has seven more weeks, which makes me a little sad. I enjoy waking up every Thursday morning to some unexpected piece of music and seeing various Manitoba acts challenging themselves to do something completely different. So here's hoping that Petkau's happy with his utter lack of sleep and continues the project.

You can read a bit about Petkau, who is also working on about 40,000 other projects simultaneously, in the summer issue of the MARIA newsletter. Click here to download the PDF, which is about 7.47MB.

Meanwhile, go to the ROTWC website and preview nine weeks of music. You can buy tracks for $0.99 -- some of the proceeds are going to help rebuild the WECC. Do it now. I've had this week's on repeat for over an hour.

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