Ready, Set, Go.

Tomorrow afternoon, WP leaves the comfy confines of our prairie Canadian abodes for a short string of festivals and shows in UK cities we haven’t made it to quite yet. In preparation, the focus has not stayed on booking the necessary train tickets or filling the gaps left in accommodations. No, instead, it has been the far more important act of filling up one’s iPod touch that has taken up much of this last-minute panic zone.

Just added: Scout Niblett’s This Fool Can Die Now, Quasi’s Field Studies and Featuring “Birds”, Stereolab’s Sound-Dust, and The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. These join Coeur de Pirate’s Coeur de Pirate, Do Make Say Think’s You, You’re a History in Dust, and John Cale’s Paris 1919. I’ve been figuring out a perfect time and place to listen to some of these records. Am I alone in thinking Scout Niblett’s simply perfect for an Icelandic sunset? (On second thought — scratch that. The sun doesn’t set in Iceland this time of year. Drat).

Anyway, there’s also a little record on this here iPod we’ve been working on for quite some time now titled Die Stadt Muzikanten. We’ve tweaked the mixes and mastered the mastering. It sounds just about as big as we’d hoped it would, and there’s a few more surprises in store for its release, which we’re prepping ourselves for in January of 2010. We’re at the final round of making sure it’s all good to go, affectionately referred to as “the part where Mark travels somewhere and listens to it 1,000 times, finally ends up either liking it or just getting sick of it, and then most likely never really listens to it ever again” stage.

But at least there’ll be distraction. A small bit of recording is on the table in London-towne in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully we’ll have something to share with you on that soon. Until then, here’s a little recording we did in a Dublin hotel room this past May. It’s a song called ‘So Hold’, a version of which will appear on an upcoming split EP with our friend Chris Smith. All of the rooms in this hotel had a name, some of which were awesome (Vampyre, for just one example), except for the one in which we recorded this (which just so happened to be the one in which I slept) called Faerie Star. The chorus comes in a little off-the-rails, but that’s OK — we were probably just laughing about the name of the room.

• So Hold (Dublin Hotel Room)