Today we rejoin a story in progress: the birth of Touching Earth Made Of Steel. Where we last left it the amazing New Spring Line was left in tear stained tatters. Bassist / drum programmer Andy Cant decided to pick up stakes and join a highly suspect agriculture-based cult. The cult was based out of Rainbow Glen Farm in a secret location somewhere in southwestern Ontario (they've since relocated; all efforts to track them down for comment on this article have met with failure). Ostensibly the purpose of the organization was to teach city folk how to survive a limited nuclear exchange by growing turnips and killing (if not raising) goats. This sounds fairly innocuous but when I dropped Andy off at the farm the barbed wire and armed sentry towers made me think that something else was going on.
He doesn't like to talk about the experience, but I have gleaned a few essential facts from him in the intervening years. First, he alternated between sleeping in a chicken coop and a hole that he dug in the ground for nicer nights. Second, after the chickens mysteriously died in one night he was forced, in punishment, to hatch the eggs they left behind, by laying on them 23 hours a day. He employed certain far-eastern techniques to distribute his weight and remain perfectly still, and had numerous visions during the ordeal. Third, he believes he was implanted with some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion that will enable the leader of the cult - a man known only as "Father" - to summon him back to the farm for some nefarious purpose or other. We are always playing the game of "guess the trigger word" but we haven't gotten it yet. Whenever the phone rings at Andy's house late at night he breaks into a cold sweat.
Fortunately, though, the time in the cult was short-lived. Andy's wife and I arranged an intervention whereby we infiltrated the compound, spirited him away, bound inside a pig carcass, and spent a month deprogramming him completely. Today he cannot grow any turnips at all. With him back in our nation's capital the three of us got to thinking that it was time to get back on the musical horse (primarily motivated by its therapeutic value, according to several noted psychologists). So we convened, tentatively at first, in my attic studio, and began wanking around. Soon enough we had the basis of a song, but as it turned out - and in spite of the fact that it was still just three of us, same as always - we had formed an entirely new band, doing something altogether different.
Next time - the origin of the name!
