In the beginning...

If you've stumbled upon this little corner of the internet there's an excellent chance you knew what you were looking for. However! If you were looking for pornography and somehow ended up here by chance and would like to get oriented this post is for you.

Where did Touching Earth Made Of Steel Come From?
Touching Earth Made Of Steel began in 2004 I think? Something like that. I worked at Agriculture Canada at the time, and there met a dude named Jordan Himelfarb (one third of saidthegramophone - a music blog you might wish to check out) who was playing a show with his band The Cay at good old Bumpers on Bank Street in Ottawa. "No glitz, no glamour, just good times and good friends" was their slogan. Sure. Anyway, I performed under the moniker "Babies Don't Race" and did a droney atonal remix of The Cay's album with a computer and some synthesizers. It was not exactly a hit with the audience. However, when I was done a guy who'd been watching, whom I knew casually from the local record store, helped me pack up my stuff and then asked me if I had any interest in maybe playing with him and his friend sometime. For some unknown reason I said yes, and actually meant it. That guy was one Andy Cant.

Editor's Note
If you play music at all, if you even whistle a tune from time to time, someone whom you don't really know will eventually say to you: hey man, we should jam sometime. This is such a frequent occurrence that it must actually work more than one could ever realize. There are grave consequences if you accept these types of offers. The likely outcome: sitting around a junky basement "jamming" with some shady guys in too-tight shirts who won't look you in the eye. For the uninitiated, jamming of this type in fact amounts to someone playing a musical part that they pretend is "just something I made up" (really they've been imagining serenading beautiful women with the riff for months, the fantasy growing more detailed and intoxicating as time elapses) and everyone else not really paying attention and playing solos. It's awesome.

So I soon found myself in Andy's living room with him and his pal Brian Martin. Brian barely said a word. Since I'd been recruited on the strength of my electronic "music" I had brought a pair of Korg MS-10 synthesizers with me, paying no mind to the fact that I couldn't play two synthesizers at once. We screwed around for what seemed an eternity and made horrible music. Then I went home.

The strange part, though, is that some time shortly thereafter we did it again (this time I brought a guitar). And then again. And suddenly we were a band, of sorts. We were called The New Spring Line, and changed our name with the seasons. I played guitar (which I am barely capably of actually playing) as minimally as possible, Brian played guitar (which he can play, thank god), and Andy played bass (which he insists he cannot play, but the facts suggest a different conclusion) and programmed a crappy drum machine. No one sang.

Thanks to the endless pity of show promoters we managed to play a few shows, and I honestly have no idea if we were any good. Our friends and family were excellent actors. Nonetheless we had fun, and amassed something like a hundred bucks for pizza, as memory serves. But then disaster struck! Andy joined a cult.

In our next episode we will reveal the shocking conclusion!

- Jeremy