Balmoral Drive profile picture

Balmoral Drive

About Me

Balmoral Drive is influenced by all sounds big and small. A self-professed culture junky, he ravenously bites into the bones of his surroundings and breathes out the secret fragile treasures that he's found along the way.
He has been writing songs for a little more than a decade and capturing most of the results using instruments and devices ranging from primitive to sophisticated. He approaches music like a child approaches a sheet of bubble-wrap, preferring to learn more through experience and experimentation than theories and analysis.
In words, he has been through moments of sarcasm, simplicity, vulnerability, illusion, self-pity, love, sex, death and taxation. He sings with cautious optimism and venomous cynicism touching on points in between for good measure.
His companion of choice for performance is a guitar. As his Grade 5 report card and his resumé have stated, he plays and works well independently and with others. He does not shy away from anything or anyone that makes noise, believing in the granola-esque notion of community.
He will play music until the day he dies.
On good first impressions:
"Who is this Eros of a man, gracing the fetid halls of Honey Martin with his godliness?"
-- Electric Ant, co-pilot of The Siamese Libertines radio show on www.cjlo.com (Thursday Nights from 8pm - 10pm EST)
"When I first met Balmoral Drive, I had to ask myself 'Is this man diamond-encrusted?'. The answer is sadly "no". Those are potato chips"
-- Raeanne, co-pilot of the Siamese Libertines radio show on www.cjlo.com (Thursday Nights from 8pm - 10pm EST)
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My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 13/05/2005
Band Members: Denis
Vocals
Guitar
Assorted white noise...
Influences: Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Wilco, Nirvana, Flaming Lips, Beck, Silversun Pickups, Massive Attack, Girl + The Machine, Interpol, Bloc Party, Thelonius Monk, Arcade Fire, George Carlin, A Tribe Called Quest, Jeff Buckley, The White Stripes, Stereolab, Bob Marley, Foo Fighters, Jurassic 5, Death From Above 1979, controller.controller, Iron and Wine, Portishead, The Dears, Queens of the Stone Age, Johnny Cash, Cinematic Orchestra, James Brown, Soul Coughing, Granddaddy, M83, The Dandy Warhols, King Tubby, Blonde Redhead, Ambulance Ltd., Guided by Voices, Blur, Talking Heads, DJ Shadow, Arab Strap, The Stills, Eels, Charles Mingus, The Beatles, Public Enemy, John Lee Hooker, Archive, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Bill Hicks, The Mars Volta, Coldplay, Slint, Bob Dylan, Blonde Redhead, Bjork, Yo La Tengo, The Rapture, Big Sugar, Outkast, Champion, Jay Z, Big Sugar, The Strokes, Ani DiFranco, Maceo Parker, Sigur Ros, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death Cab For Cutie, Wolf Parade, Feist, Metric, Neutral Milk Hotel, Ben Folds Five, Pavement, Leftfield, NIN, The Clash, Broken Social Scene, Brian Eno, Cat Power, The Beach Boys, R.L. Burnside, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Buck 65, Erykah Badu, Modest Mouse, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Mogwai, Muse, Lee Perry, Miles Davis, Moneen, Sleater Kinney, Led Zepplin, Stars, The Beta Band, The Eva Stones, The Postal Service, mr. Gnome, Gang of Four, Patrick Watson, TV on the Radio, Malajube, My Morning Jacket...
Sounds Like: A eulogy filtered through a cigarette.
Record Label: Tucker Records
Type of Label: Indie

My Blog

To all my friends in the T Dot

Hey kids,If you're in the Toronto area on Friday the 13th (just your luck!), I'm playing at Ciao Edie at 489 College Street.  It's gonna be more fun than 40 barrels of guacamole!My good friends G...
Posted by on Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:38:00 GMT

A tone. Atone. Autumn.

It's been a while.  I've had a strange and wonderful trip lately and I feel the need to share with you...I moved.  Not really far away (not that it makes a difference here), but it's still a...
Posted by on Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:19:00 GMT

Monday Night @ Crescent Street Pub!!!

Since the Events section is under some mystery maintenance for the next undeterminable period of time, I just want to blog you all and let cha know that I'll be playing a show tomorrow night, Monday J...
Posted by on Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:27:00 GMT

The Yawn of Fresh Air

We just lost the bars to the squares. I quote Eddie Izzard: "No smoking in bars...and soon no drinking and no talking." What the fuck is that?  I understand that smoking is an unhealthy habit ...
Posted by on Sat, 17 Jun 2006 15:35:00 GMT

Your Ego Has a Hitlist

It's dangerous to mistake sensitivity with a fragile ego.  So many people claim to have the former when they are really afflicted with the latter. This intricacy in the human spirit is only real...
Posted by on Mon, 08 May 2006 21:52:00 GMT

Lovesong Letdown

I'm tired of hearing songs about how beautiful and special people are to the person singing.  It's tacky and typical, and if these songs had any substance then they wouldn't be on the radio. ...
Posted by on Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:33:00 GMT

Fittingly, when the pressure was too much...

It happened on Friday night... I noticed a slight lean to the back and to the left.  I drove home, feeling slightly off balance, bumps taken on the bone rather than on the meat. I parked and as...
Posted by on Sun, 26 Feb 2006 11:52:00 GMT

Three Months

Here's something I wrote exactly three months ago today after something wonderful and strange happened to me...actually, it shook me 'till I went *TILT*.  I haven't been the same since... The Pr...
Posted by on Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:14:00 GMT

Appetite

Fifty/fifty.  I'm split exactly in half like the temperature on the moon, where the side lit by the sun is over-hot and the dark side is frozen solid. We are tied together on a bungee cord, ru...
Posted by on Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:33:00 GMT

blink blink

I talked a lot today, but depth-wise, I wasn't touching the bottom of the pool. "Bliss...bliss on tap." Thousand yard stare. Hydraulic pressure relief. ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss...
Posted by on Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:26:00 GMT