The Long story :

It all Started July 24th 1967 at Mt Sinai Hospital in Toronto Canada. Where I was born to my parents John and Lorraine. Both artists. I have fond memories of growing up hanging out in their art studios at our home (Google map) North of Toronto in the country. My mother studied piano in her youth, eventually teaching to raise tuition fees and attend Art College where she met my father. So I suppose this is where I got the music bug. My dad is the genuine article he can’t stop drawing. He carries a pad and pen wherever he is, and one of my most favorite things to do is watch him draw. He can draw anything. All you have to do is ask him. I don’t have his drawing gene, but I attribute the creative facets of my brain to him. I just apply everything I learned growing up through all those experimental art projects of his, to my music.  My Mom’s piano was always there in our house. I remember always playing 4ths on the low notes because it sounded more Rock n’ Roll to me. She started teaching me at an early age when she realized I had an interest in music. Apparently I figured out how to play “The last Rights” on a bugle we had after hearing it in a movie sound track.
Fast forward a few years, my dad realized I was more interested in electronic instruments and I remember him taking me to our local music shop to rent the first Synthesizer I would lay hands on. I don’t remember the model but it was a Yamaha, it was not polyphonic and there were a zillion knobs on it. (If I still had it today, it would be worth a small fortune). He wanted me to make up a sound track for an art movie he was making at the time. So it was ok that I couldn’t get the thing to make any resemblance of anything musical. He always encouraged me to just fiddle. I was probably no older than 10. I lost interest in it because it could only play 1 note at a time. Eventually I think around the age of 12 I convinced my mom that if they would just get me an electric guitar I’d stick with it. I did, and drove them absolutely nuts with all the noise! By now technology was starting to get better. There were drum machines, sequencers, 4-track recorders, and you didn’t have to own a Fairlight to get polyphony. I didn’t know it at the time but all this “fiddling” would lay down the foundation for what I would end up doing in music much later in my life.
After a devastating car crash I found myself recuperating on Salt Spring Island many years later. Getting re-acquainted with my past love of “fiddling” I built my first recording studio in 1991. Seal’s first album fascinated and inspired me and I think you can still hear some of that in what I’m doing today. All those hours spent honing my craft daily would pay off 6 years later when I met Gordon Fordyce. He helped me get my ideas more focused and taught me some more of the fundamentals in audio recording. We worked together for 4 years developing another artist for whom I wrote all the music. I made the mistake of putting all my eggs in this basket & putting my own career on hold. When the artist eventually flaked out on us I was devastated. I gave up and took a break. For more than a year I didn’t even touch an instrument. I can’t thank the group of friends I had in Whistler back then enough for being relentless in introducing me to my now good friend Sean Horne. Sean is a gifted visual artist and had recently given up his day job to pursue motion graphics. He’s the only person on the planet I’ve met so far that speaks the same language as me, we have this artistic connection; he sees it, I hear it. We somehow understand what the other is talking about. He was persistent in getting me to collaborate with him. And I thank him for that, who knows I might not have ever come back to music if he hadn’t been.
The first thing we ever worked on was only discussed over the phone. I never saw what he was working on. Sean just went through his storyboard idea & timeline cues. Later when we put the 2 pieces together (his video, my sound track) it fit! I don’t think we even needed to make any edits to the scene changes and how they lined up musically and visually. This blew us both away and led to many more projects.
After these projects, I had all this new music left over. Some of it had been on TV, some in promotional DVD’s, websites, TV and radio commercials and I wanted to do something with it. This is around the time my wife Nancy brought home Moby’s “Play” popped it into the stereo and said you should do something like this! I had never heard anything like it before. It opened doors for me creatively by breaking down the barriers of popular music formulas. I never considered myself a singer. I always expressed myself through my instruments and now Moby made all that ok. He didn’t sing either; he just used vocal samples most of the time. I thought, “I can do that”.  So it was during this time I started work on what would become “Timecode”.
The name “MRDC” comes from Martin Richmond Dot Com. I was referring to my website using the acronym explaining my ideas & the new album with a good friend (Dan Iosch) and He said you know, that’s kinda cool you should just call yourself that.
The process I went through for the first album was completely different from the second. For Plethora I had to come up with new ideas as opposed to remixing and restructuring songs I had. I wanted to make something really fast and Electronic. Something I hadn’t done before. There is not as much guitar on the album. More time was spent making synth’s do things I’d never heard them do. Morphing sounds between tracks and finally I had to say ok done. I’d spent over a year and recorded about 15 songs for it, then choosing the 10 that made the album and assembling it. After Plethora I took some time away to be with my family. It was nice to just take some time and learn new things.  A couple years of soundtracks, TV music, commercials and it was time to start thinking about a new MRDC album. My original idea was to call it “Living Rooms”, because I wanted to make an album of music that you’d play in your living space. Kind of like the soundtrack for your lifestyle. I continued this idea for quite a wile until I realized that I don’t really like to be constrained to one idea or set of parameters. There were songs I had recorded that I really liked and did not fit this mold. So I recently decided to call it “Infomusication” and include some other songs that did not fit the old idea. It has political overtones intertwined with my Electronic experiments. There are plenty of guitar tracks and part of its creative process is similar to Timecode because some of the songs I had already written from film projects etc. This album feels more like I’ve gone back to what started MRDC back before the millennium. I hope you like it; I can’t say for sure how long it will be before I record a new MRDC album because you know, “I hate parameters”.
On all 3 albums and all my work I play all the instruments. MRDC is more of an approach to creating music. It doesn’t matter what the instrument being played is. I would say I am most accomplished as a guitar player, but for me that does not mean I’m going to do an instrumental guitar album because I find those boring. I enjoy doing things that are abnormal and experimental in music, and this is also my approach to recording, mixing and mastering to get the MRDC sound. Try it, hear something, tweak it, make it work. My songs usually start with a sound or a riff over a groove. Then they morph as I start to hear how other parts would fit in. They all take on a direction of their own as they are created, I’ve never written anything I liked by setting out to write something specific. I doubt I ever will. I invite you to come inside my site and have a listen to my latest work “ Infomusication”, and please do leave a comment. Its always interesting for me to read how my music is received.

Thanks,

Martin Richmond [ MRDC ]