. : : March 20thth, 2012 : : .
The Omaha, Nebraska music scene seems to be particularly incestuous (in the best way possible).
The 2000’s saw an explosion of talent from the scene, including Azure Ray, Cursive, Bright Eyes, The Faint, and many others. If you are a fan of more than one or two of them, you were likely to see a familiar face or three among the groups, especially when touring.
It’s far from uncommon for members of the particular scene to be members in two, three, even four other local bands. It’s equally common to see love and support between the bands; they’re often rep’ing other musician’s albums during interviews, online social media posts, and — more often than not — bringing them on tour.
So it wasn’t surprising when Tim Kasher, front-man for both Cursive and The Good Life (not to mention his ever-expanding solo body of work), brought along Conduits in the opening slot for a Cursive North American tour in 2012. Conduits were signed to Team Love, a indie record label started by his buddy Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes’ fame, and the band featured The Good Life percussionist, Roger Lewis.
This recording took place in Buffalo, New York. My best friend and I took a road trip to see Cursive, and Mohawk Palace proved to be a great venue when we travelled there in year’s past. The 9-years since have erased most of my memories of Conduits’ performance, so it’s been interesting and a little surreal to go back and listen to this tape. We’re about to cross the 260-recordings that have been made available on the blog and there have been numerous shows that weren’t recorded mixed in there. With that in mind, I guess it’s bound a few of them slipped between the mental cracks.
That’s not to say it was reflective of the band or the quality of this tape.
Rather, it has more to do with the fact that the band was pretty new at the time: Their self-titled LP had dropped only ten days earlier, and streaming services weren’t really a big thing back then. Putting together an accurate set list for the info file and/or blog required real leg work and attention. Like many of the recordings surfacing from the dust bins of my archives, I didn’t give it them time needed to get to that stage, and it was set aside after tracking and EQ’ing.
As with the similarly abandoned projects, I always intended to get back and finish it up … but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
Unfortunately, it looks like the band hasn’t been too active since touring the album. BandsInTown shows a single show performed in 2019, and their social media hasn’t seen much activity since 2013.
Like a few of the other tapes, though, I’ve decided to go back and tweak my original EQ job and give it a bit more long-deserved love. Hopefully the increase in sound fidelity will justify the ridiculously long wait for this tape to see the light of day.
[info.txt // FLAC Fingerprint] … [ ZIP MP3 Link ]
