https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/leonard-cohen-advice-young-songwriters

So it's officially the end of 2020's "halcyon days" - i.e. a week past the winter solstice - and you find an old CD-R of an old band you were in back in the day. But now you're stuck in a pandemic, and in a mad scientist frame of mind, so here's what to (re)order from Amazon...

1) Must Be the Day
2) Dover
3) Hyena
4) Road Weary
5) Halcyone

**[EDIT: "Fan of Yours" from 2005 has since been moved to a separate track for this playlist]

So these recordings originally were done for a 5-song demo from a couple studio sessions that the short-lived Campbell River band "Halcyon Days" recorded in Nanaimo BC at Island Pacific Studios with Joel Spillette in 1999. 
Also the track order was switched to put the intro to the song "Hyena" in the middle, including the excerpt from the 1980 psychological thriller "Altered States" (which has something to do with floatation tanks, mad scientists, and Faust freaks!). 

Here's the full quote for context... 

EDDIE JESSUP: "What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist God per se. It is the Self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth."

EMILY JESSUP: "What the hell is not religious about that? You've simply replaced God with the Original Self."

EDDIE JESSUP: "Yes, but we've localized it. Now I know where the Self is. It's in our own minds. It's a form of human energy. Our atoms are six billion years old. We've got six billion years of memory in our minds. Memory is energy! It doesn't disappear — it's still in there. There's a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be; and I'm telling you it's in the goddamned limbic system."

MASON PARRISH: "You're a whacko!"

EDDIE JESSUP: "What's whacko about it, Mason? I'm a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get? Everybody's looking for their true selves. We're all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God, we've got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life....Well, I think that that true self, that original self, that first self is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate. And I'm going to find the fucker."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Altered_States

*NOTE: the original studio recordings from 1999 were "remixed" later in the year as part of a audio design course for BCIT's New Media Design program. Samples of Tom Waits' "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today" from 1994's "Bone Machine" and the opening water sounds to PInk Floyd's 1987 reunion album "A Momentary Lapse of Reason". The British Navy sound effects were from a disc of BBC audio clips available to BCIT New Media students.

** All songs written and performed by Joel Flynn, Derek Lee, Ryan Pollock, and Matt Wilson of the band Halcyon Days, 1998-2005

*** And what the hell's is with the rain stick at the beggining? :) Okay, it happened to have arrived in the studio that day and we kinda threw it on there for a lark, but also because the song had a bit of a water/floaty thing going on. We always assumed we could take it out later, but since we were the last band to record reel-to-reel at Island Pacific, we had to go back to get the tapes. When I went back to pick the tapes up in September of '99 before starting classes at BCIT, they'd gotten lost in the shuffle of replacing the analog recording system with a brand one (MOTU, I think). So that was that... HOWEVER... the reason I did the sound design sampling experiment in class with these recordings was to lessen the rain stick's effect by way of sampled water sounds from Pink Floyd. I think I got an "A" in the class... i dunno...  it was a long long time ago! :)

Halcyon Days 1999 – "The Floatation Tank Demos" - a BCIT New Media Design project

OLD ADVENTURES IN LO-FI... 

Next to a small little cobblestone street on the edge of Vancouver's Gastown used to be a bunch of rehearsal spaces for local bands, with all the aesthetics, trappings, and varmints of a set from David Fincher's Fight Club. Matt Wilson, the ex-bassist from from late 90s Campbell River rock band halcyon days had a shared room here with his other band and in late 2008 suggested to former bandmates Joel Flynn (vocals, acoustic guitar) and Derek Lee (drums) to come on by and make use of the space. After the sudden passing of Flynn's father in December of that year, the ex-Riverite singer needed some music to work through the situation. He recruited two other ex-Riverites, his nephew Luke Schuss on guitar and Erin Lahay on piano/keyboards. 

To honour the infamous old singing fisherman - Flynn's father Doug, who had moved on to Fiddler's Green - the five-piece put together a bunch of mostly Irish-themed songs to play at a St. Patrick's Day memorial at the Media Club. The nameless group continued to get together and learn songs, some new originals and holdovers from the halcyon days era, but mostly just a bunch of cover songs that were fun to play. Borrowing Flynn's nom-de-plume of that he used for his digital media art experiments, the band played one other show at the Media Club in July of 2009, but never did anything else outside the walls and microphones of, ahem, "Cobblestone Road Studios". 

Of course, "studios" is saying a bit much, as it is basically a 15'x15' room with some randomly placed microphones. These consisted of either a Rode Podcaster or an iPod nano with a Belkin stereo mic attachment, which were later thrown together into multitrack Garageband projects. Yet this bare minimal approach did the lo-fi job and the Campbell River collective continued to play away in the space until it was closed down in early 2010. Some informal recording took place during this time, but was more note-taking and reference material for the band members than anything else. 

Later in the year, while backing up all these recordings to a new hard drive, Flynn ended up losing most of them when the brand new drive crashed within a  week (damn you LaCie!). File recovery software couldn't identify the Garageband files, and the old "throw the drive in the freezer" last resort couldn't get the drive spinning. The still nameless band never ended up finding another full rehearsal space, or play another show as a full band, while the lost Garageband recordings are still sitting unrecoverable on the busted LaCie (with the eye-catching design by Porsche). 

FAST FORWARD: While rummaging through discs, drives, and other piled up office stuff in early 2011, Flynn came across an old recovery disc from the busted LaCie drive. On it were some raw and rough mp3s taken during the group's rehearsals in 2009 that he gave a listen. With Erin now on a two-year 'round the world adventure, and the rest of the band still in limbo with other projects and a lack of a regular rehearsal space, Flynn decided to collect and coordinate some of these lo-fi recordings through a SoundCloud page, which has now been repurposed for Podstream Studio's uses.

Promotion Is The Key To Success: newmusicplaylisting@gmail.com

Halcyon Days 1999 – "The Floatation Tank Demos" - a BCIT New Media Design project

Podstream Studios