Direct from the bunkered underground of CKXU Lethbridge, Italian Edition's Official Tour Communique:

And so it begins... burning wreckage on the Rocky Mountains... bike rides through the wilderness of downtown Kelowna... keytar escapades in the tourist trenches of Banff... and finally our first show in Calgary, Alberta. We played with some intense outfits on Canada Day, resisting the blistering heat with the wicked pop of Adam Power, the rocking tunes of Calm Asa Coma, metal onslaughts from Open Eyes Elysia, and a hardcore finale courtesy of From the New. All of these bands tore the stage to shreds, leaving the small community hall in Banff Trail a sliver of its former self, and we are so excited to go away from a kick-off show with such passion in the air.

A stop over in Medicine Hat followed up by tonight's gig in Lethbridge brings us up to a total of three shows... out of thirty plus! The insanity as yet to take its real hold, but we've been keeping ourselves from the depths of madness by way of constant distraction: snapping photos and video (check it out on the website!), shining the van with our sweaty forearms (no grease like elbow grease), and critiquing the colour of Smitty's eggs. We're also recording new material when we can, so that perhaps we'll have some new creations to show off by the end of our carousing through the wilderness of Canuck-land.

Our next stop is Regina (we're playing on Friday at O'Hanlon's and The Club on Sunday) before heading off for Thunder Bay on the eighth of July (at the Black Pirates Pub). More news is on the way... who knows if we'll escape from Lethbridge in one piece?

Ominously yours,
-Jack Edition

This is just a little reminder to all of you folks out there over 19 that we're not only playing but organizing a fundraiser show for this friday, November 30th.
The deal is, for those of you that aren't hip to what's going on, that we put on a show, get as many people as we can to come and with the money record our new album, which will then be released back to you, for free, on the world-wide-web.

The line-up might be a little up in the air at the moment (Mt. Crushmore is no longer with us), but this might just mean that everyone else gets to play a longer set.

Who: Italian Edition with guests.
Where: Sugar nightclub (858 Yates st.)
When: Friday November 30th
Why: Because we are so, so broke.
How Much: $5 advance/$7 at the door.

We'd really love to see your shining face in the crowd. Basically, if you're a fan of our music this is the most direct way that you can help us give back to you - both live and recorded.

See you Friday.

Love,

IE

Yes, we're playing today in Vancouver at The Bourbon. It'll be us, 16mm and Oakalla. We're on first at 9pm. Hopefully we'll see some of our Vancouver friends and fans lining the stage with their beautiul smiles.

Word to your mother.

-Dave/IE

Captain's Log: Stardate 21-17.  After poring over the documents provided by the Ferengi, I can only assume that the crew of the SS G-UNIT suffered a major breakdown following their launch into hyperspace.  The records made out by the ship's doctor allude to large amounts of physical bruising, narcisistic madness, substance abuse, and absurd facial hair anomalies.  One can only imagine the hell that formed on board during those ten short days.  The full text follows.

Sept. 9/07

We've officially embarked on our first attempt at crossing the Rockies. Our first gig is in Lethbridge and despite our various degrees of experience with touring I think we're all really excited. I've never even been to the Prairies before – you'd think that in nineteen years I would've made some kind of effort to see one of the most breathtakingly vast parts of our country – but hey, we're all busy right?

Other than the trepidation and excitement that the unknown provides, I think the band is just happy to be out of our summer ruts – which for all of us was almost exclusively full-time work, and for a few of us also involved a steady amount of partying and substance abuse – which in turn meant a steady amount of brain damage.

We caught the 7 o'clock ferry today – meaning I was up at five. Jack slept on the floor in my room, and the other members arrived by cab at half-past. We woke up in the dark, and as we race away from the sun we will almost certainly stop in the dark as well. Watching the sun rise over the Saanich Peninsula as we raced towards the ferry was more than welcome. I suppose it's nice to compare one's efforts to the inevitability of something like the movement of the planets. The significance of insignificance and shit like that.

The ferry ride consisted of politics over our maps and organic oatmeal – uneventful I guess. Matt didn't get a chance to sleep because of work – he's still asleep in the back of the van with rosy cheeks and endearingly tousled hair. He's also blissfully unaware of our difficulty in finding Highway 1.

I'm not sure why, but every time we get off the ferry we immediately get lost in the maze of highways signs and farmland that is Delta and Surrey. I guess us small-town boys just get flustered with all the cars and people and endless pavement.

Anway, I suppose I should wrap up this little essay for now – we're still mired in the city – and concentrate on navigation. We have a long day of driving ahead of us and a whole province to tackle.

Sept. 10/07

Well, we tackled a province. We found our way out of Van at ten o'clock and finally checked into our motel in Calgary at around one in the morning Calgary time. Before I talk about the drive though, I have to talk about the motel while it's still fresh in my memory. Our motel was that breed of Super 8 where even the parking lot was pocked and stained. The room was clean on the surface, but everything in it – from the seals around the bathroom fixtures, to the bedspread, to the curtains, the chairs and even the doors had bits missing. The holes, coupled with a few questionable stains on the carpet inclined Jay, Peter and I to sleep in our sleeping bags on top of the made beds. After our twenty hour day, anything that wasn't the van was fine by me. Though Jack and Matt decided to stand guard over our possessions and tough it out in G-unit.

The drive to Alberta was awesomely smooth. Jay and Matt took turns driving, and I guiltily navigated at intervals – thanks to a few speeding tickets and the B.C. graduated licensing program I can't drive for the next six months. The prohibition does mean I get to look around a little more though – and make some headway on Nicholas Nickleby. Yay Dickens.

We stopped in Revelstoke for dinner and used our handy A&W coupons. After the Coastal Mountains, Revelstoke was our first real glimpse of what the Rockies might have in store for us. The town is completely surrounded by huge peaks, and the more distant they loomed, the more black and jagged they became.

It wasn't until we entered Glacier National Park that we could really see and appreciate the huge mountains that mark the continental divide. It's kind of baffling to think of tectonic plates and shit, but it really is amazing. As we left glacier national park and headed towards the Rocky Mountains proper the sun began to set among the peaks behind us – I won't really bother trying to describe it because I won't do the sight justice. Suffice to say that the combination of wilderness, mountains and pink sky was one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in a very long time.

By the time we got into Yoho (ha – Yoho) National Park in the Rockies it was dark and for most of the band the rest of the drive to Banff and then Calgary was passed unconsciously. Banff felt a lot like B.C. and was completely fucking gorgeous. Every street was a copy of a Swiss mountain village, and every hotel was priced accordingly. Matt took over the wheel in Banff and he and I sang along to Moneen and talked all the way to Calgary where we ended up at our upscale Super 8.

This morning was a little bit rushed – we woke up late and had to book it to Lethbridge, which is where I am now. We're at the U of L getting ready for the show to start.

I'd regale you with hilarious anecdotes (especially Henry Rollins) and my first impression of the Prairies but I think I'll do that at the end of the day, once I have a little more perspective.

Sept. 11 & 12/07

I heard a lot about the vastness of the Prairies before we came on this trip, mostly in the form of my own answered questions. Still, I don't think I could ever have been properly prepared for how much land there is here. It just shouldn't exist.

We played in Medicine Hat last night where huge stretches of golden plains started right behind the bar's parking lot. It was thirty degrees when we arrived and seemed to stay that way until well into the evening. I spent most of the day cursing my dark pants and the extra coats in G-unit.

The Hat left a decidedly better taste in our mouths than Lethbridge did. There were only a few people in the bar for our set, but that also meant that we could talk with the crowd and feel really easy on stage. The town itself had a pretty little downtown core and had very little of the weird, oppressive, conservative cloud that Lethbridge had. There were less Mormons I suppose, though more than that it just felt less American – and especially less commercial. There were a lot of really cool health food stores in the downtown core which Jay and Peter were extra stoked for. I bought a Cheech and Chong record for the road, but no one was really excited about it except me. Go figure.

It was today's drive to Saskatoon that really filled me with wonder and the sheer immensity of the Prairies. I took a walk into the fields around Medicine Hat yesterday and began to feel it. I'm not sure I can describe it, but there is a Prairie feeling. It encompasses simplicity, and apocalypse, and meekness, and the courage of survival, a strange sense of tamed wilderness, and also of loneliness.

Mostly it just mixes together to feel like adventure. Real wild west stuff. Golden grass stretches from the highway to the horizon, where it meets a light blue sky that gets darker and darker the farther you crane your neck. That's where the simplicity comes in I guess – it really is no more apparent than in the simplicity of the colours around us as we drive. Gold and blue or green and blue. Land and sky. If it's a cloudy day like it was today, then all you see are hundreds of miles of billowing greyness until you focus on the horizon again.

Saskatoon, though, feels altogether different from all of that. It's urban and surprisingly trendy, with all the cool brick buildings from the twenties and earlier that Vancouver seems to have demolished or covered with billboards. The people are friendly and multicultural, and on the whole a little pudgier than they are on the island which makes them seem that much more jolly.

Besides, Saskatoon is fucking cold. The clothes I cursed in Medicine Hat just yesterday barely kept out an extremely biting wind that even the locals are bracing against. It was definitely worth it to brace the storm though – Saskatoon is a beautiful place. And they have deciduous trees here. Have I mentioned the trees? They have leaves!

The whole time I've been writing I've been trying to think of all the funny shit that's happened over the last two days. How many times have I told myself to remember "that one," so that I can make this tour journal interesting. When I get home I'll post a picture of Matt squatting outside the second story landing of our motel room in Medicine Hat. There's just something about the distant look in his eye as he cooks bacon on a hot plate that is fucking hilarious.

What else? Most of the tour so far has been fart jokes and semi-ironic homophobic insults.

I think I'll stop now though – the Mexican food we had is making my tummy feel funny.

More later.

Do you enjoy super sweet cocks-out indie rock?
Do you enjoy long highway drives across our great country?
Do you have a class-five driver's license?
Are you comfortable seeing full-frontal male nudity?

Then you have all the qualifications to accompany our band on an epic quest to Saskachewan and back!

You will be coming to all of the gigs posted in our profile page, and gain valuable life experience - not to mention that you'll be hanging out with 5 of the swellest rockers on the Island!

If you're interested you can leave a message here, contact one of the Administrators of our group personally, or call 885-4238 and leave a message.

Stay warm!

p.s.  "Nathalie" is the CBC NMC track of the day.  Check that shit out at http://radio3.cbc.ca/blogs/2007/08/New-Music-Canada-Track-of-the-Day-for-August-31-2007-Italian-Edition---Nathalie

This has nothing to do with our band.

Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FkTORyXc6g

 

 

So it's almost July, and the climate in our home town is abuzz with music. Bands are coming out of the woodwork and hitting the street, and we're going along for that trip as well. June 30th at the Victoria Events Centre will be a rowdy, no-nonsense stage show full of the exciting exploits of Messrs Counting Heartbeats, Open Parachute, My Broken Hero, and (our adopted father) DJ Steve Freightine III. We really hope to get a massive crowd together for this bad boy, so bring your friends, bring your mom, bring your mom's friends, bring your mom's friends' friends, etc. This is IE's last show for the next month and a half, as guitarist Peter Braga is fleeing the country for tax purposes, and we intend to send him off in style. We're putting in some time to get our world-class film crew to highlight the evening, so hopefully we can sling some footage up on the page (mo fo yo moneys)--a tiny morsel to keep you all happy through July.

Until We M33t Again,
-Jack Edition

You may have been wondering recently, something to the effect of "what the hell's Italian Edition been up to these days?" Well, other than wondering the same thing ourselves, we've been running around with telephones to our ears and guitars in our hands generally taking care of business.

First of all we have a few shows coming up: 

On March 31st we're playing at the Buffalo Club in Vancouver - the details of which can be viewed here. We're really excited to be going across the water again, and might even have a few fans to play for.

At the end of April, on the 28th, we'll be playing at Big Fernwood with Vincat and other guests for an all-ages extravaganza back in Victoria. I think I'm more excited to see Vincat again than I am to play, but we'll give it our all for everyone at good ole' Big Fernwood.

Then, on May 25th, we return to the brick walls of Lucky Bar to basically rock the fuck out. There always seems to be good sound and good people at Lucky; I think it's safe to say we all love playing there.   

During April things will slow down a little band-wise. Those of us going to school have to write and study for exams, and Jay (that lucky bastard) is going to be spending most of the month in Japan. We can only guess what he'll do to offend the conservative sensibilities of those cute little Japanese girls!

The only other little tidbit of news to report is that we've been recording with our long-time friend Scott Lougheed, the drummer for Mujeres (and past drummer of Pushing Up Daisies). So far we've put down four new songs that could go towards a potential EP, and could be coming out sometime in the next six months. That is, however, all very tentative, and we've mainly been recording for the sake of recording. (Though if anyone reading this has any possible names for a potential EP, we'd certainly like to hear them - especially since its probably dedicated fans like you that will end up hearing these songs before anyone else.)

Happy Spring everyone! We hope you run around smelling blossoms and making babies! Although we also whole-heartedly endorse safe sex as a band. Keep a look out for more info about the upcoming shows and other events!

See you soon,

-Dave Edition 

You know what's great?  The CBC Radio 3 podcast.  This week's their 91st.  Check it out:

• The Western Investor – 'If You Wanna Go"
• Counting Heartbeats – "Lend It Bullets"
• Lesley Lane – "Never Say Goodbye"
• The Junction – "Components of Four"
• The Dudes – "Fist"
• Italian Edition – "Miss Demeanour"
• Call Me Poupee – "Western Shanghai"
• The Sadies – "The Mohawk"
• Empiricals – "Hotline Ho"
• Champion – "Guy Doune" (Patrick Watson's..n Missing You re-make)
• Matt Mays – "Spoonful of Sugar"
• Sloan – "Can't You Figure It Out?"
• Insideamind – "Laughing Life"

 

Download it here: http://dawn.cbcr3.com/podcast/CBCR3_2007-02-16.mp3

Also, Victoria folks:  Get ready for Tuesday, February 27th at Lucky Bar, with Cobras Cobras Cobras, Colourbook, and us.

 

-Matt Edition