ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Over 1,400 albums of original music have been recorded by Newfoundland and Labrador musicians, mostly in St. John’s, since 2008, all in one of the coldest, darkest months of the year: February.
Elling Lien is the executive director of Unpossible NL, a non-profit organization dedicated to arranging creative challenges and events with little or no barriers to entry. One of the yearly events is the Record Production Month (RPM) Challenge, which has produced that aforementioned mountain of recordings.
“We had 22 albums submitted that first year and (we thought), ‘Wow, that’s a lot of albums, that’s a lot of listening (and it involves) music that didn’t exist before the beginning of that month,” Lien said.
“Then, it just kind of grew and grew until it was consistently above a hundred albums every year. Pretty crazy.”
Anyone in the world can participate by making an album of 10 songs or 40 minutes of total music in that — leap years aside —28-day span. And though most submissions come from North America, artists from the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates have participated.
By recent calculations, artists from St. John’s are responsible for over 10 per cent of the total submissions.
Origins of the RPM Challenge
Portsmouth, N.H., and St. John’s have a very similar history and culture, Karen Marzloff says.
“One of the first arrivals from Europe came here in (the 17th century) to fish,” said Marloff about her New Hampshire city. “We’re on the water, we’re a port city … a big arts and culture scene.”
Along with David Karlotski, Marzloff was co-founder of an arts weekly called The Wire, a now-defunct alternative weekly newspaper in Portsmouth which first proposed, and became the flagstaff for, the RPM.
Expecting around four submissions, to their surprise, they received 120 in the first year.
"We had 22 albums submitted that first year and (we thought), ‘Wow, that’s a lot of albums...' Then, it just kind of grew and grew until it was consistently above a hundred albums every year. Pretty crazy.”— Elling Lien
“We had people dropping off CDs by hand and just exhausted because they had stayed up all night trying to meet the deadline, but also happy and exuberant and thrilled that they had done it,” she said.
Alongside Bryhanna Greenough, Lien co-founded the St. John’s based arts weekly, The Scope, which existed between 2006 and 2014. The two publications began a correspondence when Lien was hoping to bring the RPM m model to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Having visited the area before, the multitude of submissions coming out of St. John’s wasn’t surprising to the folks at The Wire. But it did manage to spark a sense of friendly competition.
“It was great, it was such a boost,” she said. “Oh well, we thought we were doing good here, but now you guys, look what you’ve done. Now we have to up our game in our community too.”
The RPM originators decided to move on from the project this past year, and having known Lien over more than a decade, passing the RPM reins to him was obvious to them.
Although there is a certain amount of work that goes along with the task, Lien describes his official role as “head cheerleader.”
“He’s very driven by the mission to bring more creativity into people’s lives,” Marzloff said. “When people are creative together, they bring out the best in each other and I think our world could use more of that on an everyday basis. … If you’ve ever felt something isn’t for you, the RPM is the opposite of that. And Elling gets that.”
Impact of the RPM Challenge
The Swinging Belles is a “swing band for kids” started by child educators and performers Laura Winter and Erin Power. Duane Andrews, known for his bizarrely tasteful combination of Newfoundland folk music and the gypsy jazz of two-finger virtuoso Django Reinhardt, plays guitar in the group.
“Erin and Laura had been writing songs for their classrooms (and) they had the idea of recording those as another RPM project,” Andrews said. “As we started to do more of it, we thought this would be a great RPM (submission), but this actually feels really exciting and inspiring to be working on this.”
They took more time to realize the full potential of the band, he said. Eventually, the music they made would win a Juno for Children’s Album of the Year in 2016 for “More Sheep, Less Sleep.”
“The RPM was the booster rocket that got us going and then we just hopped in the spaceship and went for a ride,” Andrews said.
Being around all that creativity, Andrews’ son Isaac caught the RPM bug, too, and recorded an electronic album called "GerbilD2" when he was only seven.
In 2009, classically trained musician Meg Warren wanted to jump into songwriting and start a band, but kept hesitating.
“I was very comfortable in the classical world and that’s kind of all that I knew,” she said. “I was definitely really intimidated by being a woman and not really feeling like I was a part of that world.”
The RPM served as a fun way to test the waters without pressure, she said.
Warren didn’t even finish an album that month, but the motivation to explore the world of writing songs remained. And the group that came out of the RPM, Repartee, would serve as the vehicle for her passion for songwriting as they recorded and toured all over Canada, winning multiple awards along the way.
Though Repartee has since disbanded, Warren continues to write well-crafted, often danceable and hook-heavy, pop songs. Her most recent release is the EP “A Thousand Ways.”
“It was a pretty big part of me getting the courage to start,” she said. “The goal is not to create a masterpiece, it’s just to create. … I don’t mean to be dramatic about it, but in my memory, it’s what pushed me to take that first step.”
To sign up or listen to previous submissions, visit the RPM Challenge website or Unpossible NL.
@AndrewLWaterman
Andrew Waterman reports on East Coast culture.