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The Garage Is Too Cold, Let's Go Into the Living Room and Warm Up

by Various Artists

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about

I came up with the concept of The Garage is Too Cold, Let's Go Into the Living Room and Warm Up in the fall of 2004 while living at the Totally Awesome House (724 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor, MI, a house which has since been demolished). Michigan winters are cold and hard, especially without a car — mine had broken down that August, I think — and I found myself increasingly comforted by the idea of staying in with friends, making or listening to music.

Luckily, the other residents of T.A.H. — Jason Adam Voss, Patrick Elkins, and Penelope Richardson-Bristol — were fans of those activities, too. We had shows in the living room all but one Tuesday night for the eight months we resided there, usually casual and low-key (the week we didn't have a show, we watched Ghostbusters together on my tiny TV). We did our best as vegan-friendly twentysomethings to cook dinner every time, with highly varied results. I have distinct memories of living for at least a week that spring off of maybe a dozen bags of flaxseed tortilla chips that some friends from a local co-op house had procured while dumpster diving at Trader Joe's.

Lots of different kinds of underground folks played at the house. I typically gravitated towards the noisier ones — Dead Machines, Odd Clouds, et al. — but for a handful of reasons, it was the outwardly tender-hearted performers which spoke to me the most in those months. Calvin Johnson played the first show at our house, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone the second; Kimya Dawson packed us out to ill-advised levels a week before our shared birthday (almost two decades on, I still blush when I hear her lyric in 'My Rollercoaster', "I've got my Scrabble game, food on my plate, good friends and family"; I had gotten her travel Scrabble with my employee discount at Borders).

More to the point, though: there were a great deal of kind and talented people mining similar territory locally, and I wanted to get as many of them as I could to celebrate being indoors with me on record. Many of the folks on this compilation are scattered across the U.S. and beyond now, but most of them are still active musicmakers. Nearly all have moved on from the myriad approaches mined here, but their spirit is largely the same. This makes The Garage is Too Cold feel doubly like a time capsule, and for me at least, a very comforting one.

There are people who should be on The Garage is Too Cold but aren't, largely for personal reasons long relegated to the "whatever" drawer of memory. That is only not regrettable in that it made for a more concise and carefully sequenced collection, likely the most successful application of my mixtape-making skills to this day. I don't even like my own track here as Actual Birds, but still, I wouldn't take it out and damage the flow!

I'm not sure how any new listeners will experience this compilation: it comes from such a specific place, time, and moment, and it's fully possible "you had to be there". For anyone who was there, though, and anyone else who's curious, I'm glad that it's available again.

— Dustin Krcatovich
Ypsilanti, MI
March 2023

[Editor's note: According to my records, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone was the first show at T.A.H. on 8/10/2004 with Fred Thomas, Terror At The Opera and Aquadora. Calvin Johnson was the third show and the first official Totally Awesome Supper Club on 8/17/2004 with Eliza Godfrey.]

credits

released March 3, 2023

originally released as CTECCD0007 on CD-R by Casanova Temptations Edutainment Consortium in 2005

artwork and mix by Dustin Krcatovich
remastered by Fred Thomas 2023
reissue coordinated by JAV

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weretwins Ann Arbor, Michigan

We're Twins Records was.a CD-R label that existed from 2001-2007 in Ann Arbor, MI and put out about 50 releases in very small quantities. This page is an archival repository of selected music released on the label and other related sounds from the period.

An oral history of the label can be found here:
anomalyindex.com/2020/05/16/label-archaeology-were-twins-records-ann-arbor-2000-2006/
... more

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