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Ceramic Hello
The Absence of a Canary
Mannequin - 1981
Michael Panontin
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Those who scratch their heads at how such left-field electronica like John Paul Young's The Life of Ernie Scub or The Absence of a Canary by Ceramic Hello could have come out of a city like Toronto forget just how prevalent synth music was back then. Ultravox's Vienna and John Foxx's Metamatic, for instance, both cracked CFNY-FM's top 25 in 1980, while the cyborg Gary Numan played to 5000 people at the cavernous Maple Leaf Gardens that October.
The duo of Brett Wickens and Roger Humphreys also came together that year out in the pastoral bliss of suburban Burlington. Wickens had only recently left the Spoons, in fact just after the release of their fiendishly rare 'After the Institution' seven-inch, but with Humphreys' more classical tendencies, the pair set about making icy synth tunes allegedly in the mold of Daniel Miller's novel Mute label.
The clinical sounds on The Absence of a Canary were first issued in 1981 on the Burlington-based Mannequin label in a tiny press run of just 1000, a miniscule quantity for LPs back then. Tracks like the eerie 'Gestures', with its clever cache of frosty synths and forlorn vocals, and the baroquish (and cleverly titled) 'Conversation between Units' were hardly what you would call dancefloor ready. So it should surprise very few that the LP had trouble shifting even that paltry number of units.
Wickens left Toronto shortly thereafter for the brighter skies - well, metaphorically speaking anyway - of the UK, where he launched in earnest a long and fruitful career in graphic design. It was there that he teamed up with the renowned Peter Savile, contributing cover designs for a plethora of artists from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the Durutti Column to Jah Wobble and Peter Gabriel. (The Absence...'s cover, by the way, was Wickens' first LP design ever.)
These days the album is coveted by electro fetishists the world over, though for my money San Francisco's Units did this cold wave stuff much better. And speaking of cash, mint copies of The Absence of a Canary now change hands for upwards of 300 USDs a pop, so clearly the record has its fans.
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