Biography

Dirt Farmer has been a band since October 1986. And although there have been minor tweaks to the Toronto outfit’s physical configuration and major twists and turns in an ever-curious, eternally enthused and endlessly evolving musical output across the intervening decades, at the core of the whole thing for more than 35 freakin’ years have always been the close friendship between Scott Cryer and Rob MacDonald, the symbiotic pop language they speak and a Brill Building-worthy work ethic that’s seen the pair churn out so much material during the regular writing-and-recording sessions it has diligently observed since Day 1 that Dirt Farmer itself has completely lost track of how much good stuff it has lying around in the vaults. Hence Curio. Dirt Farmer’s eleventh album, this beguiling slab of luminescent lo-fi fizz, fuzz, fog, froth and fun takes its name from the “curio cabinet”. The songs collectively represent Cryer and MacDonald’s shared reckoning with the enormous wealth of half-finished and half-forgotten (and sometimes completely forgotten) songs and song ideas they’ve lately (re-)discovered just sitting around in the bottomless piles of tapes and CDRs and digital files and notebook pages and god knows what other shreds and shards of potential greatness Dirt Farmer has accumulated over three-and-a-half decades of doggedly making music together for the pure pleasure of making music together.