Running

Websites:  No
Origin: Vancouver, British Columbia, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Jan 23, 2025:

Hi Robert,

I am originally from Calgary, and moved to Vancouver in 1983 after taking Television and recording engineering at SAIT.

After moving to Vancouver at the age of 21 in a Ford Pickup with all my musical gear, I was successfully accepted to the Capilano Music College program in North Vancouver, where I met my drummer, a highly talented creator from Kamloops, Dave Morello.

Dave and I built our own recording studio in the basement of my house. It was one of the first hybrid studios in Vancouver that synced an eight track reel to reel tape deck with a 32 track Atari digital recording system, the first digital recording studio machine.

The studio was a seriously DIY build, but worked great for numerous indie short films and animated features I wrote music for, and for engineering and producing several local indie bands.

We worked construction through the day, had band practices in the studios main room five nights every week for years, etc. And on my own, I endlessly wrote and recorded songs late into the nights after practice for years in the control room of that studio. Then the band would listen to the songs and choose which ones we were going to work on further as a band. We practiced incessantly back then with our bassist, Dan Yaremko, who eventually became a member of Econoline Crush.

The original band scene in Vancouver back then was thriving and passionate. I think it’s easy to say it numbered in the semi-hundreds of acts. Best gigs to get back then were at the Commodore Ballroom and The Town Pump, which were coveted and accessible to bands entirely based on how many people they could draw. The folks that controlled that part of the scene back then would give us pre-printed tickets to distribute to our friends and if we got enough of them in the door drinking beers and cocktails, we’d get asked to play the next gig. Draw and beer sales were everything.

I was the songwriter, engineer, and producer, and Dave was the extraordinary creative supporter at all times for the album. Epidimus Mole is me. I didn’t actually start playing guitar until I was nineteen, which I did out of necessity because I had so much music rolling around my head and desperately wanted to write songs without other people’s influence.

Before that, Andrew Jons, who was a very good friend of mine and the singer/keyboard player of the cover band my brother was in, wrote songs by me vocalizing to him what I was hearing in my head and then he would play it out on his piano and/or keyboards.

It was Dave, Ted Connelly, Martin Simpson, Andrew Jons, who later became the keyboards player for the CAD act Baseball, Linda Sakal, and Larry Anschel who were the seasoned professionals that graciously gave their talents to the Running album project. On a kinetic level, I can only be forever grateful to them for giving their creative talents to this project. It was incredible for me as a self-taught singer/song writer/engineer/producer to have such talented people involved.

I was deeply inspired back then by Brian Eno’s Airport Music albums, Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Alan Parsons, Steely Dan, Eddy Offord, Trevor Horn, Pete Townsend (as a songwriter and producer), U2, Daniel Langois, etc. That’s where I learned all the recording tricks that create the ambience you may hear on so many recordings from way back then that I loved and infused into my music. There were lots of interview and articles about those recording techniques in the music mags back then that helped young dudes like me learn how to experiment, and lots of cool gear that made that experimentation very possible.

Not to bore you, but that included reverse tracking (what’s that!), micing hallway reverb, and anything else I could dream up related to expansive ambient background sound, including tape loops, layers of pre-reverb and compression on slide guitar tracks and synthesizer pads, etc. to create mystic soundscapes in the background of songs.

The gear back then was pushed to its limits to make all that background vibe. The Country Tune, Prairie Gold, Testament, On The Shore, etc. on The Running album are attempted examples of that. I was pretty into all of that production stuff back then and went all-in.

Years before at SAIT in Calgary, when I was 19/20 years old (1981/82) in the two-year television, Stage, Radio Arts, and Recording Engineering program, I was in the basement 8-track recording studio non-stop, using a fully mic’d basement hallway that was fed instrument and vocal performances through a huge JBL speaker to create background ambience and reverb for recording my first songs and the first Baseball demos that ever existed.

Long before Little Mountain Sound, these recording tricks were originally created by Pete Townsend for his The Who demos, Brian Eno for Ambient States and Airport Music tracks, Allan Parsons and Eddy Offord for Pink Floyd and YES, etc. Perhaps no one really knows that anymore, but that’s where these ambient tracking techniques were born, I was a student of all that.

Going back further, as I already note, I started engineering live audio when I was 13 years old with my brothers cover band, he was the drummer, and that’s where I met Andrew. I was super lucky to get involved in music and live production at a very young age! I even built three other studios in Vancouver from my learnings of building my own studio back then.

For me, it became pretty clear when U2 released Achtung Baby that music was starting to escape my creative velocity at that time. Plus I was in my early thirties and needed to start making a decent living!

I luckily landed in a place that has enabled me to continue to create, and here I am today, a father of the coolest toddler anyone could dream of procreating, and a tech inventor of patented technologies that cover multi-billion dollar industries.

I truly celebrate you and the fact that you’ve put together a website that memorializes the creative intent of countless Canadian artists like me, it’s an incredible discovery! You’re a good man Robert.

I cannot thank you enough for providing me the runway to revisit this era of my life and to be included in such a vast bench of Canadian talent!

My warmest regards,
Sacha

Jan 18, 2025:
Hi Robert,
My name is Sacha Spindler.

In 1991, my band, The Running, released our only CD of songs that I loved and labored over for a very long time. The album was for me, a creative odyssey into all of the things I had learned throughout my creative journey in songwriting, engineering, and production to that point. Our album was in fact only the second independent CD release from the West Coast of Canada at that time, from what I recall.  

Today, I joyfully discovered my record on your platform, Museum of Canadian Music. I cannot tell you how happy and grateful to you I am for you doing the great work you are to memorialize the creative artistry of Canada’s talented music community. I cannot believe that my music is available online now, and included amongst such esteemed talent from across Canada.
Thank you so much!
My very warm regards,
-Sacha Spindler

Sacha Spindler: lead vocals, electric & acoustic guitars, background vocals
Epidimus Mole (Sacha Spindler): bass, keyboards, piano
Dave Morello: drums, vocals