 From left: Ashley, Debbie, Katie, Jenny, Shelby The Organ are a Canadian indie rock band formed in 2001 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Image File history File links Organ_20042. ...
Indie rock is a subgenre of rock music often used to refer to bands that are on small independent record labels or that arent on labels at all. ...
2001: A Space Odyssey. ...
Vancouver (pronounced: ) is a Canadian city in the province of British Columbia. ...
Motto: Splendor Sine Occasu (Latin: Splendour without diminishment) Official languages none stated in law; English is de facto Flower Pacific dogwood Tree Western Redcedar Bird Stellers Jay Capital Victoria Largest city Vancouver Lieutenant-Governor Iona Campagnolo Premier Gordon Campbell (BC Liberal) Parliamentary representation - House seat - Senate seats 36 6...
Biography The Organ was conceived in 2001 by frontwoman Katie Sketch, born Katie Richie, in Vancouver, Canada. Sketch's musical training started at the age of three, when she began classical training on the violin. Her childhood was spent largely in ignorance of the underground sounds of The Cure, Joy Division and The Smiths, whom The Organ would later often be compared to. "Tiffany and Bon Jovi - that was my take on ’80s music." The Cure are a successful English rock band, widely seen as one of the leading pioneers of the British alternative rock scene of the 1980s. ...
Joy Division was a rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. ...
The Smiths were an English rock group active from 1982 to 1987. ...
Tiffany, performing at Gulfstream Park in 2003 Tiffany Renee Darwish (born October 2, 1971 in Norwalk, California; sometimes mistakenly reported as being born in Oklahoma, where she has some relatives), professionally known as Tiffany, is an American singer who had a number of teen pop hits during the late 1980s. ...
Bon Jovi is an influential rock band from New Jersey, USA. Fronted by lead singer and namesake Jon Bon Jovi, the group originally achieved large-scale success in the 1980s as a hair metal band. ...
Katie attended an all-girls school, where she met Barb Choit, a childhood friend who would later help design the sound of the band in its embryonic stages. The oldest of three kids, Katie focused her attention on sports rather than music during her teens, racing competitively as a skier. "When Shelby and Jenny and Ashley were in high school, they knew all the obscure artists," Sketch admits. "I knew none of them and didn't learn about them until much later. I grew up listening to top 40. I liked U2 and Guns N' Roses. I also liked old Sarah McLachlan, but 90 percent of the people that I hung out with as a teenager didn't even know who she was. She was considered totally cutting-edge because she wasn't played on the radio." However, by the end of the 90s, her musical consciousness had begun to transform in ways that would later lead to the formation of her own unique sound.
“I was in a musical lull, I couldn’t stand what I was listening to,” says Sketch, naming Sleater-Kinney as one example. “The local scene was also pretty shitty, and of course the radio was brutal. Then, by total fluke, my mom’s friend’s husband, Ron Obvious, hired me to help with the audio wiring for a studio he was building for Bryan Adams.” Obvious introduced Katie to the world of independent music, and what she calls "that ’80s sound." He created mix-tapes of bands he thought she’d appreciate as a violinist (Roxy Music, Ultravox) and a singers with an "amazing natural vocal pitch" (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nina Hagen, Kate Bush). This job also led Sketch to Tara Nelson, the engineer who would later record the Organ’s EP. It was at this time that Katie joined with her friends Sarah Efron (on bass and keyboards) and Barb "Sketch" Choit (Hammond organ, guitar, bass) to form the instrumental trio "Full Sketch." Sleater-Kinney are an indie rock trio from Olympia, Washington influenced by the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s. ...
Ron Obvious is a seminal Vancouver punk-rock producer and engineer whose résumé includes early singles by D.O.A. and The Subhumans. ...
Bryan Adams, OC, OBC (born 5 November 1959) is a Canadian singer, guitarist and songwriter. ...
Roxy Music is a British art rock group founded in the early 1970s as a collaborative project between art school graduates Bryan Ferry (vocals, keyboards) and Brian Eno (electronic music specialist). ...
Ultravox (formerly Ultravox!) were one of the primary exponents of the British electronic pop music movement of the early 1980s. ...
Siouxsie and the Banshees are a British gothic rock band. ...
Nina Hagen (born Catharina Oliva on March 11, 1955) is a singer from Berlin, Germany. ...
Kate Bush (born Catherine Bush on 30 July 1958 in Bexleyheath, Kent (now part of Greater London), is an English singer-songwriter with an expressive four-octave voice. ...
"I met Katie Sketch when we worked morning shifts at a wretched cinnamon bun shop," says Efron, "but we really became friends on a road trip where we ended up breaking down in the redneck town of Hermiston, Oregon. On this trip, we decided to form a band and call it Full Sketch." Katie, though she was already a proficient multi-instrumentalist, decided this would be a good time to try her hand at drums.
"The concept was, 'Let's start a band where you play an instrument that you've never played before. It was basically drunken ridiculousness, but all of a sudden I felt like life made more sense. Sarah was involved in CiTR, and Barb was big into indie rock, so what started off as a joke got me out going to see shows. The way The Organ began was as an offshoot of Full Sketch--I wanted to take the same sound and do it with singing."
Efron was also the news director at UBC’s CiTR, where she, Sketch and Choit co-hosted a raunchy late-night call-in program called "The Dead Air Show." The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university with its main campus located at Point Grey, in the University Endowment Lands adjacent to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and another smaller campus known as UBC Okanagan located in Kelowna, British Columbia. ...
CITR (Canadian Independent Thunderbird Radio) is a Canadian FM radio station based out of the University of British Columbias Student Union Building in Vancouver, British Columbia. ...
After about a year, Barb Sketch left the band to focus on her career as an artist and Full Sketch ended. According to Katie Sketch, "Barb Sketch is now in suburban California. She’s long forgotten her Canadian roots and lives on a ranch with her man and a team of horses." At this point, organist Jenny Smyth, Born Genoa Smith, replaced Choit on keyboards. Together with Efron, they founded The Organ.
In 2001, a long audition process began. Eventually, Sketch "tired of auditions," and decided to "just hire some people." After finding a handful of like-minded musicians, Katie assigned them instruments and taught them to play. Taught is a relative term though -- Debbie had been playing guitar for three years, and Sketch has expressed distaste in interviews when portrayed as a "music teacher" to the girls: "[The press seems] to think they had a lot of help or something, but mostly it's just the drive to be able to learn the instruments and play them," Sketch said. "[My teaching them] was maybe a half-an-hour, hour process."
The full formation of the band that would appear on their first EP took three years. "It’s not like the five of us got together and spontaneously created this," Sketch once commented in an interview. "Jenny and I had a direction we wanted to go in and then we slowly recruited people. We could tell if someone didn’t get it, which is why we had to get rid of so many players. It’s funny — sometimes people say the band’s moving really quickly, but I feel like I’ve been doing this forever."
The original group eventually rounded out with Katie, Jenny, Sarah, drummer Shelby Stocks, and guitarist Debora Cohen. In summer 2002, The Organ made their debut with the release of the Sinking Hearts EP. The Canadian press and indie publications across America praised The Organ's dream-pop inflected presentation. By January, The Organ was signed to Chad Kroeger's 604 imprint and Mint Records.However, before the year was out, Efron would leave to focus on her journalism career and be replaced by Ashley Webber. Chad Kroeger of Nickelback Chad Robert Turton (born November 15, 1974, in Hanna, Alberta, Canada), better known as Chad Kroeger (Kroeger is the surname of Chads half-brother, Mike, and was used by Chad from childhood [1]), is a Canadian singer and guitarist for the rock group, Nickelback. ...
Mint Records is a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based independent record label founded in January 1991. ...
"The rock’n’roll lifestyle wasn’t for me." Says Efron, who is currently working For the Financial section of The National Post a right wing Canadian Newspaper. The National Post is a large Canadian English language national newspaper based in Toronto. ...
Even with the band finally complete and their first EP released, it would take years before they would release their first proper album; the process of writing and recording (the album would end up being pieced together in four different studios) would take years -- two, to be exact, to finish up as Grab That Gun, an album that barely breaks a half hour in length and recycles four of its eleven tracks from Sinking Hearts.
"We knew we had a problem when the album was being mixed," comments Cohen. "When we heard it, we knew that it didn't sound like us. It was too, I don't know, crisp."
After much agonizing, the Organ decided to scrap the Dahle sessions and rerecord the album with producer Paul Forgues, who Sketch knew from her days at the Warehouse Studio.
"It was a really, really hard choice to make," Stocks says. "We had a window where we could have just released something that we weren't totally happy with. There was so much hype at that time, but we were like, 'No way. Let's fuck the hype and start over.' And I think that we ended up with a great album. I know that people who like us for being amateur and really simple are going to get it."
Despite numerous set-backs, their five years of slow going had produced a relatively sizable fan-following, and their new material showed even more promise than their first EP, which had done very well indeed, especially for a record that had gone largely unpromoted. As such, Grab That Gun spent more time on top of the Canadian campus-radio charts than any other record released that year.
That December (2004), Ashley Webber left the band.
"I think it's the usual reasons," explained Sketch in an interview. "I mean, I love Ashley, but we had different ideas. And then she wanted to try being in other musical projects, and we support her in that ... [but our band has] got to be a high priority, I guess that's what it comes down to. Image File history File links Organstove. ...
However, with their first international tour looming and no replacement in sight, Webber was asked back in the new year.
The Organ began touring heavily across Canada, The United States, and Europe. They also produced a music video for "Brother," (directed by Robert Morfitt) arguably the strongest of the seven new tracks appearing on the record. The video consisted of a fairly straightforward montage of the band performing on a moodily lit stage. A fictitious reenactment of the video shoot for "Brother" can be seen during season two, episode two of the Showtime original series The L Word. "Brother" also appears on The L Word's season two soundtrack. This article is an autobiography, and may not conform to Wikipedias NPOV policy. ...
Showtime is a subscription television brand used by a number of channels and platforms around the world, but primarily refers to a group of channels in the United States. ...
The L Word is a television drama series airing on Living TV in the United Kingdom, Showtime in the United States and Showcase Television in Canada. ...
The L Word is a television drama series airing on Living TV in the United Kingdom, Showtime in the United States and Showcase Television in Canada. ...
Following the well received promotion of "Brother," The Organ began production on the far more ambitious "Memorize the City" video, which depicted a dizzying tour through a city of sound, light, and color. The higher artistic standard and production quality of this video reflects an amazing amount of growth for the band in a very short period, and is very impressive considering that it was shot at a time when the band was engaged in the biggest tour of their careers. That July (2005) the standalone 7" single, Let the Bells Ring, was released on Go Metric Records. The title track was "B"ed with a remix of "Memorize the City" by Dustin Hawthorne. Later that year, a second remix appeared on the French CD release of Grab That Gun. In music, a single is a short (usually ten minutes or less) record, usually featuring one or two tracks as A-sides, often accompanied by several B-sides—usually remixes or other songs. ...
In recorded music, the terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of 7 inch vinyl records on which singles have been released since the 1950s. ...
During the European leg of the Grab That Gun tour, Ashley Webber had enough. She has since been replaced with Katie Sketch's sister, Shmoo, who affirms that she is "definitely permanent in the band."
On November 14, 2005, The Organ appeared live on BBC6 Radio with their new bass player Shmoo, the younger sister of frontwoman Katie Sketch. They gave a brief interview and performed live renditions of the songs "Nothing I Can Do" and "Love, Love, Love." On the 27th, a little over a week later, The Organ announced via their website that they had just been signed to Too Pure Records, through which Grab That Gun would be available throughout the world in February 2006.
On August 23, 2006 the band released a statement on myspace saying they were cancelling the remaining portion of their UK tour which included dates at the Reading and Leeds Festivals. The reason given was illness to a band member and they assured fans the band were not splitting up. August 23 is the 235th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (236th in leap years), with 130 days remaining. ...
2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. ...
The Reading and Leeds Festivals, officially called the Carling Weekend, are a pair of annual music festivals that take place in Reading and Leeds in England. ...
Discography
Full Sketch Self titled CD which circulated around the local scene 2000-2001, presumably through shows and friends. - Picky
- Cooler Than Clean
- Steven Smith
- Soundtrack
- Sketchersize
- Ice Fishing
The Organ 7" Record
 The Organ Self titled single sold at shows and on the band's website prior to the release of Sinking Hearts, 2002. Image File history File links Organrecordcover. ...
- It's Time to Go
- We've Got to Meet
Sinking Hearts EP Released by Global Symphonic, 2002 Image File history File links Sinkinghearts. ...
Image File history File links Sinkinghearts. ...
- We've Got to Meet
- I Am Not Surprised
- It's Time to Go
- Sinking Hearts
- There Is Nothing I Can Do
- No One Has Ever Looked so Dead
Grab that Gun LP Released by 604 Imprint, 2004 - Brother
- Steven Smith (lyrical version)
- Love, Love, Love
- Basement Band Song
- Sinking hearts (2004 version)
- A Sudden Death
- There is Nothing I Can Do (2004 version)
- I Am Not Surprised (2004 version)
- No One Has Ever Looked So Dead (2004 version)
- Memorize the City
- [Untitled organ solo]
French CD release of the album by Talitres Records contains a bonus track, 2005 - Memorize the City [Remix]
Memorize The City 7" Record Released by Noize! Records (NOIZE001S), 2005 - Memorize The City
- There Is Nothing I Can Do
Memorize The City CD Single Released by Noize! Records (NOIZE001CDS), 2005 - Memorize The City
- There Is Nothing I Can Do
- Memorize The City [Reimixed by Simon Bookish]
Let the Bells Ring 7" Record Released by Go Metric Records, 2005 Image File history File links Bellsring. ...
Image File history File links Bellsring. ...
- Let the Bells Ring
- Memorize the City [Remixed by Dustin Hawthorne]
Unreleased - Can You Tell Me One Thing (2002-2003?)
Sources - Email correspondence with the band
External links The All Music Guide (AMG) is a metadata database about music, owned by All Media Guide. ...
MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. ...
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