Rose Chronicles

While Nettwerk is perhaps best known for its electronic bands, it has also been making quite a name for itself with ethereal, more guitar-oriented music. The labels latest offering is Rose Chronicles, a Vancouver - based foursome who released their debut LP, "Shiver," earlier this year.

The group is comprised of Richard Maranda (guitars), Judd Cochrane (bass), Steve van der Woerd (drums) and Kristy Thirsk (vocals). All the members come from different parts of lower mainland Vancouver and met through ads in a local paper. The last member (Judd) joined on May 7, 1992 and Rose Chronicles was born.

Within a year, the band was signed to Nettwerk, something that Richard calls "quite a fluke." A friend of theirs who knew an A+R person at Nettwerk recommended the band the label, and at the same time Rose Chronicles sent off a letter to them expressing interest.

"Because of these two things happening at the same time, they came out to our show and wanted to do a demo with us," says Richard. "Seeing as they were quite responsive to us right off the bat we just sort of said 'OK, this is it, this is the label that wants us and we want them so why look anywhere else'."

The members of Rose Chronicles are all relatively young as musicians. Judd and Steve had played in a few cover groups, Kristy had never been in a band before, and Richard had been searching for some serious musicians to start a band with.

"There are a lot of flakes out there, and I'm sure there always will be," says Richard on trying to get a band together. "People who see whatever on TV and say 'oh I want to be like that' rather than it really coming from inside. A lot of people want to be a musician but it's not really in them, they sort of wish it was."

Rose Chronicles had been together for a year before going into the studio to do their debut album. After about a month of intense pre-production, "Shiver" took about three and a half months to record.

"There's sort of snippets taken from everywhere in the career of the Rose Chronicles," explains Richard about the album. "On the LP, 'Visions 'was one of our first songs. It's really funny because Judd, Steve and I write the music first, and we tend to write faster than Kristy, we write between 3 and 6 songs in a section, and then say we've got to stop and wait for Kristy of catch up. So there are about 3 or four different sections over a period of a year, so there's a couple from each section and a few throwaways too."

Rose Chrnocles is a completely collaborative band, with no one member having more control over the music than the others.

"Nobody can say this is how I want a song to go and it goes that way. If somebody doesn't like it they say it, we try everything out. If somebody says 'well let's do this for 14 and a half bars', that's one of our policies, we try everbody's idea before we ax it down, and then we make sure everybody's happy with the final product. If we're not, we don't play it."

Up until now, the music has been completed first before Kristy comes up with the vocals. But in the future, the group would like to create songs that start with a vocal riff.

Rose Chronicles did a short US tour this past Spring and would like to do a more extensive tour in the future. They'd like to get on one with another band, and cite Ride and Teenage Fanclub as bands they want to tour with.

Things have happened quickly for Rose Chronicles, but the group is confident that they will be around for a long time.

"I knew we had potential as a band, I knew everybody could play their instrument well and write a decent song or had the potential to," says Richard. "But I was quite surprised that it happened so quickly. I knew it would happen somewhere along the way, but it happened a lot sooner than I thought."