"...featuring thoughtful lyrics sung by Cers in his native Latvian tongue."

Yesterday my brother Steve, initially a Twitter-skeptic and now one of the most prolific twitterers I know, piled on to the #CBCBands hash tag with gusto ( “ ‘The National’ Research Council Official Time Signal,” “T-Rex Murphy,” “Radio Radio Noon,” etc.). I’m biased, but I’d say he led the pack.

At the end of which brother Johnny dropped in with “I thought it was too much until Dzintar Cers Mix-a-Lot.”

Which answered a long-burning question for me: how do you spell Dzintar Cers (one of the CBC’s best newsreaders and someone I’ve woken up to on the clock radio hundreds of times).

Which, in that rabbit-holey Internet way, eventually led me to this description, from Toronto’s Eye Weekly from 1998, of a Dzintar Cers side-project called Dzena’s Initiation:

This is what happens when you let one CBC sportscaster (Dzintar Cers) and one nutty freelance performance artist (Nina Hilger) loose in a digital portastudio with a computer music-generating program. He plays (in a prog-rock meets techno kind of way) and she rants. This goes on for over two hours. Occasionally Cers’ brother Aldis provides some wild acid-rock guitar. Song titles include “Nuclear Marionette’s Dinner Party,” “Mother Dominatrix” (the S&M crossover hit single) and, my fave, “India Nomo,” featuring thoughtful lyrics sung by Cers in his native Latvian tongue.

If the universe is just, someone will find a copy of this and send it to me. Right now.