Upgrades and Changes
Clearly the site has got a little dusty - I’ve been a busy guy.
updates and changes are coming soon - in the meantime everything is still in the same place it was, more or less.
In the meantime here is some music
Post Tour
The updates stopped a little way in, not because of lack of happenings, just a result of the interminable distance.
While we were away we started up a new project - site explorations, viewable when you click here.
Here are a couple of the videos:
There are also some fresh things from theatrical shows:
For more, See Hear.
tour update No. 3 - On to Saskatoon
We’ve been busy the last several days, banging away on abandoned objects and in abandoned places. We stayed at a brilliant little B&B on a horse ranch outside Kindersley where they had accommodating hosts and an extensive junk pile. We were directed by our hosts to a site about a mile away where three combines which date back to the 1950’s have been left to rust away. We had a picnic dinner (which included local buffalo sausage - tasty!) Â and banged away on oxidized combine harvesters for hours, watching the sun go down into a distant red mist and we made our way back watching a red harvest moon rise awesomely over the distant plains.
Every once in a while visitors to the area, noticing the old grain elevator from a distance, will come into the old townsite. They will walk around the dusty streets and poke around in the abandoned buildings. When the enter the community hall, they still find a dozen old-style theatre seats - waiting for occupants that never come. On the wall, there is a homecoming sign, welcoming people to the 1971 event.”Anybody that wants to use the hall, I let them for free,” said Zlatner. “I was going to put a dance on but who would come to dance?”
Tour Update - leg 2
We’ve moved on from Swift Current after a series of shows - nothing massively exciting, one group of children screams and freaks out much the same as the last. Today at one of the schools they discouraged clapping to accommodate some deaf students that are part of the group. Instead they clap as deaf people clap, by waving their hands in the air. It was nice because we were able to wave our hands back at them and all clap together.
Having broken out of our initial loop we are now making our way north. I’m writing this from Eston, where the water is hard, the combines are busy and every few hours between wake up and bedtime an air raid siren mounted on the firehall goes off to let the locals know what time it is. The thing whoops at breakfast and lunch and schools out and at ten pm for bed time. There is a lot of open space around here for kids to run around in so an effective means of long distance communication is a handy thing. The proprietress of our hotel told us it has been wailing for a hundred years.
On the way here we stopped in the decrepit community of White Bear, population few. We saw their abandoned grain elevator from kilometers away. We knew it was disused because of the pronounced slant. Naturally we had to check it out - Bill and I explored while Dan engaged the owner. There was also a nearby building that had once been the town’s recreation hall, abandoned since the early eighties. Ceiling tiles had fallen in and sprouted greenery and random bits of stuff were strewn everywhere.
Tomorrow we make our way to Kindersley and over the weekend we may get to exploring some ghost towns. The next few weeks after Kindersley are on a whole other panel of the map.
tour update
Last week we did most of our shows in Moose Jaw and ended the run with the smallest show on the tour - 67 kids in Morse, SK ranging from kindergarten to grade 12. It was a little hard to get them going but we were assured that they were stoked. The coolest thing about the week was before an afternoon show on Thursday when a teaching assistant brought in a small boy - maybe 9 years old - who was completely blind. We introduced him to the instruments and he had a better appreciation for the show for having encountered the tools of noise making prior to the experience. The least cool part of the week was when I took a metal bedpan to the head and bled profusely in front of hundreds of school children.
Between Moose Jaw and Swift Current there’s a little town called Chaplin which has two main industries - the harvesting of salt and the harvesting of brine shrimp from the local salt lakes. Chaplin lake is on an important, protected, waterfowl migration route and there’s a whole big area of salt lakes where the birds rest on their journeys between the spring countries of the north and the southern climes where they winter. We drove throught the salt pans and marvelled at
the way the crystals climb the hardy grasses. We also found a cow skull and pelvis and some rib bones and vertebrae which we are now hauling around with us.
We spent the bulk of the weekend at a little bed and breakfast out in the middle of the vast prairie. You can see for miles in any direction from any of the small rolling hills which comprise the landscape and the sky out here dwarfs everything. There’s a river running through the property and, most exciting, a big heap of disused farm equipment which we spent hours today photographing and hitting. We’ve made some preliminary recordings (audio and video)
and there might be some fresh goodies up before too long.
Today we started the second leg of the tour which begins in Gravelbourg (a French enclave with a big brick cathedral) and ends in Saskatoon (home of Paddock Wood brewery, my new favourite).
rockstar lifestyle
We are in Moose Jaw until Friday, when we go to the thriving metropolis of Morse (pop. 236). Things have gone well so far. The current hotel is a bit of a cinderblock nightmare but adequate to our needs. We found a nice little slow-food restaurant with beer on tap called Amuze where today I snacked on baked bacon and blue cheese with bits of toasty bread. Lunch was at a Vietnamese place where a large guy, in deep conference with his potential AA sponsor after a 12 day bender that lead to troubles with his wife, got all aggro with us and tried to start a fight. He immediately apologized after his outburst and we were cool with it - he was doing a hard thing.
I also wandered around Moose Jaw taking photos of the excellent industrial buildings and brickwork.
Saskatchewan Tour 2008
SWARM Flickr stream
Drum Smashing Badassery
Dan Lunn and Bill Wallace
Bill Wallace in the air,Curtis Mathewson in front
The whole lot of us
Bill Wallace and Dan Lunn on longstrings, that’s me on the drums
Dharma Plated Vehicle
Looks like fun, doesn’t it.
Swarm in Kelowna
This weekend Swarm played the Mary Irwin theatre in Kelowna to an enthusiastic audience. We had a great time.
The video we used included some appropriated images that should be credited.
video for Spinfectious included a clip from the film Bodysong
video for 7of9 included a clip from At Land
video for Anung Un Rama contained a clip from Meditation on Violence
short clips from a plethora of public domain movies were used throughout, thanks mainly to publicdomaintorrents
More images and video clips to come in the next few days.
darkstyle dubstep video
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Fresh 20 minute video demo posted. The audio is from the ‘world’s heaviest dubstep’ compilation - provenance unknown but the mix of ‘wayfaring stranger’ that kicks it off is brilliant. It’s a live video recording and best viewed fullscreen.
the official announcement
Asides
Place for sideblog or ads
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FlickR
