The setup for tonight’s SWARM show on the island looks very nice. I’m excited about the big pink cones.

For the past several weeks SWARM has been conducting a series of experimental sessions with an unusual collection of objects. Unusual even by our standards – which is saying something. The centrepiece has been a variant setup of Bill’s Strange Fruit tower assemblage. We’ve altered the configuration of instruments and added more contact microphones. The tower mics all run through a little 8 channel mixer which runs to the main board and through a set of powered monitors. We’re also using two sets of large cans, an assortment of pvc drums, a portable suitcase sized xylophone and a set of tuned tanks (of the sort used for holding pressurized gasses). Also rototoms, and at one point the floor.

This is the first release of that undertaking. Next week there will be video.

Walking With Large Animals

We encourage very much the disassembly, reconstruction, dismemberment, recontextualization and subversion of this work.

We’re currently working on a show with a smaller footprint so we can expand the range of venues which can accommodate our show. The new instrumentation (including a handmade cylindrical stand-up bass!) and modified electronics will provide fresh ground for developing the repertoire.

The next public show is winter solstice in Cumberland, on Vancouver Island, December 21. I’ll put up more info as it becomes available.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.