Wednesday evening a small group of us got together to make some noise. That was our intention and we were successful. I arrived at the church office a little before 7:00 pm to find Rachel, our worship leader, there. What are you doing here?, I asked her. Working, she replied; why are you here? We're here to make some noise. She probably didn't think I was serious.
Five of us showed up with choice materials to explore and share with one another. Bobby brought a small metal cup and something that looked like a midget version of the Pillsbury dough boy, except it had some sort of spray nozzle top hat affixed to it and you could shake it like a baby maraca. Jeff brought an amplifier and a microphone with a volume pedal and a small delay effect box. Chip brought a guitar, an amp and several odd glasses which he filled withe different levels of water. I was going to bring some copper tubing I have, which you could blow into or bang about, but it turned out to be about eight feet in length and too long to put in the car. I brought some metal rods, 3/16 x 36", which are fun to place on a table, pull back and release while you change their length. I looked about the office for some objects and found a drum, a couple of vases with fake marble like rocks in them, and a couple plastic pitchers. Joel showed us all up. Joel has the most toys of us all and came with an untuned guitar and amp, a tenor saxophone, several glass beakers, a small drum, a set of tuned wind chimes he had made, a set of tuning forks, a marching band glockenspiel, some screwdrivers, a brass bowl for gonging, several pvc pipes cut to different pitch lengths, a cardboard tube 5' in length and about 8" in diameter, a car brake and a car tire. Probably several other objects which evade my memory at the moment.
The idea to do this came after an arts meeting we had about a month ago. The topic moved to music and it turned out that several of us listen to experimental music and were interested getting together to see what we could come up with. We had one guiding rule- that we shouldn't stick with any instrument that we naturally know how to play. Not too difficult since we mostly had things which had an indeterminate tuning. Other rules applicable were for determining how it might possibly be structured- a sense, a mood, an emotion; a time concept or a poetic construct, like call and response. We ended a piece when it felt like it had reached a finishing point, and in less than two hours had created three distinct and ephemeral pieces. We beat on things, we rattled stuff, we added different rhythms over other rhythms, hit things with random pitches, ran sounds through the microphone and manipulated them, squawked with reeds and pieces of paper, chanted and yelled, rustled bags and gamboled about in junk and noise and discovery and reverie. It was like men going into the forest to beat on drums and bond. Well, not really. It was more like young kids, left alone and unsupervised, finding out about sound and creativity. Worship music from the church of the blissfully bewildered.
