Dag, we've reached the age where we have no further good news to report, and all of our posts are eulogies for our fellow travellers -- not only are we conspicuously absent from the scene, but gradually also every place we ever had a connection to is expunged from the record! (Never did quite get around to mourning the Little Mountain Gallery, that loss is still a little too big to process.) Where to start here?
20 years ago, Internet friends who had converged from across the lower 48 to inhabit (or visit) Portland, OR, began hosting an annual party. The nascent Blackbox Squeezebeard started shlepping along his instrument during his Greyhound expeditions south to stink up their living rooms, cosplaying as a musical performer at their short films and social functions. Within three years, he had been recruited into the Creaking Planks (themselves initially established, let it be known, with the intention of performing on the tiny triangular stage located in the corner of the original Portland location of iconic chain Voodoo Donuts -- PDX figured large in our band mythology!) and, well, the best way to put muscles on what he brought to the party was by packing along the rest of the band.
Thank goodness we are not currently memorializing the Horace Phair party. Many of its resident party hosts and patrons were involved with Portland's community e-waste recycling initiative, the then-young (est. 2000) Free Geek. We thought that it was a great idea, and when word got out that Vancouver was going to try its hand at opening a franchise in 2006, a side hustle pitched by some of the anarchist bikepunx we were already in deep with, we pledged our support via such unique skills and talents as we had to offer. On the face of it an electronics recycler had little use for a jug band, but when you open your imagination a little to the power of a grand metaphor, a cadre of renegade musicos breathing new life into old tunes on unwanted music machines from bygone eras made our association make a little more sense. (Only a little. Talking Heads give good guidance.)
The following year they had us open for a screening they hosted at SFU Harbour Centre August 2nd, the Basel Action Network's documentaries "The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa" and "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia." (Phew! Tough crowd!) "The CREAKING PLANKS will recycle and repurpose salvageable components of defunct and formerly toxic popular musics."
Formerly Toxic? Well, it was a new introduction to our set and the arrangement hadn't quite gelled yet:
It wasn't until the end of that year, when they formally outgrew their initial space, that we had a chance to play one of their functions in situ. December 29th 2007 we rang out Farewell to Old Geek in the dsitinctly industrial confines of their warehouse. (The Portland FG site is assuredly a doomed e-waste Superfund site, though Vancouver's hadn't yet been in operation long enough for it to obviously be a present threat to our health. To be fair, we surely don't need to search that far to find unsafe illegal venues we took up residence in! I vaguely recall the fire code legal capacity of the Little Mountain Gallery was what, five? And then there was Secret Location or, heck, the rusted hulk of the McBarge offshore. But I digress.)
The most memorable element of that gig was that, true to its domain, most of the other acts booked to perform at its send-off party were electronic in nature -- drum machines, turntables and the like. After we kicked things off with our acoustical brand of weirdness we were free to set our instruments down and enjoy some tasty adult beverages while the boots and cats got underway. However, that night it turned out there was some trouble with BC Hydro... I vaguely recall a runaway car had unexpectedly crashed into a transformer box blocks away, resulting in something like ten thousand people in the neighbourhood suddenly finding themselves without power. This situation is a major impediment to a DJ, of course, but all Planks remained on site, sitting on quite a bit of musical repertoire we hadn't yet shared with the room, so once we were able to get some tea candles lit and find our bearings we rocked on with a bonus set, the only glad noise in the area for hours. We paused only to make way for a brief musical routine of an amazing disassemblable saxophone contraption that could make musical noise in any of its wide range of integral configurations, from rather long all the way down to very small. Electronic musicians can of course do things that live performers can't, however like Apollo's musical duel with the satyr Marsyas, under certain uncommon circumstances the playing field really tips away from the new school.
Half a year down the line the Velofusion post-Critical-Mass series of dance parties at the ANZA club held a benefit for Free Geek (every month's event would fundraiser for a different cause) and FG invited us to be part of their night:
We had one further Free Geek experience to recount -- our intersections were few but they trended toward being highly memorable -- some nine months down the line. February 6, 2009, they invited famously particular (and in the meantime since, rather cancelled) GNU guru Richard Stallman to do a talk at the Maritime Labour Centre... with us opening for RMS! We found ourselves thrown in the deep end when the organizer volunteered us to accompany the headliner on a folk song of his own arrangement, The Free Software Song, adapted from a Bulgarian folk song, "Sadi Moma"... in 7/4. Unrehearsed! Why the hell not, you're only young once. We wrote it up at the time, but in retrospect it's a great case study of the wild and completely unpredictble adventures your life path can dump you into, out of control and totally out of your comfort zone, simply by casually picking up an accordion in your youth.
Holy guacamole! Dumped online 13 years ago and forgotten about, this recording has accumulated over ten thousand views! It's not our finest moment -- unwilling to play anything potentially wrong, all our accompanists retreated to pure percussion mode, leaving Stallman an unassailable train of rhythm to hitch his own wagon to... but he may have been accustomed to conducting the orchestra rather than submitting to its dictates, and consequently the performance suffered some timing issues originating from its lead vocalist. Anyway, it sure as hell hammers home that We Were There, thanks to our oddball association with Free Geek Vancouver, which is now conclusively defunct.
