Half a decade ago, we made (some 90 seconds or so of) music for Afterland, a collectible card game for smartphones, which launched in October of 2015. Its support from its developers was scattered, and as often happens in this rapidly changing world of tech, it soon disappeared from the marketplace, leaving a wide community of thwarted fans disappointed that they could never again enjoy the game's wonderful sights and sounds.
Well, we can't do much about the sights, but since we never signed a contract with Imaginary Games, the music has remained ours all along - and the time has finally arrived, five years since the game first took flight, for us to fulfil the numerous requests we've received from Afterland's devotees to liberate its soundtrack. Go get your fill at https://creakingplanks.bandcamp.com/
(This Afterland-adjacent artwork of a squeezebox carnie was made by the creative dynamo at the heart of Afterland, Elin Jonsson, for the 2016 installment of the Accordion Noir Festival.) (Speaking of which, you ought to be made aware of that festival's virtual 2020 installment, taking place next weekend!)
I know, I know -- it's the time of year to throwaCreakingPlanksanniversaryconcert. And yet... as Blackbox Squeezebeard discovered at his 40th birthday party last year, the only sure way to ensure a worthwhile Creaking Planks turnout these days is to book a solo gig. So, as to best assure the involvement of many Creaking Planks -- he has invited nearly two dozen of them -- he has booked another solo gig.
This one celebrates the fulfillment of his 2019 New Year resolution to record and share an accordion cover song video every week, a throwback to the last huzzah of the most recent regular incarnation of the Creaking Planks as a band that skipped the late nights at bars and just played songs in their living room for the benefit of the internet. He dubbed the series "Stupid Accordion Tricks", and by gum, he played all the songs -- some of them old Planks standards, others Planks discards, others Planks "don't you dare suggest it!"s. So this Saturday, he descends upon Spartacus Books -- final home to his 57 Varieties open stage series, last-one-standing accessible venue for strangeness on an intimate scale, and, as always, a place where things can happen that simply cannot happen anywhere else... to make something happen that cannot happen anywhere else.
And while he's not making any specific promises, the idea is that there'll be a crew of musical friends on site -- some Planks, some mere 2x4s -- who will take turns joining him for a song or two. (Inadvertently, he's kind of reinvented the "jam" from first principles. Oh well! It should be fun!)
Saturday, January 18th EARLY SHOW: 4-7 pm at SPARTACUS BOOKS (3378 Findlay Street) admission by donation, no one turned away due to lack of funds
We first met D hosting the Creative Coworkers launch party for the eerie mobile game Afterland we wrote and performed music for, which left us casting the gauntlet to its primary artist Elin Jonsson, to have an art exhibition and engage us to perform at it... which we did, back in the same space, at last year's "Echoes and Ripples" kick-off to the 11th annual Accordion Noir Festival. (About which, look out, this year's is coming up in November! But I digress...)
Anyhow, the Creative Coworkers org has moved down the street to a new facility, the Pace (520 Alexander Street), and D invited us back to join a bill hosted by Bailey Creed including a reincarnation / memorial craft project facilitated by Emily Smith and culminating in a rousing set by Turkish tradpunks Something About Reptiles, who we haven't shared a bill with since Valentine's Day 2007, yow! Details on Facebook, tickets $15/20/25, and the party runs from 5:30 pm to half past midnight. If that's not enough seasonal festivity for you I just don't know what to say.
Just when you thought you'd seen your final Creaking Planks video...
Circa 2009, "Accordion" Bruce Triggs was finally getting into the thick of his research, and understanding that the form it would ultimately need to take would be in the book medium. Hosting the Accordion Noir radio program every week had opened the door, but poking his head in he could tell that what lay within was both vast and almost entirely unexplored. If he didn't write this book, no one else would. But first, he had to exorcise some stories he came across, accounts of anecdotes and incidents that were both highly memorable and not entirely bookworthy. And he would exorcise them in song form. There was the Curse of the Andrea Doria, the ship that sank with a hold full of accordions; there was the song about the windjammer musician at the Mississippi crossroads, burning his instrument because it would not accommodate the scales required to perform blues music. (... and also there was "Never Play Your Accordion Naked".)
They were inspired fragments in search of a band! If only Bruce was acquainted with a crack band in search of some original tunes! Waitasec...
Anyhow, ten years later, two full incarnations of the band had risen and fallen, and Bruce had completed his book, "Accordion Revolution". The situation called for a book launch, which called for a small side show of supporting activities. A little musical entertainment! Does anyone have any songs about accordion history? Hang on... I just remembered something!
Here's the page of his book pertaining to this false history. While there was a natural connection between sailors and accordions, it is a simple matter of chronology that could not, despite influential early film adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, have put the instruments in pirates' hands -- unless, as Bruce put it, they were time-traveling pirates. (Time Bandits?) Most likely pirates would have played tunes on fiddles, he reckons, and so we caught Wyoming Johnny during a chance visit into town to lay down the law (of the sea!) on his instrument. (And of course there is the caveat that today Somali piracy has resumed around the Horn of Africa, and there is a Somali accordion tradition, so while it's not impossible that there is such a thing as legitimate pirate accordion music, it is guaranteed that it sounds nothing remotely like anything you might expect.)
Our sole constant Blackbox Squeezebeard is taking it all in stride. The first original arrangement in the Creaking Planks songbook was around the lyrics to Derelict, aka the "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" song. He was recruited into the Planks initially explicitly to facilitate their deliberately heading in a more piratical direction. Have all these years amounted to living a lie? (If so, it was a fun lie!)
As an accordionist in a pirate metal band, this is my new favourite song. https://t.co/10tiH9irWm
Anyhow, after exhuming this incomplete song and polishing it off (this is great, it writes itself! Why didn't we play this years ago? Oh wait, the next verse has a different rhyme scheme and a totally changed meter! Wait, I think I remember now!), we debuted it at Bruce's book launch, and fittingly opened our Wooden Boat Festival sets with it. Where will we be dropping this science next? It's really anyone's guess. Many thanks to Lee Shoal for baking so many tasty little jokes into the lyrics video!
Our band was established, as our name suggests, under the premise that we would be performing shanties to nautical audiences. Then we left it all behind (except for the name, strangely somehow we kept that bit) and skyrocketed to strange heights before splashing down in pieces. Now here we sit, a broken man on a Halifax pier, once again performing songs of the sea to salty crowds.
That's right, folks, the Vancouver Wooden Boat Festival at Granville Island is having us back for the third year in a row; we're playing two of its three days in such company as the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra, the Carnival Band and Salt Thief (and also many wooden boats), and you can find us -- in a radically revised yet somehow totally classic configuration of a totally different band -- headlining this Saturday from 4:15-5 pm and also performing from 12:15-1 pm Sunday the 25th with an oddly familiar set. You can find full details about the free performances out behind the Granville Island Public Market over here, and also further information about how the long-running festival is being run this year. Don't forget your eye patch!
Due to a great conceptual fit, as well as nepotism at the highest levels, the Creaking Planks have been keen fellow travelers with the Accordion Noir crew from just about the very beginning. We have guested on their radio program, playing up its angle to promote and expose the unexpected side of the instrument. (Indeed, we have performed its theme song!) We have played at their festival until they told us we couldn't play there any longer... and then we continued to do so! The radio program's host Bruce Triggs even sat in with us (on, if memory serves correct, Barbadian rhythmic saw) at our weird May Day gig (but I'm being redundant, all our gigs are weird by virtue of including us!) in Grandview Park four years ago.
So it makes a certain kind of sense for us to be performing a couple of songs at the launch for his long-fermenting accordion history book, Accordion Revolution, dropping this Friday night at Accordion Noir ground zero -- the lobby of CFRO Co-Op Community Radio itself, located at Columbia and Hastings. (Sometimes it seemed as though it wasn't clear which of us would publish a book first, Bruce's accordion history or our chronicles of our wasted summers on the road, but it looks like Bruce came out ahead! Guess this means we're next -- maybe we can book him to perform at our launch 8) The launch runs from 7 to 9 pm, the second half of which will be broadcast live over the airwaves! And for those who can't make it out in person, tune in at 100.5 fm (or stream from coopradio.org): the event will be bookended with some Celtic squeezing on the air prior to the launch and some experimental electronic accordion (courtesy of Ross Birdwise) immediately following our broadcast.
Admission is free but seating is limited, so don't delay and reserve your spot on Eventbrite today!
Basically, we can't accept gigs as the Creaking Planks anymore because we can't guarantee you'll get anything beyond a crazy accordion. This isn't to say that you ever just get a crazy accordion, only sometimes we don't learn just what else will be on offer until we take the stage. So it is that this weekend, we'll be delivering up a set of songs from the Creaking Planks end of the musical gutter, by three historical Creaking Planks... billed as "Stupid Accordion Tricks", Blackbeard Squeezebox's solo YouTube accordion cover song series.
We're back at the Accordion Noir stage at the Car-Free Main Street festival that we played at two years ago, still on the west side of the intersection of Main Street at East 21st Avenue. Our set, which should liberally be peppered with such new covers as have been populating the video series, is scheduled to run from 3 to 4 pm. We're part of a program of free musical performances -- with accordion! -- running there continuously from noon through to 7 pm, so if you're at the festival, do please swing by and check out what's being offered, it's all amazing stuff, culminating in a headlining set from our disciples in the Argyle Embargo! As for us, this is just about the end of our rope. You should be catching one or two of us making a joyful noise at the June 28th launch of Bruce Triggs' book Accordion Revolution (7-9 pm at the CFRO Co-Op Community Radio studios) but ... that's grist for a different post.
