2016-06-11: Major Tom (Coming Home)

As quickly as our campaign of video clip world domination began, one mere month later it found itself on indefinite hiatus. The reasons why are difficult to articulate (and if we can't do it, who else do you think is more qualified to do so?) but the good news is that, at some perhaps more moderate pace, it has resumed, and for the first time in half a year we present the next video in our YouTube series! This one is our take on transhumanist anthem "Major Tom (Coming Home)", originally by West German Peter Schilling waaaay back in 1983. The song makes use of the "Major Tom" character who was the subject of David Bowie's 1969 song Space Oddity (and indeed, when we announce we'll be playing "Major Tom", a lot of people expect that we'll be playing Space Oddity. No dice! Bowie is a well we simply haven't yet managed to drink from... an omission we should perhaps look into addressing. But I digress!)

Here's this week's video! Enjoy! Planks trivia: our "bellows-shake" arrangement of Major Tom was first conceived and envisioned for our 2009 performance at the art opening for Bryce Rasmussen's "Gutter-Punk Space Opera" show at the Gallery Gachet. Now we're still bumbling along like, well, the fool who persists in his folly, while the Gachet has found its core funding cut after 21 years of providing art therapy to people with mental health issues, so we're pledging five cents for every view this video gets... just kidding, that won't ever amount to a hill of beans! But we will be strapping our instruments on in support of the troubled (yet essential) institution next month, so stay tuned!

(PS, Mazel Tov to the group of freshly minted adults we got to klez up at a B'nai Mitzvah at the Peretz Centre!)

2016-06-25: Accordion Noir presents -- Button-String Solidarity!

Vancouver's radical bookstore Spartacus Books plays host to community events that simply could never occur anywhere else. Its monthly Squeezebox Circle and Fiddle Jams have joined forces to present you three ensembles for a memorable night of acoustic music!

Like a force of nature sweeping up from the wilds of Washington State (and then showering the trembling victims with an assortment of delicious bonbons), Tsunami Piñata brings in its accordion-and-banjo wake a formidable array of high-energy songs from dozens of folk traditions from Chilean to Celtic to Czech. (And that's just the "C"s!)

With fire and precision, the feisty fiddlers of the Violent Violins soak up only the most slippery of folk melodies and then let them wriggle loose on the floor before you, taming drunken melodies and the extraneous beats so beloved of dancers with a lock of horsehair and a raised foot.

(and of course you already know and love the Creaking Planks!)

(PS, congrats to Chihiro and Todd!)

2016-06-19: Creaking Planks headline the Britannia Summer Solstice Coffeehouse

So. It's been quite a while since our last public gig. Opportunities have arisen and been retracted due to complications, renovations, and other problems. We didn't think it'd be quite this long before announcing our next concert, but here we are: we were unavailable to perform at the Britannia Community Centre's Spring Equinox coffeehouse, so they asked if we might be able to make plans to feature at their Summer Solstice coffeehouse. Sure thing! (And not a bad general approach: if not now, then how about one season from now?)

There you have it. The poster has all the details: it runs from 7-10 pm, Sunday June 19th, with us taking up the final hour. We'll be sharing the stage with Backspin, the Solidarity Notes Labour Choir, and Lori Weidenhammer. The fun all happens down in the Al Mattison Lounge, and admission is free. What more could you want to know?

Bring your Dad, 'cause it's also Father's Day. If you don't like crowds, don't come early -- because it's also Car Free Day on Commercial Drive! But our 7 pm start time should give the milling ravers ample time to pack up the turntables and fun fur and clear out.

More details on further performances this year (we're not quite ready to start hyping our 12th anniversary show, though plans are in the works) coming up soon! (And, hopefully: more videos! We haven't forgotten!)

R.I.P. the Railway Club (1931-2016)

Opening for Oh My Darling, March 3, 2011. (Photo by Mark Donovan.)

We were basically a generation too late to appreciate the apex of Vancouver's live music nightlife, with the Town Pump merely a distant, hazy memory by the time we hit the scene, and even the Starfish Room and Richard's on Richard's left by the wayside by the time we started making plans to take the stage. The somewhat stranger territory left for us to claim was in splendidly marginal rooms such as The Sugar Refinery and Ms. T's Cabaret. (Also other since-departed venues that briefly played host to the magic, like Cafe Montmartre and the Little Mountain Gallery.) But there was one room we could name that wouldn't make our parents scratch (or shake, more likely) their head.

At Memewar issue 8 launch, Feb 19, 2009.

We just celebrated our 11th anniversary; our first appearance at the Railway was a month shy of a decade ago, one of T. Nile's Connect nights April 24, 2006, meaning it had taken us a little bit more than a year to go from freshly-formed to semi-legitimate. (Many people's recollections are of playing their bands' first shows at the Railway, which makes me wonder if booking standards weren't a little slacker back in the Golden Age.) We were back again for the Family Stump Xmas Extravaganza Dec 10th of that year, and were rather getting used to the idea of becoming regulars. That never quite ended up happening, but we did gather momentum even as the venue itself shed it, peaking with a series of appearances there through 2008 and 2009 as the Memewar magazine house band.

The gig-by-gig analysis would put you all to sleep (and then we played Creep, and THEN, we played Dead Man's Pants... again! and THEN...) but you can enjoy this partial tapestry, in reverse order, of some of our numerous appearances at the Railway Club:

(Dieter caught us missing out on one: we hadn't gotten our hands on a copy of the poster, but it turns out he still had the original hanging on his wall. If anyone else has any more missing ones, I would happily throw them in the mix here.)

We didn't know how good we had it when the sun set on Janet Forsyth's tenure over the club's booking and administration. Her successor Steve demonstrated a keener concern for the bottom line -- could we put a band with more draw on the bill? Thanks, now we can draw a big enough crowd for our paid admissions to cover the salary of a staff member working at the door! -- but the irritating nickle-and-diming was in retrospect more understandable upon learning that the venue was paying $10 000 in rent, monthly, back in 2008. (Our "aha" moment was when our band pulled in more money playing to a dozen friends for an hour at a field house in a Vancouver park than we did performing for three hours to a crowd of over 50 at the Railway. You can make money and you can live out rockstar fantasies, but not always at the same place and time.) Over the course of his era the Railway Club suffered a hollowing-out, as regular and long-time staff, especially those on the organized labour side of things, disappeared as regular fixtures of the cozy space. The Railway provided a fertile ground for us to revisit our stalled ambitions to host annual birthday concerts for ourselves, starting there in our sixth year and continuing through years seven, eight and nine (indeed a tradition that continues on today -- elsewhere, as the more birthday visits we had there, the less like home it felt, our friends in the peanut gallery of regulars having found friendlier haunts.)

All the same, things manage to sour but still persist every day, as we continue along our separate paths and grow apart, like estranged adults who still exist, just not in each others' everyday lives. I feel much the same way about Downtown Vancouver (indeed, playing at the Railway was one of my very few reasons to ever venture in there at night) and indeed it's not hard to imagine that I'll feel this way about Vancouver proper before too long. But I digress. An institution is easy to take for granted, and despite the relatively recent announcement of the business being up for sale, it was impossible to expect that it might cease to be. But here we are.

Before I go off on any more tangents, let me introduce this post's true function: an excellent excuse to dig up and share some photos of Good Times being had with Creaking Planks at the Railway Club. I believe these are from our 8th anniversary concert with T. Nile and Raghu Lokanathan, a Deet Street blowout with perhaps the most Planks ever on-stage at the same time and a series of encores demanded by an audience who simply would not allow us to leave. (Taking a page from the "That's My Brain... And You're Killing It!" playbook, escape was finally achieved only by leading the band off the stage, through the crowd, and into the bathroom.)

This room is heating up... quick, deploy the secret chord!

All right, that's enough fun. Lucy, settle them down with the moo tube!

No good, it's backfired, they're dancing harder than ever! We're going to have to warp out of here! Hold on to your music stands everyone... in 3... 2... 1... BLAST OFF!

After opening for us (he headlined, but playing last interferes with his libation schedule) at the First Annual Accordion Noir Festival Of Squeeze, our patron saint Geoff Berner staggered over to us and sagely proclaimed that on any given night, somewhere on the planet, some band is the best band in the world... and that on that night, with that crowd (going down the infamous Railway stairs and out around the corner!) suitably warmed up by Geoff's best antics, that band was us. So let's remember those good times and rage (rage!) against the dying of the light. Good luck, Vancouver -- you're going to need it filling the Railway's boots!

2016-01-29: 11th Anniversary Party wrap-up

View from my perch at the @creakingplanks 11th anniversary show at the Wise. pic.twitter.com/AcrVMPRHQM

— Graham Ballantyne (@gnb) January 30, 2016

We somehow pulled it off, friends; after eleven years in show business we still have no idea if anyone will come when we put on a concert, so we make sure for our birthdays that at least we will have supporting acts whose performances we will enjoy.

But we achieved a double rainbow: the masses (fans, friends and complete strangers) found their way to the room in addition to the night being stacked with unique and compelling acts, so in a sense -- we won the lottery.

Kate & Rich kicked things off with some ambient wandering minstrelsy, playing acoustically to the crowd without getting all that electronic gear in the way between their songs and the listeners' joy.

Clara Shandler the Sidewalk Cellist offered up a solo set of unrivalled intensity (pictured above), demonstrating greater passion in her between-song banter than most performers can manage to pull off in the heart of their act.

The Myrtle Family Band were an all-singing, all-dancing serving of the most charming kind of awkwardness, and then there were us -- a different kind of charm, a different speed of awkward.

Nine of us took to the stage last night (the record to beat is 14 simultaneous Planks), including an historical Plank who we just get one show a year with (our annual anniversary show, naturally) and a newly-minted Plank on a fittingly bizarro instrument (the guitarviol).

Also: full drum kit! It makes a difference in a big room. (It makes a bigger difference in a small room, but in the other direction 8) Our set was focused and strategic, with a mix of cover songs and originals and a bias toward more recent arrangements -- of things like our soundtrack to the 2015 mobile game Afterland (free to play on Android and iOS devices if you want to hear the rest of it!)

Creeking Planks plays the song of Afterland #afterland #imaginarygames #creekingplanks
Posted by Elin Jonsson on Friday, January 29, 2016

Also we somehow somewhat successfully revived the subject of our most popular YouTube video to date, that Gumnaam-Ghost World-Heineken classic Jaan Pehechaan Ho, enhanced (because life imitates art) with some inspired tie-around bandit masks that very effectively interfered with our ability to read our bloody charts for the complicated song.

But people danced anyway. Hello, Friday night, were you just resolved to dance anyway? Hell, people danced like a flock of migrating, spawning flying fish during our encore presentation of O Superman. 11 years on, and that was still a first.
(Also, though it was very touch and go for a while there, as part of the anniversarial festivities we did succeed at getting another batch of our Creaking Planks t-shirts made up for the occasion, meaning that we are once again open for business!)

Effusive thanks are in order -- to Angela and John for holding down the ticket booth all night; to Jasmine, Bo & Karen for making our business with the WISE Hall so eerily frictionless; to Bruce at Accordion Noir, Katheryn at the Accordion Noir Festival, and Pam at CFRO Co-Op Radio for helping to establish the framework needed for this concert to be possible; to all of the musicians who played on the bill with us, and all of the audience members who took a chance on our box-of-chocolates lineup. And to all Creaking Planks, past and present: it's been a wild ride, thanks for helping us to get there! (To get where, exactly? Why, here, of course!) (And... thanks to Graham for all of these skilled photos with which I belatedly beefed up this post, many of the best pix I couldn't even contrive an excuse to fold in here!)
We're already booking shows for quite a bit later in 2016, plus now that we got this epic undertaking off our plate you can look forward to us resuming our living room video series, so ... stay tuned!
Cheers and Plank on!

2016-01-20: Creaking Planks live on Accordion Noir Radio!

In promotion of our fabulous 11th Anniversary extravaganza coming up next Friday (, Jan 29th, with the Myrtle Family Band and the Sidewalk Cellist), we opted to one more time sit in with our presenting media sponsor Accordion Noir Radio, that wacky weekly all-accordion alt-accordion radio program / online music stream running out of CFRO Co-Op Community Radio (100.5 fm). (Yes, the same folks who, in a roundabout fashion, present that annual festival in September.)

We rolled in direct from rehearsal five minutes away, and after a couple of moments getting set up (many of us! The most on the radio in many a long year, that's for sure) under cover of our YouTube videos and a nominal acknowledgement of Leadbelly's birthday (Did You Know: the Creaking Planks performed In The Pines, once, on request from our early saw player at a curious gig at the Memelab?) (I'll answer that one for you: if you weren't there, you didn't know.) we started playing music. And, pausing only for rambling diatribes from a confused accordionist torn between being guest and host on the radio, we didn't really stop until the show was done!

You can enjoy our appearance here in an audio stream from the radio station. We run through a wide variety of Planks tunes old and new, covers and originals, giving listeners a good taste of what they can expect on Jan 29th (though that show will have more guest performers and ... a slightly more elaborate microphone setup) without giving it all away. Happily, the radio setting did an excellent job at picking up our new vein of multi-vocal arrangements, so you can enjoy moments of sublime beauty in the songs between spells of perplexing absurdity in the banter setting them up: everything balanced and in moderation, as it should be!

Cheers and see you soon!

2015 In Review

Every year is very different. This sounds obvious on the surface but when you consider the possibility of your returning to a well-known location to do a familiar activity -- sometimes even performing the exact same songs as the previous time you were there -- things can blur into a muddy kind of sameness; even if you colour with all the different crayons, use them all on the same spot and you still end up with brown.

So in considering the Creaking Planks' Best-of-2015 top-10 list of highlights, we assigned a high rating to several experiences which were, even after 10 years in show business, unique "first time"s. (Then again, returning to a ritual thought forever extinguished can lend it further resonance, like an eerie echo through time.) So the list isn't one of "business as usual" items, but rather of "new business", with a touch of "revisiting old business".

#10. December 6th -- opening for Portland's Professor Gall & Victoria's Carolyn Mark at the WISE Hall.

Here it is, our most recent gig! It was a gas! The supporting acts were hot stuff, we FINALLY got to share a stage with Professor Gall, the evening built and built, and we sounded great (the secret is: give everyone a vocal mic) ... which means as a warm-up for our 11th anniversary show coming up on Jan 29th, it passed with flying colours!

#9. July 23rd -- Bike Smut at the Rio Theatre

Something as unlikely as we are and as old had somehow continued to strangely thrive in the shadows of what has in the meantime become relatively mainstreamed: bicycle culture. It's just an everyday activity now, not a radical movement nor a cult anymore, so the outrageous excesses on its fringes have disappeared... or so it seemed. Turns out, they were just on the road the whole time! No, we never got to strut across the stage at a second instalment of the B:C:Clettes Rouge et Noir Cabaret, but this was the next best thing: a packed house at the Rio Theatre featuring Portland's own RevPhil presenting a program of bicycle pornography. What were we doing on that bill? We had no real business being there... but because we had been there, then, our presence gave our old cronies the right feel. (Also that night: old cronies giving each other other kinds of feels.)

#8. September 13 -- Guerrilla Accordion Noir Parade in Grandview Park with Kate & Rich

The Accordion Noir Festival has an uneasy history with accordion parades. They look good on paper, but are a huge hassle to organize and coordinate in real life. (Get everyone playing the same song at the same time? That's for Kimberley, and look what good it did them! We'd just try to get everyone playing in the same key and stand back!) The first few years of festivals featured gloriously messy chaotic processions (culminating in year 4's line of garbage-bag-clad accordionists performing moistly in single file on Commercial Drive during a nighttime downpour). Since then, the festival has seen a three-person parade, and a one-person parade, and then gave up the ghost.

But in 2015 an accordion parade was on the bill -- listed on the poster, pledged and promised to the accordion nation. The festival was obligated to deliver an accordion parade! So we, uh, threw a flashmob together at the last minute, violating the previous year's proclamation that 2014 would be our FINAL year at that festival, and improvised our way through a circuit of Trout Lake with Kate & Rich from Halifax, delighting the Goth clothing swap in progress at the scene.

#7. March 25 -- an intimate evening of Planking at Skinny Fat Jack's

A small show in a big room is a problem. A big show in a small room is a problem (hello, Mezamazing.) A big show in a big room is... well, a lot of work. And a small show in a small room is just... a good fit. Casual, intimate, the acoustics are great and the food is, too.

#6, February 6th -- Burning 'er down at Bernerland

Really with a roster of East Van All-Star talent such as this event garnered, it was an honour simply to be included. Geoff has been a guiding inspiration for us (hello, reason I picked up the accordion in the first place), a pillar of the Accordion Noir Festival (opening for us in its first year!) and an enduring force, so it was a pleasure and an honour to celebrate him in this fashion... even if the rest of the band vetoed my proposal of a Richard Cheese-style lounge-singer rendition of Ich A Mazeldicker Yid. (To be fair, it probably would have gotten us uninvited from Ashkenaz.)

#5. January 29th -- Improvising loops beneath the blue whale skeleton at the Beatty Biodiversity Museum

Here we are living the dream of re-enacting @TheDecemberists Mariner's Revenge Song at @beatymuseum . pic.twitter.com/8tNdtndhla

— Creaking Planks (@creakingplanks) January 30, 2015

Location, location, location! A pity we couldn't have played a public event there at the Beatty Biodiversity Museum, but if you find yourself needing to improvise whale-song cello loops for ambient conference sonic wallpaper, you couldn't pick a more magnificent site!

#4. November 5th -- Our video series launched!

Because what we do is remarkable and extraordinary, and because occasionally people are left grasping for words to describe our ineffable "us"ness (it took us a long time to arrive at "jug band of the damned" and even that is only slightly clearer than mud), from just about our first performance people in the audience have been holding up their cameras (smartphones, today) and taking shaky, poorly-lit, terrible-sounding video clips of portions of our songs -- and then using them to represent us to the world. All bands are familiar with the situation: somehow, Joe Smartphone never catches your best performance of your best song with good sound... immortalizing your "doing your best under adverse circumstances" as just "... your best ..." and that one night with the hangover or the allergies or the broken amp will invariably be the representative of your work to encounter your idols in the wild. It turns out that you can't leave your social media presence up to chance!

In 2015 we resolved to take these matters into our own hands. as well as giving the band a fun and convenient excuse to get together for regular practices, workshops and arranging sessions independent of sporadic gigs and make videos of winning tunes from our rehearsals for the benefit of people who don't, won't or can't make it out to our live performances. (And heck, maybe these demonstrations will sway some minds and stir up some interest in our gigs: if you're at work, quit; if you're in prison, BREAK OUT!)

The cocktail calculations on our fresh digital video campaign have us reaching nearly 800 people over a two month period, a long tail that will only continue to grow (-- especially if you subscribe for automatic notification of future video postings!) And when's the last time we performed in a room with a capacity of 800 audience members? Also, this way we don't have to stay up until 2 am waiting for the bar to finish counting the tills... we just finish our tea, thank our hosts and nip off to our beds at a wholly reasonable hour. Getting old, or working smarter instead of harder? (The truth is: it's a combination of both.)

#3. October 1st -- Afterland launched with our soundtrack on board!

"When's the last time we performed in a room with a capacity of 800 audience members?" We composed and recorded some music in 2015 for Afterland, a collectable card game for mobile devices, and through it, our tunes have already been heard by over one hundred thousand Android players around the world... and that's not even including the iOS version! Fine-tuning the bespoke melodies for app use was an exciting new challenge, boiling hours of work into minutes of music, and the end product is a lush and truly extraordinary experience. Did I mention that you can play it for free?

#2. January 16th -- Creaking Planks T-shirts for sale!

Having fans at your concert is great; they're there, enjoying what you're doing while you're doing it. Getting them to take your album home is also pretty swell -- they can enjoy what you do even when you're not there. But wearing a band's T-shirt transforms you into a walking, talking endorsement for that band from the moment you wake up until you hit the sack hours later, long after you'd have taken the album off of "repeat". So now our fans have the option of relishing in the glory that is us all the live-long day. (Our old website is feeling a bit prickly these days, but the online shirt-ordering functionality should still be solid. Why not give it a try?)

#1. January 16th -- Creaking Planks 10th anniversary show with Ehren Salazar, Al Mader and Travis Bernhardt

The thing about our anniversary concerts is that we don't just cope with what we're dealt like at any other show -- here we get the chance to cherry-pick what the night will look like, playing to no one's tastes beyond our own (... and those who share our good taste, that is 8) The idea is that even if the turnout is a bust, the line-up will be highly entertaining for us... but strangely, when we program acts we love, the audiences have a way of coming out of the woodwork and enjoying them along with us. In this case the three acts were all old friends we've had a long association with, so our annual anniversary concert isn't just a gig, it's more of a homecoming.

And, not to belabour the point, but don't forget that we do have one coming up!