I bet you thought you'd seen the last of our video series! Sure, there's been eight months of radio silence, interrupted only by one blip halfway through. Four months' wait is nothing to us -- our band is nearly 12 years old! We have songs that have been in progress longer than Presidential administrations! (Even longer than election campaigns!)
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Anyway, here we are. By which I mean, here I am -- Daisy-Jones and Ludwika wouldn't fit in the hammock, so I believe they were "huh, huh"ing along while packing up their instruments at this point in the set. I don't know how many of the annual Horace Phair parties in Portland we've managed to play -- I like to think that we've at least hit as many as we've missed, but it's hard to prove as they're often not terribly well-documented in the interest of maintaining our ability to freely cross the US border.
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It was Daisy-Jones Locher's first visit in capacity as a Creaking Plank to Portland, Oregon (or "Disneyland for grown-ups" as we like to call it) for our longstanding annual engagement at the Horace Phair party and it was a humdinger! Not only did we have RoJo(tm) the Therapy Llama as our opener, but this performance was just the second act to a will-our-set-happen-won't-it-happen (turns out, it would!) wedding the previous day up at the Kiwanis Camp on nearby Mount Hood. (And a Mazel Tov to Samantha & Chase!) But as much splendid amenity infrastructure as was present at the wedding (zip lines, board games, pizza and yurts), it lacked a hammock in the basement. Happily, the Saluthaus basement addressed that omission, and so our Portland experience managed to be a complete one! Will performing in a hammock become a thing that we revisit endlessly on-stage? I doubt it, but wouldn't that be nice! Supposing we can't perform in a hot tub (I can think of a few obstacles to making that happen) it's a nice compromise. (Nowhere to sling a hammock? How about beanbag chairs? Wait, could anything be less ergonomic?)
The renowned vocal harmonizers of the Creaking Planks have a lot of experience singing on top of a single accordion, but what about an entire orchestra of them?
(Vancouver Squeezebox Circle: 1931 edition.)
The Squeezebox Circle Orchestra is an outreach project of the long-running Vancouver Squeezebox Circle (a slow-fruiting part of Blackbox Squeezebeard's plan for total world domination) and this year they wanted to go Noir in honour of the Accordion Noir Festival's 9th anniversary! But it turns out that it's hard to keep things edgy and noir while playing purely instrumental repertoire on the instrument of champagne music. Often the twist of the lyrics are what makes a song noir, and they're hard to replace in instrumental arrangements. But sadly, no one in the orchestra is a confident public singer. If only they knew of someone who might rise to the occasion...
You can probably see how this one turns out! Happily, the Creaking Planks volunteered four vocalists for nearly a half-dozen songs in their set! It feels almost indulgent and lazy to be singing without also playing our instruments, but sometimes it's just not all about us, y'know?
Anyhow, we'll be joining the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra for two performance dates coming up (hopefully more in the future), first at Artful Sundays (where we recently performed) up this week, Sunday September 4th, somewhere between 2:30 and 5 pm at the Napier Greenway just off of Commercial Drive... and then again a week later, at the closing event of the Accordion Noir Festival at Spartacus Books, "Accordion Crimes", from 2-6 pm. The first performance is free, the second is by donation (and boasts a ton of other entertainment to boot), so please don't hesitate to come get an earful!
As part of the veritable invasion of accordion music descending upon Vancouver for the 9th annual Accordion Noir Festival this September (you remember, the one that said we'd played our final set there), we're performing at a "way off Broadway" side stage helping to whip things up into a frenzy at the recently-relocated Downtown Farmers Market -- now in the plaza at Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton Street) -- busking from 4-6 pm with a rump Planks ensemble on the festival's opening night, Thursday September 8th, along with touring fest performer Jet Black Pearl from France (by way of Portland!)
Ploughing right through our schedule of summer performances, the next is ahead of us on the afternoon of Sunday, August 14th. We'll be playing from 2:30-5 pm in the open area at Commercial and Napier as part of the Britannia Community Centre's Artful Sundays, so please consider joining us for an afternoon of outdoor acoustic music just off Commercial Drive!
Every three years orso, the Creaking Planks have a great, strange gig at the Gallery Gachet -- for decades, a critical hub of art therapy active in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. (And even at satellite venues, the Gachet has helped us to have some of our most memorable performance experiences off-site!)
They have recently had half of their funding cut -- the entirety that was provided by VCH -- and consequently we volunteered our services for a fundraiser concert to benefit their operations. There has been a whole schedule of fundraiser benefits scheduled, and our number has come up Saturday July 23rd, from 7-10 pm, at the Lost and Found Cafe (at 33 W Hastings St.) We're on the bill with K!mmortal and Mourning Coup, so it's a hot line-up and an extremely good cause, so show up early and be prepared to give 'til it hurts at the silent auction and cash bar. Admission is $10-25 sliding scale but, in true East Van style, "no one turned away for lack of funds, we give what we can!" This is just us, giving what we can. Please come join us!
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!)
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!)
