The first vienna vegetable orchestra plays music exclusively
on vegetable instruments: carrots and cucumbers instead of guitars
and drums... or, with their new cd automate, a cuke-o-phon
and radish-marimba instead of laptop and sampler. The music presents
a transfer of electronic music pieces and structures to the instruments
of the vegetable garden. The first viennese vegetable orchestra
consists exclusively of vegetable-based instruments, although
where necessary, additional kitchen utensils such as knives or
mixers are employed. This creates an autonomous and totally novel
type of sound which cannot be achieved with conventional musical
instruments. Marinated sound ideas and canned listening habits
beg for expansion! This music is a playful departure from the
conventional way of looking at vegetables as mere means to still
an appetite. The instruments are subsequently made into a soup
so that the audience can then enjoy them a second time.
View
The Soup Recipe
Sculpting their veggies into flutes, marimbas and sundry other
precussive instruments, the orchestra blow, stroke and beat them,
guided by various forms of notation. Most of the pieces revolve
around insistent, primitive beats, topped off with a drizzle of
rustling, breathy stabs, squeaks and keening whistles. The Basic
Channel-esque "Greenhouse" is powered by a bassline that could
have emerged from a knackered old synth, while the aptly titled
"Noiz" is a texturally dense, tightly arranged slice of abstraction
that'd give Merzbow a run for his money.
Though the orchestra employ two sound engineers, their job is
to catch the presumably tiny sounds generated rather than mess
them around with DSP trickery. That would be missing the point;
the orchestra are interested primarily in live performance. Their
virtuosity shines through on "Radioaktivitat". The beauty of this
record is that after a while you can stop wondering about exactly
what they're doing and what they're doing it with, and lose yourself
in the strange little sonic landscapes this lot conjure up. Plus
if you go to one of their gigs, you'll also get to eat the soup
they cook with the instruments at the end of the performance.
