Glove of Sound
(2011) Microblister

For this song, Dean, Mark and Stuart utilize, the Musclewire. They added a truck's suspension spring, garage door springs and a hand-cranked winch to an amplified steel cable that is stretched between the three of them on lineman's belts. William plays slide electric bass, plucked banjo style.

A part of the project enabled by the arts grant Savage Aural Hotbed received from the Jerome Foundation was the creation of, "rhythmic building blocks," short, simple beats that could be arranged into myriad configurations to create new songs, or musical exercises similar to practicing scales or arpeggios. Barney is a song assembled using some of these musical components. Mark plays the Re-bar-imbau (an electro-acoustic version of the Brazilian berimbau); Stuart plays the Socket Blocks (graphite fiber prosthetic limb sockets mounted on a rack and played like a xylophone); Dean plays a plastic barrel and car spring; whilst William plays bass drum, snare drum and cymbals.

A song about getting up early and going to work, William plays trombone, and the other guys play various drums, cymbals, saw blades and hunks of pipe.

Stuart came up with the idea of mounting contact microphones to gloves so, literally, anything we hold in our hands or touch can be amplified. A steel grating and 5 foot long pipe are what he bangs on. Dean taps on a plastic water jug then drops aluminum rods onto a cinder block. Mark starts out stroking rosined, aluminum singing rods, switches to a real, but obscure percussion instrument called a Flexatone, and then finishes the song on a 55 gallon metal barrel. William blows on his inventions, the Meltonium (a plastic pipe with a trombone mouthpiece on one end and a funnel on the other; and the Slide Clarinet.

The "rhythmic building blocks" mentioned earlier were also used to compose this song. William, Stuart and Dean perform on fairly conventional drums and Mark plays his PVC Bagpipes and the Console Snorkelhorn; vacuum cleaner powered wind instruments he constructed from plumbing materials

This solo endeavor is performed by Stuart, without overdubs, on his invention the VaJazzalyzer®. From a large framework hang a collection of springs, rods, and chunks of metal. Using the gloves of sound and holding various drumsticks, welding brushes, and cooking whisks; he runs the sounds into an electronic looping station to sculpt a song by adding and subtracting tracks in real time.

Dean and Stuart playing on the Socket Blocks (graphite fiber prosthetic limb sockets mounted on a rack and played like a xylophone)

Sometimes we find new song ideas by seeing how rhythms in different time signatures relate to each other...In this case, 5 and 4. Stuart accents every five beats while Dean plays a 4/4 beat. Mark alternates between a backbeat feel and the rhythm produced by the combination of the two other drummers' beats. William uses the same rhythm on bass and vocals, but also does a jazz like walking bass pattern.

Mark overdubbed all of the basic rhythms from Alberta with a Latin American and Indonesian feel.

Everyone plays their Barney parts on a giant, 750 gallon plastic barrel, with mikes on the inside as well as the outside.