Monday, August 27, 2007

An Open Invitation and an Offer


Dear Friends,

We love the work you do to fight oppression and this bullshit system of exploitation. We want to support you and what you're doing. Are you interested in having Trash Orchestra perform at your event, protest, or festival?

If you are working to shut down the war machine, environmental destruction, the world free trade efforts, racist and classist mofos, corporate swine and their media lapdogs, repressive laws, the fascist police state, and capitalism itself -- if you are working to support indigenous rights, the freedom of women and children (and men, for that matter), civil liberties and free speech, poor people and homeless folk -- if you are engaged in anarchist and anti-authoritarian struggles -- we want to help!

Trash Orchestra is a marching percussion band – a bone-shaking recycled orchestra. We make percussion on tuned cans, hubcaps and barrels, drums, pieces of sheet metal, and homemade oddities.

We appear invited and uninvited at protests and celebrations, furors and fracases, anywhere there's a need to make a ruckus, to shout out and help right injustice, suffering, and oppression, to make a big noise to celebrate our victories and our losses. Trash Orchestra is intrinsically a radical project.

Please consider inviting us to your event. If you are far from the West Coast, more advance notice is better and maybe some help getting and staying there. But we are game to consider anything.

We'd love to do what we can to support your efforts.

Photos, audio, rants, etc at www.trashorchestra.org

Cheers!

Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Kick-ass Idiosyncratic Drummer Wanted


Trash Orchestra is looking for a beginning to intermediate drummer willing to learn and grow with us. Plus points for tenacity, self-motivation, passion, courage, righteous anger about the state of the world, and experience with non-hierarchical projects.

We are an improvisational marching percussion band – a bone-shaking recycled orchestra. We make percussion on tuned cans, hubcaps and barrels, drums, pieces of sheet metal, and homemade oddities. We are amateurs in the best sense -- from the root of the word, amo -- people who make music for the love of it and as a form of resistance.

Influences: Stomp, Tom Waits, Infernal Noise Brigade, ¡TchKunG!, Rhythms of Resistance, samba, Loyd Family Players, Brass Liberation Orchestra, James Brown, drumlines, Gotan Project, Rage Against the Machine, Gamelan Pacifica, Street Drum Corps, taiko, the military drum bands of our youth, and a dozen other radical marching bands engaged in active resistance.

Vision: We want to see Trash Orchestra grow to dozens of regular players. We'd like to see invites from far and wide pouring in to make noise and celebration in places across the globe. We see everyone in the band becoming virtuosos of their own handmade musical creations. We are ambitious in our plans to conquer the world and make it a better place full of music and dancing and resistance.

We have weekly 2 to 3 hour practices and great gigs coming in. Since this is a labor of love, the orchestra is unpaid, and gig money goes into a communal pot for travel and education.

If you are a drummer with a variety of rhythmic influences and interests and are full of rebellious insolence, we'd like you to play with us. Please send us your interest, your influences, the instruments you play, and your experience level.

Come play with us. Email trash@riseup.net

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Arm the Homeless

On Thursday, we did an impromptu performance to support Homeless Resistance in Santa Cruz.

Indymedia reported it thusly:

TRASH ORCHESTRA CHIMES IN
Trash Orchestra to steel the hearts of the homeless
Thursday Aug 16th, 2007 9:46 AM

Portentous possibility perhaps of playful performance/practice at protest of the predicament of provincial pariahs.

The famous Trash Orchestra has promised to tune up and turn us on at City Hall (809 Center St.) 6-9 PM Thursday August 16. In response, HUFF (Homeless United for Friendship & Freedom) will follow the Orchestra's percussive performance with a showing of the 1994 video "Sitting in Santa Cruz"- by Paul Brindel --on the smallest battery-run TV ever--. Bring blankets and opera glasses.
And we shot back:
Kudos to all who chose to stay another night at the City Hall campout to protest the Sleeping Ban. I got your message and it warmed my hard little heart. I think this creates a lovely double-bind. It forces the city to do something about something they'd prefer to just ignore. But the more they ignore it, the more it can build. Yet, the more they react, the more impetus and momentum they give the lawsuit and resistance. Oh, the hard life of the petty heartless bureaucrat.
And we gained a few loyal followers from this humanitarian mission. Now there are a few homeless folk who when they see us around town raise their fist in the air and chant "Things Break Down!"