If you have eleven minutes to spare or even just 3 minutes now and 8 minutes later do yourself a favor and sit back and watch & listen to this wonderful Swedish, music-driven, short film, titled Music For One Apartment And Six Drummers from 2001. Directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and featuring the drummers Johannes Björk, Magnus Börjeson, Marcus Haraldson, Fredrik Myhr, Sanna Persson, and Anders Vestergard it is the simple story of these six creative percussionists (a drum gang) who patiently sit in their Volvo outside the apartment home of strangers, patiently waiting for them to leave so that they can break and enter and then make sweet rhythmic music utilizing numerous household items (plus imagination) as they go from room to room - with ten minutes to commit their drum crime. Nice!
If you have eleven minutes to spare or even just 3 minutes now and 8 minutes later do yourself a favor and sit back and watch & listen to this wonderful Swedish, music-driven, short film, titled Music For One Apartment And Six Drummers from 2001. Directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and featuring the drummers Johannes Björk, Magnus Börjeson, Marcus Haraldson, Fredrik Myhr, Sanna Persson, and Anders Vestergard it is the simple story of these six creative percussionists (a drum gang) who patiently sit in their Volvo outside the apartment home of strangers, patiently waiting for them to leave so that they can break and enter and then make sweet rhythmic music utilizing numerous household items (plus imagination) as they go from room to room - with ten minutes to commit their drum crime. Nice!
Due to some unfortunate miscommunications between the staff here at the Amoeblog, two of us ended up interviewing the same musician, Neal Morgan, about his solo debut.
Fortunately, the interviews are vastly different, due to my professional and honed skill as a journalist devoted to hard-hitting storytelling and dedication to factual analysis, and the other interviewer, Miss Ess, who prefers a more “whimsical” and, shall we say, lying-er approach to writing.
You can read this other "interview" by clicking on this link right here.
Due to his tight schedule of touring and promoting the new album, To The Breathing World, Neal was under the weather and frequently distracted during the following interview, which resulted in many of his answers being garbled and unintelligible. (Confidentially, I think alcohol may have been a contributing factor to this. That’ll teach me to get drunk before an interview!) I therefore had to rely on memory and occasional paraphrasing in transcribing the following Q & A. Even so, I was able to capture the spirit of our conversation, from Neal's obsession with "crushing" to the revelation of his suicidal fantasies. Read on…
Neal Morgan before the plastic surgery
How did you pick up playing the drums? What is it that drew you to them so strongly - so much so that any other attempts to follow other dreams were crushed?
Fortunately, the interviews are vastly different, due to my professional and honed skill as a journalist devoted to hard-hitting storytelling and dedication to factual analysis, and the other interviewer, Miss Ess, who prefers a more “whimsical” and, shall we say, lying-er approach to writing.
You can read this other "interview" by clicking on this link right here.
Due to his tight schedule of touring and promoting the new album, To The Breathing World, Neal was under the weather and frequently distracted during the following interview, which resulted in many of his answers being garbled and unintelligible. (Confidentially, I think alcohol may have been a contributing factor to this. That’ll teach me to get drunk before an interview!) I therefore had to rely on memory and occasional paraphrasing in transcribing the following Q & A. Even so, I was able to capture the spirit of our conversation, from Neal's obsession with "crushing" to the revelation of his suicidal fantasies. Read on…
Neal Morgan before the plastic surgery
How did you pick up playing the drums? What is it that drew you to them so strongly - so much so that any other attempts to follow other dreams were crushed?
To call the above drum solo "cheesy" would not be an insult, but rather an accurate description of the art installation piece entitled "Cheesy Cheese Kit Diptych" in which the drums being played are rounds of cheese. The musician working the cheese-as-percussion is Dutch improvisational jazz drummer Han Bennink. The kit he is playing was made by artist Walter Willems in an installation from three years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.
Willems built the Cheese Kit Diptych installation, which consists of two drum kits. One has full rounds of real cheese (Dutch cheese, of course) propped atop drum stands. The other kit is built out of plastic cheese replicas, the kind that are used in store display windows. Apparently the reason Willems, who is Dutch, chose cheese and also the clogs-as-percussion bit at the beginning, was to mock and reinforce the international stereotype of the Dutch by using classic Dutch export products as its main ingredient.
The video of the drum performance by Han Bennink above was recorded on June 17, 2005 and reportedly was a featured artwork in the Demons Stole My Soul: rock 'n roll drums in contemporary art exhibition. As part of the performance Bennink also played a conventional drum kit.
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Amoeba and the Amoeba Music mark and logo are trademarks of Amoeba Music Inc.
The views and opinions expressed in Amoeblog are those of the individual bloggers and not necessarily those of Amoeba Music.