2010 Winter/Spring — What We Missed Telling You About PLUS a homophonic side project

For a season, from mid-December to mid-April, we temporarily lost control of our domain name (in fact, it switched off while I was in the middle of composing a promotional draft here!) and information about the Planks was unavailable from this site. We still played lots of great shows, however, and this is just an attempt to keep the historical record in order. Just because nothing turned up on the website didn’t mean that we weren’t busy little buccaneers!

2009-12-26 – the Maclean’s Boxing Day party in Deep Cove.
2010-01-06 – at Bandidas’ anniversary party.

2010-01-12 – Blackbox Squeezebeard on Melodies in Mind.
2010-01-14 – at Trees Organic Coffee.
2010-01-15 – featured at Beats on Broadway.

2010-01-16 – at One Two One Studios‘ launch.

2010-01-22 – A Night of Pleasing Squeezing with Renee de la Prade and Amber Lee Baker (the Accordion Babes), Gerry O’Brien, and Jack Garton of Maria in the Shower at Cafe Montmartre.

2010-02-26 – Dollhouse Tea Party.

2010-02-28 – Another Night of Pleasing Squeezing with Jeff Andrew, Marie-Josee Houle, Jason Webley at the LMG.

2010-03-28 – with Convertible Kids at the LMG.

2010-04-08 – with Raghu Lokanathan trio at the LMG.

2010-04-15 – Can You Hear Me Now? F*Word fundraiser at the Railway Club.

2010-04-21 – at Ubuntu LoCo at the HD Lab.

We’ve enjoyed a couple of shows since that we’ve mostly been able to keep you abreast about here, and are on the verge of splitting for the summer (one more — set aside noon, June 13th!), but before we go we can tie some Plankian threads together with a Go-Your-Own-Waste presentation of the Music Waste festival featuring frequent CP collaborators Erin Graves and Ehren Salazar with bonafide Plank Eryn Holbrook (aka Daisy Jones-Locher of the santur) and marvelous improv outsider weirdo Aaron Read at the traditional Plank venue of the Little Mountain Gallery (195 E. 26th at Main). This Friday, June 4th! Only $5, and free for festival passholders! 8 pm ’til we’re done! The most homophonic bill of the year: Erin, Ehren, Eryn and Aaron in Err On: the Side of Caution. It’ll be a slice. (Actually, imagine a pizza divided into four slices, all of which are different flavours, and at least one slice of which isn’t even pizza… but maybe apple pie.)

2009-09-11: Creaking Planks headline the second annual Accordion Noir Festival’s launch party at Cafe Montmartre

We had so much fun closing last year’s Accordion Noir Festival in the middle of the night (sold out, line-up down the stairs and out on the sidewalk) that we just had to open a supplementary stage at this year’s festival to give us another chance to play at it (while opening some room on the mainstage the next day for Story and Jason Webley.)  Seeking some squeezy acts with smaller stage footprints and performers with lower individual profiles in this town, we managed to secure a very exciting line-up of some of Vancouver’s choicest bellowers:  Andy Fielding, Dawn Zoe (Alchemy), Tina Tew (Wintermitts), Barbara Adler (of the Fugitives), Joanna Chapman-Smith, the Balkan brass razzmatazz of Mezamazing at what can charitably be described as long last… and the Planks close again, because why mess with a tradition of such success?  We’ll be starting at 8 pm and seeing just how much we can squeeze in by 1 am.  We play for tips at Cafe Montmartre (4362 Main at 28th Ave.) but a suggested donation would be seven dollars for all these great acts!

2008-01-25: Creaking Planks third birthday at the Dark Blue Horse Cabaret and two promos for it

Sarah MacDougall presided over the “raw & cooked” series of new work at the Western Front that was the Creaking Planks’ first public performance back on January 20th, 2005, so when accordionist Blackbox Squeezebeard (who first met Lee Shoal + Lord Eel that night while promoting the performance poetry cabaret “That’s My Brain… And You’re Killing It!”) somehow got invited to host an alt-country concert she was running in that same space (with her band, the Heroes — a truly heroic Shawn Killaly, Tim Tweedale, Russell Sholberg, Joanna Chapman-Smith, and “Sexy Pierre”) and at that magical time of year, he immediately got on board and brought along as many Plankian stowaways as he could hide under his coat. Also on the bill is AC Fields (once stopped in her tracks dropping off flyers at a CP practice session in the LMS gallery and compelled to sing along) and her Dark Blue Horse (Pierre Lumoncel, Larissa Ardis, Elise Boeur, and Christine Allen), giving the fabulous multimedia (courtesy, presumably, of Aleah Dunfield) cabaret its name. Rounding things off are Roger Dean Young and the Tin Cup, who none of us have ever heard but who we all agree have a most intriguing name.

This show runs the night of Friday, January 25th from 8 pm through midnight at the Western Front (303 E. 8th Ave at Scotia), with Planks shaking things up before, after and between sets, but if you’re not yet convinced ($15? But you get four bands!) you can get a sampling for what the evening has to offer Friday, January 18th at Trees Organic Coffee (450 Granville Street) from 8 pm on (possibly to be broadcast the morning of Monday, January 21st on CJSF 90.1) courtesy of John Pippus as well as by tuning back in to CJSF at 8 pm on Tuesday, January 22nd where the frontmen of the respective ensembles will be playing in a song circle on the Melodies in Mind show.

Originally posted Jan 17th, 2008 @ 17:42

How’d it turn out? Well, we made enough of a splash at Trees to be invited back for a longer set, likely April 11th… but you’ll hear more about that closer to the date. Melodies in Mind was a fun regular hootnanny, with members of all three ensembles jamming together to croon out soulful renditions of… public service announcements. That’s right. As for the main attraction… well, due to delays (ah, cabarets!) there wasn’t quite as much Plank performance as we’d anticipated (apologies to anyone who came out hoping for a big, fat slice of us!) but between the three headliners a full, satisfying concert was nonetheless delivered. Happy third birthday us, and as bonus content here you get the joke I’m contractually obligated to open every Western Front engagement with — Q: What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a performance artist? A: (ahem) Yuz gets sumwun whos makes yuz an offa ya can’t unnastand!