2011-01-26: Creaking Planks radio takeover on CaBaRadio and Accordion Noir!

In promotion of our fabulous 6-year-anniversary show next Monday night, we’ve hit the airwaves! Last night we joined Teddy Smooth and E-Roc at CaBaRadio again over at CiTR in the UBC student union building, where we played tunes and made strange innuendo late into the night. Always good times. We hadn’t confirmed the engagement with enough advance warning to let potential listeners know, but … in all honesty, how many of you would be tuned in to campus radio after midnight? (More than I expect, hopefully!)

We lifted a page from our friend Ryan Fletcher at CJSF’s Melodies in Mind and as guest troubadors took it upon ourselves to musically interpret some public service announcements the show wanted its listeners to know about, including a very special rendition of a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, screening this weekend… well, you’ll get all the info in the recording. Also excitingly present, though you have to wait through the whole recording — a world exclusive sneak peek of some recent studio work we’ve been doing on Phaulonious J Knucklebones’ original songs, thanks to new friends made at the Orange Party! Admittedly this recording isn’t done yet, but it’s more than half-baked … and it’s been a very long time since we were committed to any permanent media in any form. A better representation of us, to be sure!

We managed to mine the Plankian portions of the show from its podcast and serve it up to you here; in the meantime, it’s not too late to catch the black wave of our promotional hype, as we’ll be on the air tonight down in the downtown eastside studios of CFRO Co-Op Radio at Accordion Noir, whose audience we haven’t joined since an Accordion Noir Festival promo appearance back in 2008. Excitingly, we’re hoping to take on the challenge to do our own version of their lovely theme song — and would encourage you to do the same!

In the meantime, here’s a log for our truncated CaBaRadio recording:

• Creaking Planks – Dead Man’s Pants (Al Mader) 3:39-5:54 (2m15)
• Creaking Planks Duo – announcements medley – LIVE! 6:56-10:37 (3m41)
• Creaking Planks Duo – The Girl In The Pink Canoe (Big Rude Jake) – LIVE! 16:14-19.25 (3m11)
• Creaking Planks Duo – Womanizer / Toxic medley (Britney Spears) – LIVE! 22.28-28.28 (6m00)
• Creaking Planks – Kishka Anthem (debut!) 32.06-34.57 (2m49)

We’ve also managed to skip the queue usually involved while waiting for the Accordion Noir folks to post their episodes online as a podcast. It’s here, 12 hours later, and though we don’t have a full track listing (edit: the AN folks do, up at their website, with creative song titling), here’s all the places you can hear four mighty Planks playing their hearts out:

• Creaking Planks Quartet – Accordion Noir theme (Andy Fielding) – LIVE! 0:00-2:32 (2m32)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Insane in the Membrane (Cypress Hill) – LIVE! 11:07-14:30 (3m23)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Flatbush Waltz (Andy Statman) – LIVE! 15:03-17:14 (2m13)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Tanz Tanz Yidelehk – LIVE! 23:47-27:33 (3m46)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Sometimes All Of The People Aren’t Here All Of The Time – LIVE! 29:39-32:49 (3m10)
• Creaking Planks – Kishka Anthem (studio mix) 33:04-35:53 (2m49)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Vanha Jatsi Station ID – LIVE! 42:52-43:38 (0m46)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Psycho Killer (Talking Heads) – LIVE! 44:00-47:41 (3m41)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – the Song of the Count / Bones Bones Bones (Sesame Street) – LIVE! 50:20-56:58 (6m38)

Also eminently worth mentioning — us welching on our word! We were going to take all January off to develop new material for our anniversary show, but we did join the cool cats at Bandidas again for their own anniversary back on Jan 6th. We didn’t promote it since it was their own private party of sorts, but we played the heck out of lots of great songs there. Many happy returns and hope to see you again there next January, Bandidas!

2010-09-28: Creaking Planks live on CaBaRadio

It was a cold, wet, late night at UBC, and as the witching hour approached we wondered if any of our fans would be hearing the three of us make merry music over the airwaves, courtesy of Teddy Smooth and E-roc at CiTR’s CaBaRadio. Maybe not. But still — there’s always the Internet’s long memory (sorry, tail) to fall back on. Thrill as we (eventually) reflect on our origins and quip regarding the recent Accordion Noir Festival! And enjoy three great tunes, including one recently exhumed while Stateside from the ancient past.

Here’s the recording! And here’s the playlist!

• Creaking Planks Trio – Insane in the Membrane (Cypress Hill): 12:57-16:30 (3:33)
• Creaking Planks Trio – CaBaRadio stinger: 16:31-16:40 (0:09)
• Creaking Planks Trio – Kiddie Closer (Nine Inch Nails): 16:41-20:34 (3:53)
• Creaking Planks Trio – (Hit Me) Baby One More Time (Britney Spears): 26:42-29:29 (2:47)

Bonus! Hear us simmer in the background as we promote a different radio station’s affairs!

2009-11-12: Creaking Planks on Live From Thunderbird Radio Hell

Picking up on an invitation from former Butchershop Floor cohort Ben Lai, the jug band of the damned convokes at UBC for the first time ever in order to spread our curious musical taint out over the public airwaves (CiTR 101.9 fm or later as a podcast) as the second hour of a special two-hour station fundraising extravaganza installment of the long-running live music radio show Live From Thunderbird Radio Hell. Beware! We go live from 10-11 pm!

Edit! Missed the live broadcast? Fortunately, the show podcasts!

Track listing:

• 1. Dead Man’s Pants (1:31)
• 2. I’m A Lousy Lay (3:58:)
• 3. The Girl In The Pink Canoe (10:31)
• 4. I Want You (But I Don’t Need You) (13:52)
• 5. Rhymin’ And Stealin’ (20:15)
• 6. Fight For Your Right (To Plunder) (23:15)
• 7. Insane In The Membrane (31:33)
• 8. Womanizer / Toxic medley (34:51)
• 9. The Song Of The Count (45:07)
• 10. Kiddie Closer (48:23)

2008-03-27 through 2008-04-05: A Dybbuk

During a 2005 Planks practice in Grandview park, a passer-by observed Squeezebeard’s accordion and stopped by to inquire as to whether we were a klezmer band. Blackbox began clarifying that we had in fact been playing Turkish music when Lord Eel, a founding Plank, cut across and established that yessir, ma’am, we here are the Creaking Planks, Vancouver’s best pirate klezmer zombie shanty band, and that we play weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs and brises. He must have more of a killer business instinct to close the deal, for that exchange ended up getting us engaged for a week-long run as a klezmer back-up band in Melinda Gidaly Mayor’s Fringe Festival production of “Jew! A Musical”. We weren’t, at that time, actually a klezmer band, but we had an appetite for learning and an instinct for show business, and eventually got up to speed though sweat and tears. When the run concluded, Lord Eel suggested that for our next engagement we re-invent ourselves as a flamenco band for the hat-shop proprietor’s costume party! After all our hard work jumping into a new musical idiom for which we were largely unprepared, at the prospect of taking on another… well, suffice it to say that if our tall ship hadn’t been in drydock, there might well have been a mutiny.

Fast-forward a few years. Coming out of musical semiretirement, Lord Eel again calls us together with a strangely familiar pitch: to become a klezmer band in a play about a Jewish wedding! Where have I heard this before? With oodles more experience gigging under our collective belts atop our earlier immersive experience into the klezmer idiom, a crack squad of Planks decided to take on the UBC Theatre production — Squeezebeard on accordion, Dr. Steelhand on the very traditional klezmer ukulele and steel guitar, percussionist Pawel Piechocki (on Daisy Jones-Locher’s lent santur!) and introducing Kat-’o-Nine-Tails on the clarinet. (Really having us play is a natural fit, since as was noted — Squeezebeard is already the subject of the poster!)

The Fringe Festival gig was a zany, upbeat madcap comedy about wedding planning and reconciling matters of faith with life in the modern world. This play, Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner’s adaptation of A Dybbuk, is considerably more somber and austere in tone, dealing with a harrowing ghost story of love from beyond the grave among an extinguished people. All the same, there is a wedding, and we are a klezmer wedding band; we do get to stretch our roles a bit (not just for the actors anymore!) and also produce all manner of eerie soundscapes one might expect at free jazz night at the Western Front to underscore the workings of supernatural forces man was not meant to know. The intersection of avant-garde and traditional Jewish music: it’s not just John Zorn’s turf anymore!

Opening night is tonight; the curtains raise at the Freddie Wood at 7:30 pm every night through April 5th, barring Sunday March 30th (giving us a chance to rest up from our two-gig night with the County Fair Saturday night following our Dybbuk performance!) Typically the Creaking Planks will be trying to make audiences laugh or dance, but here you have a chance to catch us in an unprecedented third motivation.

…

Called out in a Courier review (Apr 2, ‘08)!

Composer Patrick Pennefather’s music–drawn, as he writes in his notes, “from existing Yiddish, Klezmer and Hebrew music, prayers and chants”–is beautifully integrated into the story and performed live on a shadowed balcony by The Creaking Planks, a four-piece band featuring accordion, santur, steel guitar, ukulele and clarinet.

In a look back at the project the director David Savoy seemed quite pleased with our work:

November 12, 2007: May have a lead on a band – The Creaking Planks. My posting at Hillel House may have paid off!

Saturday, March 29, 2008: The Creaking Planks are great. I am so glad I stuck to my guns and pushed for live music. The fact that they stay in place is actually working out to be a visual blessing. They are like silent watchers of all the action. If only some of the cast could mirror their discipline!

Chapter 4 – Reflection. I am glad I stuck to my guns and pushed for a live band. The Creaking Planks were amazing, sitting like a ghostly presence above the action, and more than willing to jump in and provide various effects and noises as required.