REPORT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF BIZARRE GIG-EXPERIENCES

Every musician has their own collection of stories of those completely off the wall gigs: that time the bride and groom wanted them dressed all in leaves; that village party when they were expected to enter the venue riding on a horse; the early morning festival gig when the booker conveniently forgot to mention that the audience would all be school kids between ages 7 and 9 - you get the idea.

So, I wanted to give you an account of one of those rather-surreal-experiences of mine; the time when I was recording for an entertainment TV-program which had the vaguely eccentric intention to test how sweets translate into music. Yeah, you read it right.

Now, there was this bakery that wanted to find out what their chocolates would be like, interpreted into music - yes, how they’d sound were they to be audible materia, rather than - chocolates. ‘Let’s find out what happens if we feed a bunch of musicians with sweets and tell them to play something!’ Well, it sounded kinda great to me, a dedicated fan of foods and sweets.

Okay. So me and four colleagues entered the studio, where four kinds of delights were lined up, each meant to represent one flavour; there was one rather normal, sweet-tasting chocolate truffle; one sour lemon-jelly; one spicy chilli-chocolate truffle; and one salty (now it gets interesting) chocolate with bacon-creme.

Yup. We were told that for the take we would taste each one of them, and when doing so try to associate to something musical, improvised or composed, and perform it together - however, not without first motivating our choice of music to the camera. Hmmmm. Together with all of that, there was also the fact that we all were due for a rehearsal later that day, which meant there was only time for one go at each shot. Better nail it...

‘We would really like for you to do the associations spontaneously, in the moment, without practising beforehand. Is that ok with you guys?’ said the camera man.
‘Sure’ answered we, and swiftly went away to a corner were we methodically (and completely spontaneously) decided what of our common repertoire to play for each tasting and who would do the talking for each one (of course I was assigned main responsibility for the bacon-flavoured creme, which by the way turned out to be rather disagreeable from the culinary point of view).

We began the filming. I got the dubious honour to be the first one out with the talking. As I stumbled my way through a half-decent motivation for the modern-composed folk tune I’d chosen for the bacon-chocolate, the others were stone-faced. As the recording went on, it became apparent that I was the only one who took the task of explaining our musical associations remotely seriously. The others took great pride in exceeding each other with imaginative motivations for their chosen pieces.

So anyway, the gig went by pretty smoothly in the end, and everyone was happy (including my teenage students, who watched the program in amusement when it was broadcast a few months later). And the next time bacon flavoured chocolate is on your menu - take a minute to think about what it would sound like, to you…