From Scratch keeps its vow to innovation

By GILBERT WONG

School of Creative and Performing Arts - I have seen a man perform with water coolers strapped to his legs. As comical as this sounds, in the hands of Adrian Croucher, one of the From Scratch trio, the percussive beats boomed across the performing space with great effect.

From Scratch is back, though they have left their racks of PVC pipes behind to be replaced by new instruments. Some have the same comical impact, like the sliding tube drums which work like trombones and sound like didgeridoos but look like plumbers' discards.

Others, like the foley trays, beds of river stones and ceramic tiles used for film soundtracks, are the sorts of tools you'd expect them to exploit in their quest to replicate natural sounds.

Their most recent work, Pacific Plate, is from the latest incarnation of the group. Founder Phil Dadson is now joined by Croucher and Shane Currey, a percussionist with the Auckland Philharmonia.

The group has always walked a tightrope in performance. With only the slightest stumble, their use of common industrial and building objects to make music could easily fall into a Hoffnungesqe cartoon. They are saved by the complexity and novelty of their music.

Dadson began the evening with the simplest of instruments, two stones and his own voice, miked so his guttural intonations brought to mind an ancient firelit ceremony.

The piece developed from there, a process of organic evolution that at one point resorted to those objects we never thought we would see - keyboards on adapted melodicas - and the ironic use of 50s tourist footage of their subject, the thermal rumblings of the Taupo region.

There is an increasing emphasis on the use of found and natural sounds - the whirr of dinner plates set spinning by Currey, who also essays a solo with marbles and aluminium mixing bowls - which takes From Scratch further on an innovative path that might have long ago grown stale if they had remained as they were.