Refuse becomes musical at MCA Scrap Arts troupe innovative, talented

Scrap Arts Music, which performed Thursday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono, is a zippy percussion quartet that reconfigures industrial material to make wacky musical instruments. In the beat-seeking hands of these trained drummers, sewer pipes, giant steel springs, PVC piping and recycled boat aluminum are occasions to whack.

The performers, who wear black T-shirts and bright kindergarten-color aviator pants, leap and hop and skip and grin a lot while they pound out compositions with names such as “Magnum Opus for Bowls & Plates,” “Synthesoid Plasmatron,” and “Phonk.” Sometimes at the end of a number, they lob their instruments offstage in a satisfying whirl of abandon.

If a group of second-generation “Sesame Street” watchers forgot to take its Ritalin, this is what it would look and sound and act like.

Frightening though that may sound, Scrap Arts is industriously upbeat ruckus, in a tinny, bangy cacophonous sort of way. It’s not Stomp, or Tap Dogs, or the Kodo drummers. It’s shinier, less edgy, more suburban and happy.

Developed in British Columbia by purist lighting designer Justine Murdy and lead drummer Gregory Kozak (who starts the show by flexing and kissing his biceps), the show is mathematically choreographed and features sophisticated meters that are both impressively complicated and maddeningly repetitious.

Nevertheless, one would never want to underestimate the immense requirement of talent, coordination, concentration and metal – undoubtedly enough to fill the cavities of an entire third-world nation – in this 90-minute presentation.

The show also requires no small amount of auditory stick-to-itiveness because metal, plastic and stage flooring do not exactly create the most pleasing of sounds.

By the end of the evening, the 20-plus Dr. Seussian-named instruments, including ziggurat drums, humunga drums, thunder sheets and sigh-cordions, proved to be both innovative and multidimensional. In fact, Scrap Arts wins the award for the all-time best use for artillery shells: to make music, not war.