JACK Band Profile
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here comes
the booty...

by Louis Lane, cub reporter

Q: What does the "It’s A Natural" ethos of Peterborough share with the discordant, machinist, tumultuous, sometimes aggravating, sometimes compelling music and cultural production of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Test Department, SPK?

A: Nothing.

Oh, well, the possible exception is the loose collective known as FULL METAL BOOTY. Pilot K-9 (Brian Wagner) has been known to say on more than one occasion that much of what this motley crew (no relation) strives towards is “a kind of beauty born out against its own will.”

Pilot K-9, alongside of Mr. Reuben Kincaid (aka David LaRiviere), noise veteran Porter Hall (aka Michael Waterman) and Hartley (aka Hartley) initiated the project in December of 2001.

"When we started out I rode along for shits and giggles," Mr. Kincaid says in a casual tone, smoking a pipe worthy of Sherlock Holmes. "Within no time at all I found myself gripped by the project and its inherent potential for mischief - I was really the first fully indoctrinated cult member".

And of course others would follow, in part due to the band’s open door policy and the clarion call to what Mr. Kincaid describes as a "need to replace music". Trent Philosophy Professor and pipe-smoker David Morris entered into the frame with a battery of "invented" instruments and his own software entitled "Jambient".

Pipe smoking Stuart Chamberlain provides additional ground hum thanks to the phatest didgeridoo this side of Lindsay. And then there’s Wayne "webmadman" Elliot who can be heard grumbling in the back (between puffs on his beautiful cherry wood tobacco pipe). "FULL METAL BOOTY echoes back to the experimental noise band movement of the 70’s," says the webmadman, "The people that stay are really into it [but] it’s not for everyone.

Morris describes this process as a "shedding of prejudiced criteria about what should be happening on any level, as taking up the possibilities of anything, as social jam - turning a bunch of discrete people doing something into something else, in the way that discrete strawberries become a novel something else when they turn into jam". Adds Morris, "But strawberries don’t jam themselves, whereas people do, and that’s where it gets beautiful". Rumour has it that strawberry jam is the preferred flavour of jam among all of ’the Boots’.

FULL METAL BOOTY is as it sounds, a conflation of various impulses that taste great together. The military aspects of Full Metal Jacket meet the lowbrow and sexist Booty call of hip-hop culture in a jumble of sound made up for our time. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes strangely melodic and haunting, sometimes downright repellent, the FULL METAL BOOTY continues to jam with alarming weekly regularity.

People wanting to check it out are welcome to wander by Artspace (129 A Hunter St. W., next to St. Veronus) on jam nights (mostly Wednesdays and/or Fridays). Call 748-3883.