Tales from the Junkyard

At the first sight of Alco Iron & Metal Co, Gino Robair's heart rate spikes and his eyes glass over like a Toys R Us kid on a holiday bender. The found-sound percussionist loves to climb all over the San Leandro junkyard's vast acreage of 55-gallon drums, stuffed with discarded car parts and rusted pipes, foraging for scrap metal that might someday make music. "It's like prospecting for gold," he says. "You just get dirty... and find garbage that can be used as an instrument."

Robair's prized cache includes various gongs, a "burrito phone," which is actually a crimped muffler, and an empty gas can that sings in perfect pitch when struck. Though the drummer's lust for rooting through trash is arguably atypical, it's not without precedent; from classical futurist Lou Harrison to post-rock improvisor Moe Staiano, otherminded artists whose musical visions exceed the capacity of conventional instruments have long relished a good day at the dump, seeing industrial society's castoffs as renewable resources with the power of potential.

The cognoscenti of scrap-metal percussionists generally transform their grimy treasures in one of two ways: They either construct an original sonic device by fusing complementary parts from unrelated materials, or they merely clean up their junkyard finds and toss them in a gig bag alongside their drumsticks. Robair prefers the latter, less labor-intensive course. In fact, in recent months he's been progressively streamlining his methodology, exploring what he calls a "meta-percussion" concept for which, he explains, "I don't even bring a drum set. I just show up with a paper bag of things and a bow, or I just find things and try to play 'em."

Last year he staged an infamous "Potluck Percussion" event, which involved arriving at the venue empty-handed and drawing his instrumentation from random audience contributions: a piece of metal, water, a condom, an amplifier, and a contact mike in a tin of Jell-O. "Whether the music is good or not is secondary," he argues. "I'm developing the craft of improvising in front of people with stuff." That willingness to put himself in the precarious position of having to make some sort of musical cohesion, sans "real" instruments, teeters on the edge of performance art. Both spectacle and serious investigation, it's a daring move each time out, with no guarantee of success. "The challenge is total improvisation," says Robair. "I'm trying to get sounds organized in musical ways in real-time and not relying on models like song form.... I'm [also] trying not to rely on a specific set of tools," where there's safety in the relative reliability of the known quantity.

For example, no matter how you strike it, a well-maintained snare drum will pretty much always give you a recognizable snare sound. It's this level of predictability that Robair wants to subvert, as often as possible and with great imagination, by augmenting his trap set with Alco recyclables and an array of accessories both mundane (toys, duct tape, CDs) and motorized (cake mixer, cappuccino stirrer, battery-operated pen). He also plays theremin and will bow just about anything, from dustpans to Styrofoam (see Plates, Blocks, Cups & Hair, the definitive statement on teasing sound out of polystyrene plastic).

"I've found that the only way for me to proceed is to remove any semblance of comfort," Robair once wrote. "In this case, by stripping away the instruments themselves and ultimately relinquishing control over the performance entirely.... On one level this means allowing instruments to complete their natural cycle of decay. That includes using drum heads and drum sticks until they become completely unusable, well beyond the initial breaking point, and the practical result of this is that I may reach for a familiar sound only to find that it's altered in some gross way that makes it a challenge to use musically, to go beyond the drummerly aspects of percussion and get into pure music or pure sound."

Robair's immersion in the uncertainty of this type of music-making process -- with its edgy prospects for triumph or failure -- has engendered considerable respect among Bay Area creative-music audiences and peers. From his work with jazz pioneer Anthony Braxton at Mills College (documented on Duets 1987 on his own Rastascan label and reissued in 1998 on Music & Arts) to a half-dozen standout releases with his shape-shifting improv group Splatter Trio (mostly issued on Rastascan), local fans have come to expect nothing less from the scene veteran. Longtime Splatter bandmate Myles Boisen notes that "there's a great intelligence and openness to chance [in Robair's playing], guided by a sensitivity and intuition that's very special."