Royal Canoe crafts icy instruments for free concert at The Forks
Indie band's free Friday concert will feature instruments and sounds made almost entirely out of ice
Royal Canoe's Matt Peters hates the cold but leaped at the chance to make some new sounds out of ice.
"We're always up for some sort of ridiculous challenge that's going to make us pull our hair out for weeks on end," said Peters, the band's singer.
"So here we are in this weird Sugar Mountain train car with a bunch of ice cubes."
Royal Canoe will play a free concert titled Glacial, a collaboration with the architect behind the Swedish Ice Hotel, at The Forks at 7 p.m. Friday.
Just over a week before the show, the five bandmates bundled up and crammed into a chilly old train car — formerly the Sugar Mountain candy shop — to test the icy sounds and instruments they've spent the last while crafting.
"Every sound you hear, including the bass, was in some way recorded with ice and processed, or it's ice we're performing with live," Peters said.
'Ice god' provides
Luca Roncoroni, the Swedish Ice Hotel architect who has worked on creating warming huts along The Forks river trail in past years, has been instrumental in helping Royal Canoe put the show together.
"He's kind of like the ice god," Peters said.
Roncoroni's expertise was particularly helpful when it came to crafting the ice xylophone.
The band figured out how to carve and tune each ice block but was struggling to find something to hit them with that sounded good.
"He showed up and he was like, 'Oh, you just hit it with ice,'" Peters said.
Watch this video to hear what the ice xylophone sounds like:
The ice was harvested from the Fort Whyte Centre, since conditions on the Assiniboine River weren't ideal.
A good chunk of that ice now serves as drummer Michael Jordan's bass drum and hi-hat.
The bass drum is a hollowed-out block of ice turned upside down. Instead of kicking it from the side, Jordan kicks it from the top. The dome is just big enough to fit a microphone in it, which captures the ice drum's booming sound.
His hi-hat — normally two cymbals that he can hit with a drumstick or crash together with a pedal — is now a bowl of ice shards he crushes together.
This is what the icy hi-hat sounds like:
The other instruments are keyboards and drum pads, which are loaded with sounds the band recorded in guitarist Bucky Driedger's garage.
They recorded the sounds of ice scraping and smashing together and mixed them in a way that gives specific notes an icy flare.
Driedger's drum pads are hooked up to guitar pedals and embedded in ice blocks that light up whenever they're hit. Brendan Berg's bass guitar has transformed into a keyboard, while Matt Schellenberg will tickle keys chock-full of frozen tones.
Instruments that melt
The band's done its fair share of experimenting with sound, but when it comes to this particular challenge, "it's right up there," Peters said.
"We like having control over what we do," he said.
"There's a lot of risk, because if it's a warm day, we don't know what we're going to do, but in the end, hopefully it's clear and cold and I think it'll just feel like it was really worth it."
Royal Canoe will perform flanked by ice sculptures on the steps of the Johnston Terminal.
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