Drummers on a roll from junkyard chaos to musical harmony

How many grown-ups remember how to play? Not a sport or a structured game with rules, winners and losers. Just a simple activity, like stringing a pair of tin cans together for a makeshift telephone. Or swinging a ribbed plastic hose hard in the air for the loopy whoosh sound it makes. Putting this kind of 'play' back into playing music is what powers Scrap Arts Music, a dynamic five-member percussion ensemble from Vancouver.

'Scrap Arts Music is a five-person percussion ensemble that is centred around instruments created out of industrial scrap turned into sculptures on wheels,' says Greg Kozak, who builds the group's instruments, composes and performs.

'We try to do as much high-energy performance as possible using sculpture, music and choreography. We're trying to merge all three of those art forms into one.'

Audiences familiar with taiko performance will recognise the drumming and rhythmic responses. Alongside drums, Scrap also uses cymbals, gongs, hoses, tubes, marimbas and a whole host of shiny musical paraphernalia made for the most part from scrap metal and industrial salvage.

Since 1998, members of Scrap have played such zany self-made instruments as sigh-chordions, humunga drums, plasmatrons and annoy-o-phones. Born out of the excitement generated by Stomp, the original street noise musical, Scrap Arts Music has since built up its own distinctive repertoire of entertainment that celebrates the transformation of junk to funk.

Kozak heads Scrap alongside Justine Murdy, who acts as co-director, manager and lighting designer. Scrap's current line-up of performers, Simon Thomsen, Scott Bishop, Sarka Kocicka and Michael Schoolbraid, all have musical backgrounds, a must for Kozak, who styles himself a drummer first and foremost.

Kozak, a self-professed 'hyperactive kind of guy', creates his scrappy instruments himself. He seems to have tapped a limitless source of musical invention in his foraging of junkyards. From an initial harvest of largely marine scrap (the detritus of an ill-fated scheme for faster ferries) he began crafting sound sculptures like the ziggurat drums that would define Scrap's kinetic style. Kozak's work with scrap has become familiar enough to the Vancouver welding shops and industrial outlets he frequents that they regularly set aside choice discards for him.