Video for ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ by the Cube Orchestra, based around excerpts from the 1938 propaganda film ‘Reefer Madness’, along with shots of myself and Chema Gala from the orchestra, using overlays and colourising techniques to zap up the poor quality of the black and white film. It features some great over-acting, which works really well visually, and I adapted the fantastical storyline as a cautionary tale of the consequences of deciding that “We’re gonna get wild!”.
As well as myself (of course!) the video features Chema Gala, who has played sax in the Cube Orchestra for over three years and has now gone traveling. He’s sorely missed.
The improvised music was recorded on 13th January, 2016, at the Cube Microplex in Bristol.
The players:
Keef Chemistry: Vocals, Effects;
Jon Shepherd: Bass;
Ollie Owen: Guitar;
Chema Gala: Sax, Vocals;
Steve Radford: Alto Sax, Vocals;
Alun Person: Percussion;
Matt Mockford: Flute;
I wore my furry wolf hat for this tune, sparking the title and vibe, comprising mainly of drums and bass over which three of us howl, speak and sing with nice and sparse guitar work from Ollie. Jon is great at keeping up a good riff and I spent much of the tune watching him churn it out. The two sax players chop and change between vocal outbursts and sax interplay. Eventually I begin rapping something about the bass, shortly after which Jon treads on his lead and unplugs his guitar! It all threatens to collapse, save for a lone sax and myself yelling “Got no bass!”. However, Jon plugs his guitar in and we all drop back into it like it was meant to be. Perhaps my favourite orchestra moment …
The track appears on a ‘best of’ compilation, ‘Cubest 019’, which can be downloaded free at the Cube Orchestra website, along with the rest of the orchestra’s prodigious output:
orchestra.cubecinema.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Cubest019
The main footage was sourced at the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 510 billion archived web pages: