The organic sounds of The Vegetable Orchestra
B.B. King had Lucille, George Harrison had Lucy, and Klaus of The Vegetable Orchestra has a carrot. Founded in 1988, the Viennese band consists of ten musicians, a sound engineer, and a chef. They are, as far as I’m aware, the only band in history who offer audiences a fresh bowl of vegetable soup at the end of their shows.
The collective’s mantra is as follows: “The further exploration and refinement of performable vegetable music is a central part of the orchestra’s aesthetic quest. Every individual background that is brought into the project is of vital importance in sustaining the fundamental artistic objective of the Vegetable Orchestra. The broad variety of creative approaches at the same time secures the artistic autonomy of this unique ensemble.”
This ensemble welcomes architects, painters, of course, musicians, and anyone else willing to bend their craft to the will of vegetables. Why? Well, their music is entirely sustainable and offers an experience that excites all the senses. In an age of manufactured regurgitation, it’s refreshing that there are folks out there quite literally keeping art fresh. Everything is exclusively vegetable.
Naturally, there is a comedy and mirth to the enterprise; you can’t watch a sound technician struggle to mix a particularly sonorous courgette with a shrill swede tuba and not laugh, but is strictly serious. The band started as a joke: a dinner party question about the most difficult instrument to play coincided with a pot of soup being brought to the boil, and one thing led to another. However, as the idea gathered steam (sigh), a level of intellectualism bolstered it.
This is very often the case in art. Take, for instance, the Dadaist movement. What started as nonsense for nonsense’s sake was quickly mused over by scholars who said that the absurdity of the movement reflected the absurdity of a world ravaged by the First World War. When the Dadaistx themselves said that that wasn’t the case, the scholars said it didn’t really matter because art’s intent and the society it interacts with are inseparable. If a world gone awry produces art gone awry, then whether the artists intended it as a statement is really a moot point.
So, while The Vegetable Orchestra admit that many people think that they’re a joke, and indeed, humour is never truly far away from their thoughts, the depth of orchestration makes a subtle point in the analogue age. After all, considering that we’ve only been living with electricity for a little over 250 years of our 200,000-year human history, what’s really weirder, someone getting a tune out of an already drum-like gaud and the audience getting a meal afterwards, or 150,000 people gathering to watch someone play a laptop? Therein lies the delicious point of Vienna’s First Vegetable Orchestra, whether they meant it or not.
See an example of their work below.
