It’s no exaggeration to say that experimental percussion ensemble From Scratch is legendary. The group, led since the early 1970s by Philip Dadson and now featuring Adrian Croucher, Shane Currey and Darryn Harkness, makes use of a beautiful and ingenious array of invented instruments, combining the rhythmic and polyphonic.  

These range from large arrangements of end-struck PVC pipes, which have become their signature instrument, to vacuum cleaner hoses, industrial pots and pans, combinations of metal bowls filled with marbles and nails, rigs of chimes that are slung on like backpacks, cymbals and drum skins, xylophone-like contraptions made of what appear to be tuned lengths of square aluminium tubes, a waterphone, shell casings, petrol cannisters – and so on.

Their Arts on Tour performance in The Great Hall at The Arts Centre Te Takatiki Toi Ora is one of my favourite performance events in years.  

The whole set up sits in the centre of the hall like a fascinating science experiment. We are seated in the round, insofar as you can in a long rectangular room, the requisite social distancing offering a much nicer experience than if we’d been jammed in. We’re also invited to move around during the performance to get a feel for how the sound changes in different spots in the hall, and to poke and prod after the show.

The hall itself offers some exquisite acoustics; it’s a good reminder of what a treasure this space is, at a time when the Arts Centre is facing potential closure because of a lack of funding. There’s also a very satisfying interaction between the colonial, neogothic space – cool stone walls, the polished floor, and the dark, rich barrel vaulted ceiling – and the motley collection of bits of pieces that make up the orchestra.

The ensemble performs three works. The first, ‘Pax / Pacifica’, is new this year, and illustrates an “ocean of invented and found sounds”. It is gorgeous: rich and illustrative, always inventive. The performers prowl through the space, first using flat stones and later larger instruments to build a sonic world, layer by layer, informed by our place in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. We start small, and work through an evolution of environment and matter. Clicking stones become raindrops, eddies of water, the calls of frogs and birds, and build through an expansion in instrumentation to roaring seas, human spaces marked by steel drums, and at one point the soft sharp keening of metal bowls, played with bows, that are like the shimmer of starlight. 

This segues into the second piece, a work from the early 70s, called ‘VOM 6’ (Variable Occasion Music) which represents some of From Scratch’s earliest experimentations. This work draws energy from syncopation, including fierce layers of rhythm that loop, build on and challenge one another. The ensemble performs closely here, on instruments in a shared ‘work space’, the aluminium tubes augmented with claps, stomps and slaps.  

The third piece, after a short break, revisits a work from 1982: ‘Pacific 3, 2, 1, Zero’. This is an activist piece, originally created to protest French nuclear testing and waste dumping in the Pacific. It’s recast here as a warning about the catastrophic effects of climate change on vulnerable atolls, as well as our own islands. The work is rhythmic and urgent, its pulse marked by angry vocalisations and polyphonic loops that refuse to resolve comfortably, punctuated with staccato drumming like explosions or gunfire. It gestures to threat and contamination.

There’s a moment when work with bells hits the something in the resonant make-up of the architectural space and the harmonics become piercing and profoundly intense. The room is flooded with red light as chimes toll mournfully at the end – it’s a trip.

It’s fascinating watching the performers shift between improvisation and more structured play, communicating with one another through their instruments, sharing space and movement and breath. They are an amazing, coherent organism, both free and utterly precise. I’m aware throughout of our own role, too, as our bodies feel the physical punch of the percussion and shape the acoustics of the room. We are so privileged to be able to experience this show, and to be reminded of the urgency and tangibility of live performance, and the fact that anything at all can make music or art. 

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