Performance
Their live performances have featured puppet shows, pseudo-scientific scholarly presentations, and performances by members of the Butoh group inkBoat.
The band uses many homemade devices as instruments, such as the Viking Rowboat. Dan Rathbun — who has created most of the band's idiosyncratic instruments — plays, among other custom-made instruments (though he uses a common bass guitar most of the time), a custom-stringed bass instrument referred to as the Sledgehammer Dulcimer (or, alternately, the Slide Piano Log), which uses piano strings and is possibly more than 7 feet long; it is played with two sticks: one in the left hand generally used as a fret, and another in the right hand to strike the strings.
Percussionist Michael Iago Mellender's instruments consist of restaurant kitchen equipment, trash can lids, and other "found" metal objects, in addition to traditional percussion instruments. One of the more infamous instruments used by the band was Moe! Staiano's Popping Turtle (now residing in Brooklyn, NY). It can be heard about 1:21 into the song "Sleep is Wrong".
Read more about this topic: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Famous quotes containing the word performance:
“Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day;
Breaks time, as dancers,
From their own music when they stray.”
—Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Still be kind,
And eke out our performance with your mind.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)