beautiful noise

I attended Big Family Day at MOCA last weekend, and the highlight was my friend Liam's Styrophone Orchestra (Liam is an experimental musician, his instrument of choice being styrofoam). Every participant was handed a styrofoam cooler and a drumstick, which we used to "bow" the cooler.

Liam gives instructions to the musicians.

The cacophony begins.

Adriana gets bossy.

Shit gets punk.

What surprised me most about this event was the lack of boredom. I expected the kids to get sick of playing their Styrophones, but nearly everyone kept going until their instruments were obliterated. I don't know if it's more or less surprising that the same thing applied to the adults. We played our hearts out, chunks of styrofoam flying into the air all around us like a blizzard. As we experimented with the range of sounds we could draw from our Styrophones, the expression on most everyone's face was bliss.

At home later that night, after eating the most satisfying bowl of udon at a Little Tokyo cafe, I sat on my sofa with Adriana and Liam, watching Planet Earth: Ice Worlds, and happily picked styrofoam from my hair.