What is Action Drumming? Where do our ideas come from? What is our background?

SWARM gets asked these questions all the time, so I decided to dedicate a web page to explain the roots and influences of SWARM's music and sculpture. Action Drumming, Extreme Drumming, Experimental World Music, Percussion Theatre and Invented Instrument Theatre are all terms used to describe what SWARM does. Action Drumming is the direct combination of drumming and dancing where the rhythmic/choreographic structure moves the performers from drum to drum while playing so as the dancing and the drumming are inseparable. It is part of the larger trend of musical percussive theater to combine music dance, drama and prop as one. We create new instruments and new ways of playing them which in turn determines the music, dance and storyline of the final show. SWARM's music is geographically Canadian but is influenced from Rock, Blues, Jazz, Swing, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Rap, Folk as well as musical styles from all over the world. SWARM is not a Japanese Taiko group nor are we African drummers. Though I love, respect and have been greatly influenced by the vast diversity of world music, in particular, Realword Studios, Luaka Bop, Mickey Hart, and the Kodo Drummers. SWARM's musical and choreographic style predominantly evolved from Art, Sculpture and Experimental Sound Collage.

Throughout my years as an artist my pieces transformed from paintings; to paintings with sculptural objects glued to them; to outright sculptures; to sculptures with acoustic and electronic sound elements to them; to acoustic and electronic instruments; to sculptural instruments intended for the stage. As the sculptures grew in size and scale so did the size and scale of the gestures needed to play them. Hence the natural development from art into musical theatre.

SWARM's music is very process-based and we try to approach each song in a new way. Often the shapes and sounds of the instruments determine how we approach the music and dance. We have pieces that are completely scored out, but after teaching the piece to the group we collaboratively arrange and rearrange it to incorporate everyone's musical and choreographic suggestions. Other pieces are collaboratively written from the start with everyone contributing as we go. Some pieces are completely improvised around a basic structure much like free Jazz or East Indian Ragas. I strongly believe in the collaborative process in art and music. Art does not exist in a vacuum. It is about a free exchange of ideas.

The following is a condensed chronological history of my evolution as an artist and musician. One of the reasons for writing this history of my music/sculpture, is to try to illustrate the more obscure influences on my music; and to give credit to all of those who have taught and influenced me so much. (There are many more I did not have time to list).

My first big influence as a child growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario was my mother. She introduced me to Modern Art by taking me to art galleries where I was exposed to great artists like Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy , Salvador Dali, John Miro, Frida Kalo, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Georgia O'keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Henry Moore, and Christo .

When I was a teenager, Frank Florio introduced me to experimental music. He owned a counterculture record shop in Niagara Falls, Ontario, called Poptones. It was in this cultural oasis that I first started to listen to music by John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Z'ev, Diamanda Gallas, The Residents, Lydia Lunch, William S.Burrows, Negativeland, John Zorn, Shakti, Psychic TV, etc. These and many other bands showed me that there was a whole subculture of artists and musicians who were not limiting their creative and intellectual possibilities and did not fall within existing musical definitions such as pop, rock etc.

As a young adult I taught arts and crafts at The Boys and Girls Club and the creative diversity of the children's natural curiousity helped me decide to pursue a career in art and music.

I studied Art at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. There I was trained and encouraged to explore a wide range of experimental techniques in all possible mediums. One of my teachers, Tony McCaully, introduced me to the world of sound and multimedia art. I started recording soundscapes onto cassette 4-tracks and documenting sight specific percussive noise performances onto videotape. These sound and video experiments played back in my sculptures and wall reliefs. They were triggered by interactive sensors in works such as my sculpture The Burning Bush. I was a regular guest DJ on Tony's late night art radio show Turbulence. While at Fanshawe, I was exposed to artist's like Joseph Beuys, Herman Niech, Francis Bacon, Walter De Maria, Ansem Kiefer, etc. I took printmaking classes with Janet Cardiff and she introduced me to alternative art comics such as Raw magazine, Blab, Kaz, and and encouraged my installations. I also worked as an apprentice sculptor for Patrick Thibert where learned many of my metal art skills and acquired a taste for scale and the importance of structural solidity and resolved craftsmanship.

From there I went on to The Nova Scotia Collage of Art & Design where I continued to expand my sound and video editing techniques and combined them with sculptural installations and performance. At NASCAD I made my first drums under the guidance of a fellow student Peter Wallace (not related). Here my drums evolved from small handheld traditional ceramic forms to larger abstract ceramic shapes. From there I started experimenting with all sorts of alternative vessel materials and eventually made a number of larger scale PVC drums whose size and scale necessitated custom metal stands on wheels. David Clark was also an influenchial teacher along with artists likeBill Viola, Nam June Paik, George Pompidou, Buckminster Fuller, Takis, Arman, Nicolas Schoffer, Edward Kienholz and Jean Tinguely. Here I also met and did workshops with Phil Dadson of From Scratch. I thought I was on to something new with my larger scaled PVC drum sculptures, but he had a whole fleet of them. Phil also instilled in me an interest in practicing polyrhythmic time signatures and whole body rhythms through his clapping and stepping patterned workshops. My large-scale drums culminated in a musical playground sculpture Earth wheel. for Sir Frederick Frazer School for the Visually Impaired that I built along with my friend Pete Wallace and Steve Trusoni. Nova Scotia also exposed me to a wide range of Celtic music.

In 1992, I went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to earn my Masters' Degree. Here I started building larger and more resolved PVC drum sculptures as well as studying electronics, robotics, metal casting, graphic design, video and sound engineering, performance art and telecommunications. The creative environment at the Institute was incredible. No matter how hard I worked there was always other students doing something even cooler and more complex. It was here in the metal shops that I met and became friends with Bill Close, a fellow instrument builder. We worked side by side in the same shop creating sculptures and exchanging ideas. This led to our forming an invented instrument band together called Bipedal Herd. We performed around Chicago in alternative venues like "The Milk of Burgundy", "Randolf Street Gallery" and the "Around the Coyote Art Festival". As well, Close and myself worked as audio/visual technicians at The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, where we did lighting and sound for a wide range of visiting artists and musicians from around the world.

I then met Jellyeye. They had just finished a show called "Avalanche Ranch" which they called a "Drum Opera". It featured an incredibly wild script by Bryn Magus and had the beginnings of "action drumming". (A row of drums with linear movement and drums set up in a square, as the performers danced a drumming hoedown). They also had drums on wheels; standard drum kit drums refitted with thick cow skins. These were bolted and mounted on plywood wheeled bases and covered in papier mache. Although the drums and choreography were basic Jelleye had a great ideas that were very similar to my own. I approached them about collaborating with them for the next show. For the next three years I was practicing three times a week collaboratively developing Blood Lotus as well as building a complete set of twelve industrial strength action drums. We worked well as a team, with Shu Shubat as the groups founder and main choreographer, Ollie Seay as composer, Bryn Magnus as the playwright, and myself as the sculptor/set designer. Rick Kubes, though officially only a performer, also contributed a lot to the music and choreography. It was during these years that action drumming really started to blossom. We performed in such venues as The Chicago Cultural Center, The Illinois Institute of Technology, The Athenaeum Theater, Dog Haven Arts Center, Chicago Filmmakers Theater, The Art Institute of Chicago, Daley Plaza, Remains Theater and The University of Illinois to name a few.

The Chicago Reader had this to say, "Jellyeye's forte is heavily choreographed, intensely physical drum assaults, performed on an awesome set of custom designed, rolling drums. Ensemble member Bill Wallace, a graduate student at the of the Art Institute, builds the instruments. The most spectacular of which are formed from giant 50 gallon barrels that look like they've been crushed in the paws of godzilla. The drums are welded to wheeled steel undercarriages, a simple expedient that explodes the notion of a stationary drummer. The performers move them about wildly during performances and bang on them with with leather-and-rubber-tipped three quarter-inch-dowel rods, far bigger than the largest drum sticks available. They flay their arms wildly, shout, and generally create a bone-shatering racket." Bill Wyman, March 25, 1994.

The phrase "Action Drumming" was first coined by Shu Shubat . Taking her cue from the phrase "Action Figure" she was looking for a way to describe that the drumming and dancing are intertwined. Shu also taught me about pneumonics, a process where nursery rhyme like sayings could be used to score out and remember complex rhythmic phrases. This technique greatly influenced my music. Almost all of Swarms drumscores are written by using pneumonic devises. Classic Shu phrases like "put your foot down Betty" are still regularly used to describe a basic 3 against 4 pattern to new SWARM members. Shu and Ollie are the true grandparents of Action Drumming.

It was around this time that I first heard of Blue Man Group and Stomp. We in Jellyeye were simutainiously encouraged and discouraged. It was great to see that our wacky sculptural approach to musical theater had commercial merit but at the same time The Blue Man Group's sculptures were very similar to mine and Stomp had many great pieces finished that we were only experimenting with (tubes, plungers, kitchen sinks etc.). Artists like Twyla Tharp, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, La la la Human Steps, Bill Laswell and Philip Glass, were also very influential at this time.

In 1993, Bill Close and I decided to take our musical experiments to the next level and we co-founded MASS (Music & Sonic Sculpture) (Incidentally, the name Mass, was coined by Rick Kubes of Jellyeye who was a performer in Mass at the time). I can remember showing Bill Close the book "Echo : the images of sound" and pointing out Ellen Fullman and Godfried-Willem Raes's longstring instruments encouraging him to start building Longstrings. We built an array of more sophisticated string and drum sculptures for our new group. We then enjoyed a few years of building and performing together, combining percussion and stringed sculptures, electronics, and traditional instruments with dance. We played such venues as Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago's Hothouse, Wood Street gallery, Synergy Theater, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago’s Gallery Two, Wood Street Gallery, Chicago Filmmakers Theater, The Grand Canyon World Unity Music Festival, The Dance Center of Columbia Collage and did sight specific installations in the painted desert.

People in Chicago often thought my music was African. The strong influence of African music through the incredible Jazz and Blues scene in Chicago made that seem like the most obvious parallel. Here In Vancouver, people think we are a Taiko band. Again the diversity of musical influence from all over the Pacific Rim makes that a likely assumption. I am greatly influenced by all sorts of world music but my predominate influences are the bands I have directly worked with like Jellyeye and Mass as well as bands like Stomp, Blue Man Group, Peter Gabriel, From Scratch, Ellen Fullman, John Cage etc.

One of my favourite memories of Chicago is when Shu from Jellyeye invited The Kodo drummers of Japan, who were playing in town at the time, over for supper and a private Jellyeye show. After we performed for them, they asked our permission to try to play the last part of our show. After a brief Kodo huddle, they were able to completely replicate all of the music and choreography of our last piece. With only having seen it once! That's true talent! We were quite humbled! The relevant part is that The Kodo Drummers said that they were so happy to see us doing this new style of drumming. They see all kinds of Taiko groups and they find that many of them are very derivative of Kodo's work. They said that we were not Taiko, but that we maintained the essence of what Taiko is about, and that they were very happy to see us developing a unique style of our own. That was one of the best compliments I have ever had!

I left Chicago in 1995 as my student visa had expired. I had to leave all that I started behind - two incredible theatrical troupes at the peak of their creativity. I decided to leave Jellyeye with all 12 of my best drums, so that they might continue on, unimpaired. Before I left I also made a percussive skyline as part of the set design of Steppenwolfs theater's production of "A Clockwork Orange" and an interactive musical sculpture which is on permanent display at the Chicago Children's Museum.

I moved to Vancouver, and as soon as I had built a sufficient number of instruments I formed my new drum troupe, SWARM. I had 8 or 9 drummers working with me and we did a few small shows around town. I had just finished writing a piece called The Descent which was extrapolated from a 7 beat pattern of Ollie Saiy's when I met and auditioned Greg Kozac. He had good chops and could easily follow me through odd time signatures, as well he was a good improviser and we had a great rhythmic rapport. We then buckled down and started to write some more music for SWARM. We wrote all of our music collaboratively at my studio in the ARC. Using all of my instruments and my theories of moving music, we would bounce different rhythms off of each other and weave them together into a song. Often Greg would have 2 or 3 rhythmic patterns to start with and I would transform them into choreographic gestures. We went to The Banff Centre in Alberta for a musical residency and drove across Canada to Montreal for the CINARS International Showcase for the Arts. Despite physical injuries, the power of our showcase landed us a number of tours through the States. We played at the Atlanta Arts Festival, the University of Massachusetts, the Pittsburg International Children's Festival and even a debut show on Broadway at the New Victory Theater.

During this same time frame, but before we left for our Broadway debut, SWARM applied for and received a Factor grant to record SWARM's first professional CD. The bulk of the pieces and most of the bed drum tracks were recorded at Koko Recording Studios. The recordings were great in spite of the fact that the studio space was too small to properly record large-scale percussion. I took the recordings home in order to collage many of the sounds that I had sampled from my instruments throughout the mix. I completely composed, recorded and engineered a number of extended pieces myself - Longstring parts for the Bioconversion Saga- tubes, whirlies, drum samples, electronic beeps, and siren samples for the piece Itchy- and a long ambient Longstring drone intro for Chocolate Satilight Love Machine. The tubes song, Poulet Noir, was recorded and mixed completely in my home studio. As well, I was busy developing new material for our US tour - Phenumatic bagpipes that fit into the drum stands; refitting my drum tower with many new drums and sample pads as well as restructuring the main tower so that it would detach into two sections.

SWARM's US tour went quite well. We had two versions of the show, a shorter 45-minute show consisting of mostly drum pieces and an 90 minute set with new longstrings, phenumatic bagpipes, sci-fi face organs and drum towers. We débuted our longer set on the New Victory Theater stage. The New York Times review by Lawrence Van Gelder said "In the second half of the show, the music becomes more complex and interesting. On the stage at the outset are the 24-foot-long strings, a stainless steel nine-string instrument resembling a laser gun, played with rosin-covered gloves; nearby is an instrument that looks like a lunar lander with dish antennas, thin cables and struts. It can be bowed, plucked and thumped in conjunction with the long string. In this piece the performers are costumed like space travelers, and their music possesses an otherworldly quality." "By the time their 90-minute show has ended, they have evoked the primitive, embodied the hip and reached out toward an almost extraterrestrial avant-garde. All in all, Swarm proves to be a novel, lively curiosity."

This article has been used as a Scrap Arts review when, in fact, it is a SWARM review. Scrap Arts did not exist at the time of the review. The first phase of SWARM broke up shortly after the New York tour. SWARM's first CD is now being sold by Scrap Arts, as Greg Kozac's Fabrication Laboratory.

Despite these small setbacks I still remain enthusiastic about the collaborative process. I feel that ideas are not to be claimed and hoarded but shared. I even encourage direct sampling of my instruments and music, as long as SWARM is given credit. I encourage other artists to explore the possibilities of their many influences, but instead of just copying, to internalize the influences, and transform them into something new.

Since the temporary breakup of SWARM I have built my new sculpture/recording/video studio at The Edge from scratch and set up cooperative wood and metal shops in The Edge's amenities building. The new SWARM is going strong and has been together for four years. I am very lucky now to work with people who are not only highly talented musicians, dancers, actors and technicians but are genuinely good, kind, patient people! We have developed a wonderful collaborative rapport, a unique bond that allows us to creatively structure music from multiple different approaches, ranging from completely structured to completely improvised.

Throughout the fall and winter of 2003 to 2004 we toured throughout BC playing for students in 165 schools. We do a wide range of gigs from community events such as the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach Program, the Friends For Life Benefit Concert and Public Dreams events, to collaborating with Arts Umbrella children's classes to produce an opening number for the Arts Umbrella Tribute Gala, to high profile corporate events like 2003 Weightlifting Championships Opening Ceremonies. SWARM self -presented our new 90 minute multimedia theatrical show on May 7th 2004 from which we got some great footage and we will be releasing our first full length DVD. We are now preparing for our summer 2004 cross-Canada tour were we will be playing at the Medicine Hat Jazz Festival, The Celebrate Toronto Street Festival and collaborating with DJ's and other techno pioneers of Winnipeg's underground at the Millennium Centre coordinated by Precursor Production's . We have just completed a commercial for Bratz Dolls which is to be aired internationally in August 2004. Things are finally going great for SWARM! Good things do come to those who are patient and keep working at their art, no matter what obstacles the universe throws before them.

Thanks to all my family, friends and instructors who over the years have given me so much support and understanding.

Bill Wallace,

SWARM Director

June 2004