Bring a Unique Kind of Excitement to Your Festival Audience!
“Music people want to hear, made from objects they they no longer wanted!” that’s Junk Music™
And you’ve heard The Junkman’s Grammy-nominated music on ESPN, NBA Playoffs, video games for Electronic Arts, Airbnb, videos for Nike, PowerDot, Paddle to Live, and live concerts with Eminem, the Black Eyed Peas, Phish and more…
The New York Times calls The Junkman “a virtuoso!”, The Washington Post says “he’s the Max Roach of the dumpster”, Downbeat calls Junk Music “music definitely worth hearing,” and Conan O’Brien called it “a mind blowing experience!”
The Junkman™ is the Daddy of Eco-Beat – the original reused materials percussionist, and he offers a number of programs for festivities large and small.
Whether it’s live, online, or a combination of both, The Junkman® will work with your festival team to design and deliver a schedule of programs that fits your audience and budget!
The Junkman® offers programs to please every age and music that appeals to lovers of classical, rock, world, dance, jazz, and avant garde.
The Junkman® has appeared at festivals and venues worldwide, including: Lemonwheel, Llangollen International Music Eisteddfod, Dunbar Civic Week, Basingstoke B Love, Grinigog, The Van’s Warped Tour, The Great Went, LA Music Center, Lemonwheel, The Great Went,Sundance Film Festival, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Discover Jazz Festival, Kansas City International Jazz Festival, United Nation’s COP 16 Conference on Climate Change, Summer Series Dubai, Seoul Drum Festival, Stockholm International Percussion Event, Zagreb Biennale, Escena Contemporanea, Fort Worth Arts Festival, and recently, the Imagine Watford Festival in London, England.
The Junkman® offers the following six programs that can be customised or mixed & matched to suit your audience, festival theme, schedule, and budget:
1. Interactive Concert with Junkjam™
An odyssey of highly original music with diverse & brilliant styles of influence and magnetically-vibrant grooves. The dextrous Junkman, with his knock-out percussion chops, performs on his rack of over 60 re-used materials including old signs, tin cans, scrap wood & metal, glass bottles pvc pipe, wood shutter, flower pots and much more. He also performs special selections such as Kitchen Music on jazzy kitchen utensils, and Rock Music using real, ruddy rocks. The program closes with a Junkjam™, where audience members grab a provided stick and a re-used material and everyone jams-out to his Enviro-chants. An Enviro-chant is a small, distinct habit-changing suggestion that one can adopt into their daily lives that will yield a healthier human race and planet earth. Previous concertgoers in 2018 referred to the event as “ Dazzling”, “Enlightening”, “Educational”,“Delightful”, and Sheer Fun!”. The Junkman™ offers age-appropriate versions of this program for both Adult and Family audiences.
2. Junkjam®
A stand alone event apart from the Interactive Concert. It’s an experience in which the young and the old can come together and experience the powerful sensations generated by a common beat. Each Junkjam® begins with a series of Enviro-chants and ends with a free-form structure that allows total freedom to each participant. Junkjams® can be scheduled events or “flash jams”.
The enviro-chants used during Junkjams® cover each of the three environments in which we all live: our Physical Environment (soil, water, air, and climate change), our Personal Environment (how we treat each other and wish to be treated by others), and our post-pandemic Environment (reshaping out thoughts and actions in the new world reality).
3. Make and Take
A chance for children and a guardian/caregiver to make an actual percussion instrument with The Junkman using only reused materials, and then, take it home. Instruments vary by age of audience and can include wind chimes, shakers, slap sticks, spoon strikers, rain sticks, finger bells or jingle sticks. This is an extremely popular and successful workshop!
4. Enviro-Music Workshop
The Junkman explores how basic science, math and technology principals are used in his music as well as in the making of his junk instruments. And lastly, how all this relates to our three environments. The workshop closes with a Junkjam. Topics include: sound vs silence, vibration, nodal points, suspension vs mounting, rhythm, meter, listening, dynamics and basic improvisational skills. This is a highly interactive workshop with lots of drumming on reused materials.
5. Junk Music Playstations
The Junkman and the general public design, construct and learn to perform on a Junk Music Playstation – a sound sculpture made exclusively from re-used materials. Festival-goers can jam with The Junkman, at scheduled times during the day(s).
Here’s a sample of Playstations The Junkman has created in the past:
6. JunkSTATIONS
About a year ago, The Junkman™ was reading a recipe for deconstructed sushi, and thought “Wow, I can do that with my Playstations. Hence the birth of the JunkStations.
Instead of one gigantic (difficult to move Playstation) we have several small, easy to move, individual stations that can be adapted to the size of individual audience members (i.e. children, wheelchair bound, etc) and the range of their reach. In short, audience members can have access to all sides of the STATION at once.
Junkman and the general public design, construct, and learn to perform on JunkSTATIONS. Festival-goers can jam with The Junkman, at scheduled times during the day(s).
Here is a video that demonstrates the junkSTATION in musical action:
