My neighbour has a totally annoying and invasive bamboo forest which is constantly threatening my garden. As part of my strategy to fight this monster I began cutting this stuff back and turning the dead into musical instruments.

I’ve made a range of things from Boobams to Kung Fu style transverse flutes to big  clavés like the ones you see polynesians beating on at those touristy Luaus.

Making musical instruments is fun and educational. As a starting point I would suggest checking out the action-packed little book ‘Vibrations’ by David Sawyer. It’s pretty much the Bible for DIY noise making projects.

I used various home-made, bamboo percussion sticks and drums extensively on the title song off of the recent Beautiful Sounds album starting at about 6:00 in.

Totally apropos of nothing, at least one inspiration for that section came from a song off an old Cat Stevens’ (néé Yusuf Islam) record ‘Catch Bull At Four’… where there is a percussion ‘breakdown’ in one of the songs using similar timbres.