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Everyone loves playing with animals. It’s heaps of fun and you get to romp with the most bizarre living things on the planet and they generally don’t hurt you too much. Yet, it seems some people aren’t content merely playing with an animal, but feel the need to straight up ‘play’ the animal. I don’t mean play like dipping your balls in peanut butter and tricking the dog into licking it off. I’m saying it like using the animal as an instrument. Straight from the ‘I call bullshit’ files is an album by Hermeto Pascoal, a famed Brazilian jazz guy who had a penchant for strange arrangements and could, or at least would, play anything. Apparently this included livestock and on one orchestral-prog type number, called Slaves Mass, this wild South American answer to Moondog, jams out a squealing solo by squeezing (possibly even torturing a little bit) a small hairy piglet. We aren’t entirely convinced that the pig has earned its place in the World Book Encyclopedia of Instruments yet, so we bribed Johnny Mackay from Melbourne, um rock pig outfit, Children Collide to give the bacon some shakin’.

VICE: Have you ever thought to or ever attempted to play a pig before?

Johnny: I once gaffer-taped a bunch of cats to my body and mic’d up my forehead, but no, never a pig.

How did it go? Could you get the swine to whine?

Well, maybe not whine, but we did use what I’d term a bottom-range or bass pig. So I did get her to grunt like some kind of hairy tuba.

What methods did you use?

Squeezing like a bagpipe, the same way that Bazilian dude did. I also tickled and played with her udders and nipples and all that.

Udders are for cows.

Yeah I know, but I tried fiddling with the nipples, stroking behind the ears and just standing back and conducting her but playing the nipples like a fleshy keyboard seemed to give me the most control over the range.

Will you be using a pig on your next recording?

Well, this experience has definitely made me want try it out. It’s just going to be a matter of finding both the pigs and the players. I mean it’s hard enough to find a decent drummer.

KAREN CARPENTER
Children Collide release their mini album We Three, Brave and True in August. If you haven’t seen them play live yet, make it your duty. www.childrencollide.com

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