The Anywhere Organ

As some of you may have already heard, the Anywhere Organ made an appearance at Amanda Fucking Palmer’s absolutely stellar Kickstarter Countdown Webcast Party!

During the final hours of her Kickstarter, from about 7pm to midnight on May 31st, Amanda Palmer and her band of merry men shut down an entire street in Brooklyn to throw an epic block-party to celebrate her record breaking million dollar fundraiser. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to haul out the Anywhere Organ and make music.

This made for the organ’s fourth public showing. Previously, I’ve been to the Lost Circus, Figment, and Maker Faire.

I was invited to present because the party’s organizer, Miss Scorpio, had hosted the Anywhere Organ a few times before. She put out the call for all things big, loud, captivating, and pretty. I brought my sculpture out in the hopes of fitting the bill.

Not all the pipes made it, only the smaller ones that I could lift by myself, (the biggest pipes are absurdly heavy and made of lead), but enough to make a sizeable instrument. So I took it down, hauled it all the way from Jersey to the top secret party site near Gowanus, and assembled the pieces like IKEA furniture that doesn’t deserve to be tossed into a wood shipper.

The very, very beginning of the webcast and the beginning of the crowd: 

Amanda Fucking Palmer (who shall further be referred to as AFP for short) and her crew dressed up in vintage swimsuits, hauled in a giant fish-tank like enclosure, hired a disco worth of DJ’s, and launched a full scale assault on the audience using basically every sort of bewitching performer possible.

Here’s a chunk of Fuse.TV’s account of the evening:

Palmer presided over her carnivalesque cabaret with her usual mix of punkish spontaneity and exacting control. She was surrounded by ecstatic fans, her band, author husband Neil Gaiman, people dressed like pirates, a fashion designer, a porn star friend (Stoya, who formerly dated Marilyn Manson) and a webcam which live streamed the whole fete for fans at home to watch.

She briefly serenaded the crowd with her trusty ukulele, then spent the next six hours emceeing the event. She introduced the entire cast of her cabaret to the crowd, from an organ player to magicians, a belly dancer to fire twirlers, whose short performances punctuated the focal point of the bash, which was an on-camera tribute to every one of the 24,883 people who donated to Palmer’s Kickstarter fund.

Inside a makeshift structure built from rusty pipes and see-through plastic film (it resembled a human aquarium—check it out below), Palmer and co. gathered stacks of telephone books with the name of every donor written out on each Yellow Page. While songs like Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” and the Beatles’ “Money (That’s What I Want)” blared in the background, Palmer, her band and a group of volunteers tore out the pages and plastered the donors’ names on the static-y plastic for the ever-present webcam to capture. 

By the end of the night, the bubble/aquarium was so full of crumpled Yellow Pages that two kids successfully played hide-and-seek in the pile of donor names. 

My part in the whole affair started modestly, set up so people could play The Anywhere Organ with a little breathing room away from the crowd as the main event gained momentum.

Later on towards the end of the night, though, the Organ was moved to center stage and things got considerably more sensational.

Being introduced to the crowd (note the laptop being held up for the webcast):

Saying hello to the internet. Hi internet!

AFP and The Grand Theft Orchestra fiddling with The Anywhere Organ:

I demonstrated the instrument for a bit, explaining what it was and how to play. After the preliminary introductions AFP and the Grand Theft Orchestra had at it.

And then, after a cute kid came out of the audience to try it..

I got to play one of my own songs!

It was really fun.

I had also near infinite help from Numidas Prasarn of Numi Empire. She helped set up, introduce people to the instrument, haul pipes, and was generally the awesomest thing imaginable. And thanks also to a friend of mine, W. Aaron Waychoff, a fabulous artist as well, who came in from Boston.

Click HERE for a complete three hour Livestream video of the AFP Countdown party. The Anywhere Organ starts at two hours and twenty minutes in.