Vienna Vegetable Orchestra Have Cornered Vegetable Instrument Market

Photo via Heidrun Henke Playing with more instruments than your average prog band, the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra have been going for 15 years now. Covering songs by Kraftwerk and making their own pieces they’ve had moderate success touring the world and making various albums.

I chatted to Tamara Wilhelm, who’s part of the orchestra (playing parsley) about how different a carrot can sound, feeding their fans and vegetable puns. Noisey: How would you describe the music you make?
Tamara Wilhelm: That’s a hard question. The main idea of our show a few years ago was to reconstruct the electronic music world in its various forms. We started to get the impression that when we played with the vegetables they made very computer generated sounds. Organically electronic?
Yes [laughs]. I guess so. For example, when we did a cover of the Kraftwerk song “Radioactivity," we wanted it on the album. The band’s manager asked them what they thought of the cover and without knowing who we were they described it as “organic."

Photo via Heidrun Henke I wanted to ask about the technical aspects and how the instruments are actually made? Could you give a few examples of how some are made?
There’s different types really. You have ready-mades like pumpkins, which can be turned into a bass drum or onion peels, which have a great crackling sound. Then there are instruments that are built with the template conventional instruments like flutes and trumpets. There are instruments where the wetness really helps the sound, like a cucumber. The fourth type is the extended conventional instruments, they require electronic extensions like distortion pedals for cabbages. To construct the instruments we usually hollow them out with drills then use a knife to shape them. Sounds very DIY. You usually have to build them on the day of your show; does the sound of a carrot differ from place to place?
In Europe, it doesn’t depend so much on where you are but where you do your shopping and the season, also the size and straightness. Our technical rider is pretty specific on the vegetables.

Photo via Zoe Fotographie But how does that change the sound?
The older the carrot is changes its consistency. It’s important to have the right carrot. What was the last instrument you made up?
We have made a cucumber oscillator and a carrot organ, it makes music of pressurized air.

What’s your personal favorite?
I like parsley, it can make cricket sounds, and it’s very difficult to play. How did you make that?
You just buy the parsley, rub the stems when humid, and they sound like the insect. After shows, you always make soup from the veg leftover, how did that idea come about?
After we were rehearsing for a while and we would end up cooking together with what we had left. It completes the experience as you see and hear the vegetables being played with the smells because if a leek breaks it has a particular bad scent, so eating them is the final stage. With this idea, you get to stay at the end and hang about, chatting to us or other people who were there.

We actually make the soup beforehand with the parts we didn’t use when making the instruments, it'd be very bad to use things that we had blown into during the performance.

Photo via Heidrun Henke How did you feel when people said that it was wasteful to use vegetables in that way?
It’s true we don’t eatthe vegetables on stages, but compared to what’s wasted everyday it’s really not that much. It’s very biodegradable, when compared to someone getting a new MacBook and leaving their old one to rot in a landfill.

Would you like the orchestra to expand to encompass all the vegetable groups?
No, we prefer it as a small group. There’s no boss, we use the time to build a group where every member has the same rights. Too many people would ruin that. I bet you must get the best vegetable puns thrown in meetings.
Not really, I tire of them..

Check out more from the band on their page.