The 'flue

Washing Up Stomp/Bass Line, Cutlery, Dishes and Water Really Clean Up - STOMP
How about a loose definition of music: An organization of sounds. I did say loose. Luigi Russolo believed that the industrial revolution had given men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. However, Russolo's attempts at creating these revolutionary sounds fell on deaf ears (sorry, I couldn't NOT go after that pun). Perhaps Russolo needed better tools to work with? Or maybe he was WAY ahead of his time. By the 1980s the line between noise and music had been blurred. Performance artists were leaning towards the straight up noise end of the spectrum, while groups such as Art of Noise where taking sampled sounds and cramming them into more widely accepted, traditional music. Today we're looking for a midpoint between the two.

So the answer must clearly be found with a british dance troupe, right? Wait, what? Bear with me. The dance troupe, STOMP, is a unique combination of percussion, movement and visual comedy formed in Brighton, U.K. back in the summer of 1991. This was after 10 years of collaboration between it's creators that has gone on the play world-wide. The idea of banging out rhythm on every day objects is far from original, and it can be argued that a percussion section does not a song make (keep in mind that if you follow that line of thought, all jazz trios would no longer be considered music, for example- bass, piano and drums are all percussion instruments) . But for our purposes we have a group making "music" with non-traditional objects. Not quite the mid ground that I was hoping to find, but it's getting there.

Listen to a sample at the iTunes Store