EI, EI, EIO

Amy Farrand, Mark Smeltzer and J. Howell live by a simple credo: “Anything is an instrument if you know how to play it.”

“Anything” might include a saucepan, a pitchfork or a washing machine. Whatever it is, these three usually know how to squeeze, jolt or coerce it into making music.

“There are about eight different ways you can get sound out of any given scrap of junk metal,” says Smeltzer, a wily-looking man with a wild gray beard and black eyeglasses. As he says this, his hands busily transform a napkin into a creation resembling some combination of a four-legged spider, the Eiffel Tower and a microphone stand. Leaning forward, he whispers loudly into his imaginary microphone: “I can see music inside of things that other people discard.”

Howell, taking a drag on his cigarette, adds, “The way we build and play these instruments is very intuitive, very spontaneous.”

Meet the Experimental Instrument Orchestra, a homegrown trio devoted to breaking just about all the standard rules of music in the interest of, well, making better music. And after just six shows (the band was born in July), EIO’s bizarre compositions have garnered enthusiastic audiences, some as far away as England.

Theory, process and final product are inseparable for EIO. “First of all, we’re poor,” Farrand says. “So we use whatever comes into our hands, whatever we can find.”

The band members regularly dumpster dive. They reclaim garbage as well as orphaned instruments, such as an old cello that Howell is converting into a makeshift upright bass. “It’s an American tradition to use what you’ve got, right?” Smeltzer asks. “Besides, if you build your instrument, you really get to know it, how it’s going to respond, what it can and can’t do.”

Sometimes, their findings seem like fate. “I was walking along some train tracks, and I tripped and almost fell on a half-buried pitchfork,” Howell says. Turns out, the pitchfork was a full-size, completely metal implement (handle and all), ideal for producing a variety of weird, creepy chimes.

Using found instruments and random junk isn’t merely economical. Smeltzer considers it an ethical statement to make art with other people’s waste.

Practice sessions usually last a hefty six hours. That’s because the band spends the first four constructing new instrumental devices and only the last two actually playing them. Even in rehearsal, EIO has to record everything. “Our music is like an ether,” Smeltzer says. “That means we have to capture it in the moment it happens.”

Sometimes the trio doesn’t know what it’s going to play until it steps on a stage, using instruments modified or crafted only hours before. And that kind of Zen-like immediacy, of course, is exactly what EIO is after. “We don’t hold on to certain lyrics or melodies,” Farrand says.

All this flies in the face of modern pop music’s homogenization and generic packaging of sound and style. “With our music, there’s no ‘how did it go?'” Smeltzer says with a smile. This, he believes, is why EIO’s peculiar music is “refreshing, even though it tastes like vinegar.”

Vinegar, indeed. EIO’s music is challenging to listen to, but the trio embraces this fact. Filled with dissonance and unexpected clangs, twangs and warbles, EIO’s sound is also loaded with wild vocal eruptions, a form of singing that sounds like ecstatic prayer.

EIO credits its rapid success to two sources. First is its origin in Kansas City’s fertile underground scene. Howell says EIO has gotten support and gig opportunities from local people open to creative, unexpected music.

Second, in a testament to MySpace’s power to actually connect musicians, a Briton and fellow musician who goes by the name Jont discovered EIO online. A few weeks ago, he came to hear the group perform in Kansas City while he was touring the United States. Thoroughly impressed, Jont invited EIO back to England to perform several gigs (he promised to scour England for useful junk) and record sessions which will eventually wind up in the hands of the BBC for broadcast.

Because they record everything anyway, the three musicians have already compiled two albums. Taking its philosophy right down to the last detail, EIO plans to release its CDs in cases made of found sheet metal. Meanwhile, the band is preparing for the trip to England, and its next performance is a benefit concert to raise money for the plane tickets.

Farrand, Smeltzer and Howell can hardly think past the next few months. The nature of the band means that its future, like its music, is malleable. “Who knows what I’ll be showing you next time we talk?” Smeltzer says. “Maybe I’ll have some toilet thing that puts out real great sounds when strings are stretched across the bowl.”

For now, EIO has plenty of junk to keep its members occupied.