Drum Circle

November 4th, 2004

By Megan Wennberg
The Coast

Like their deep-fried mollusk namesake, precision drummers Squid are highly versatile. “We’ve done everything and anything,” says founding member Matthew Guest. From rock concerts and bar mitzvahs to weddings and “talks for teens,” the band has “been able to fit any market we’ve tried,” says co-founder Ian MacMillan.

Squid members all come from a competitive pipe band background—drawing on military Scottish marching traditions—and the band was formed in 2000 in to play the Tall Ships festival. Despite the members’ histories of rigourous practice and skilled playing, none had ever performed for an audience, and the concept of entertaining people with their music was foreign to them.

“In the competitive circuit you’re usually just judged—there’s no real audience—so you never get the reactions,” says MacMillan. Tall Ships was first time the group went public, “and reactions were really good.”

Seated around a table in a basement Halifax pub, Squid members are friendly and relaxed. Joking over beer and appetizers, they’re curious to learn each other’s reasons for getting into drumming (or, in the case of Ryan Fraser, the bagpipes).

“I can’t believe you chased a girl into drumming!” says Guest, laughing, teasing MacMillan. Guest, for his part, started drumming in grade 6 but was told he had no rhythm and that he should take up the flute. Still outraged, he says, “Can you imagine? Me playing the flute! I’d be the angriest flute player ever.”

Ranging in age from 18 to 28, Squid members are friends first, professional associates second. Whether they’re playing military snares, tom toms, cowbells, djembes, stools or garbage cans, bandmates MacMillan, Guest, Fraser, Lauren Connors, Daniel St-Pierre and Mark Jamieson are guaranteed to move your body with their pervasive rhythms.

This past summer, Squid took its act to the streets and won the People’s Choice Award for their visually stunning, rhythmically captivating performance at the Halifax Busker Festival. Now they hope to tap into the street festival scene and take their percussive skills on a world tour.

Squid members attribute the band’s broad-based audience appeal to their ability to attract people who “dig the traditional Scottish angle,” as well as young audiences who see them as edgy. Also, adds MacMillan, “it’s not just a musical concert—the choreography is just as important. It’s a spectacle and people can be entertained by it.”

MacMillan composes the score for most of Squid’s pieces and he also lays down the choreographic bones before introducing a song to the other five members for group input.

“I guess one of the cool things about ourselves that we’re proud about is that we really try to come up with crazy ideas—like ‘what the hell would impress us?’” says MacMillan.

“Yeah,” adds Guest, “What can we screw up 50 percent of the time—and we’ll try to do it anyway. We keep trying to up the ante.”

With a wide array of visual tricks solidly under their belts, Squid is re-examining its music. The band is no longer satisfied with simply impressing an audience—they want to make them dance.

“We played a big festival up in Ottawa, and we didn’t get the reaction of the crowd that we wanted,” says MacMillan. “We impressed them, but they weren’t actually moving to our music so it really made me sit down and think—I mean, it’s fun to impress an audience, but how do you get them to get up and move? Is it possible for a drumming corps to make people want to dance?”

MacMillan turned to hip-hop for inspiration, hoping to incorporate hip-hop’s ability to hook listeners with Squid’s more traditional sound. “I started putting urban hip-hop beats to some of our street beats that we use as a drum corps and it just meshed really, really well,” says MacMillan.

Looking to the future, band members agree they’d love to be able to play music full time. Four of the six are still in school, and MacMillan, Connors and Fraser all teach their instruments to aspiring musicians. MacMillan explains the innate appeal of drumming: “It’s easy to find the rhythm in percussion,” he says. “Drumming is just so easy to feel.”