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rattle rattle
Pffffffft
rattle rattle
Pffffffft
rattle rattle
Pffffffft
rattle rattle
Pffffffft
rattle rattle
Pffffffft
rattle rattle

And after about 15 minutes I thought 'right then, that's enough of that," and went for a drink. Since then I've heard plenty of people whose opinions I respect talk admiringly about the group. I tell them they're wrong, They tell me they aren't. I tell them they are. They tell me they aren't. I say they definitely are. And so on.

Finally I cracked and watched some YouTube clips (remember when you had to go to Woolworths to buy a cassette single to find out what a band sounded like?).

Anyway, turns out they can be much more fun:

I think the confusion stems from the fact that there really isn't a Shibusa Shirazu orchestra, or at least it's different every time they perform. They were set up as a backing outfit for an avante-garde theater group way back in 1988, and it seems that since then the shows have been made from whoever fancied playing at the time. The Youtube clip seems pretty representative of their festival shows. Their full roster of 30-plus performers includes two "groove girls", a handful of butoh dancers and an animator (as in, animate the crowd rather than drawing nice pictures). As long as they remember to plug their trumpets into the mouthpieces, I reckon this will be a show to remember.

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Uncle Don Coglione