We’ve written aplenty about bands which turn their backs on the audience.

LAst week, we couldn’t see a band for the trees.

It was a grand return to the farm where we once memorably saw The Shaking Quakers and other acts drawn from a religious collective. (When we have raved about this music, we’ve been accused of pimping for a cult, which has caused real complications for us and this publication, and no end of negative press for the bands.)

The management of the farm has turned over. The current occupants are religious as well, they confess, but of a more conventional and non-proselytizing breed.

But they’ve inherited the same spiritual desire to use the grounds of the farm to make interesting  sounds. Where the SQs once shook the barn the old-fashioned way, there are now speakers and microphones surreptitiously planted to broadcast, eternally, the noises of the barn itself.

Composers and sound engineers have been doing things like this for decades, in oceans and canyons. The new farm crew—for that’s their name, The New Farm—adds more human elements to the mix than the more purist and naturalistic found-sound collages, however.

A barn door has been designed to creak in rhythm. A chicken coop has been placed centrally, so as to sing lead. The hayloft is left open, causing certain proscribed wind effects, directed at windchimes and bell-bearing windvanes.

This is not a calm night in the country.You can’t hear much when it’s unamplified, but when it is there’s a whirl of sounds and beats and ca-ca-caws.

The New Farm Crew is at work on its first album, Sounds Like Barn.

Tonight: 466488 and Except Hydrangeas at the Bullfinch. We know, we know, it doesn’t add up… Shirt Special, covers, at Hamilton’s…An Evening With dark, death-obsessed Canadians Satuit Post and Nothrotherium at D’ollaire’s. Lighten up, already…