Thursday, October 21, 2010

hype of the week: 2009 top secret corps, basel

A pre-race hype for the extreme drum corps geek.

In honor of this week's Cross Crusade race at PIR, I decided to toss up the geekiest drum corps video I could find. Top Secret Corps is an all-male drum line from Basel, Switzerland which incorporates elements of both traditional Swiss style and modern rudimental drum corps technique in their playing. This particular video isn't their best work; there are dropped sticks and frankly I could do without the laser light thing at the end. But about 2 minutes in you'll see why they're so damned cool. Hang in there, and be thrilled.

Usually found at the PIR race every year is a local, grass-roots drum corps whose claim to fame is that they're sort of punk (a popular aesthetic in Portland), they play at all sorts of local events, and they are loud as crap. If you go to PIR on Sunday you will probably hear them long before you see them; they're that loud. They're ear-plug loud, part-your-hair and crack-the-cement loud, vaporize-small-animals-at-twenty-paces loud. (Did I mention that they're loud? Riding past them at PIR last year was a little like breaking through concrete at 15 mph.)
But trust me, they can't do anything like this, and probably only a rudimentally-trained drummer would recognize the difference:

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