Hasta La Creative!

It will be a blue, piano-less Christmas in Toronto. We’re not sure how you lose a piano exactly, but the folks over at music/sound house Apollo Studios (which was founded in Montreal and also has space in LA) are facing sad times after misplacing theirs.

The above 5:05 mockumentary documents the studio’s beloved, lost piano and the sadness spread in its absence. It opens on Dave Douglass of Anomaly opining that there will be no emotive piano for their spot about “a kitten teaching a puppy to walk again after an accident falling down the stairs chasing a toilet paper roll.” You just can’t get the same kind of emotive, heartfelt track with woodwinds, he complains. Harry Knazan of Apollo can barely hold back the tears reminiscing of the piano’s use in tracks that were “so slow, so sensitive.” Tom Hutch opines that you “can’t replace a piano, just like that, it’s not a machine.”

So the Apollo team gets a forensic team in to look for any clues that can help lead to the piano’s whereabouts or a potential suspect, while other members of the team walk the city putting up fliers for the missing instrument. The team tries a slew of other instruments: harp, horns — but, as Jennifer Cursio puts it, “You can’t replace the piano with anything. Can you picture Elton John with a fucking marimba? It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.” The video references “The Marketer’s Anthem,” which we covered last week, and culminates with a smashed ukulele. Who doesn’t love watching a ukulele get smashed?

Apollo’s mockumentary is a nice, lighthearted piece of self-deprecating  humor. It does such a great job taking on the advertising industry’s overuse of piano, we almost wouldn’t be surprised if fewer tracks used the instrument in the coming year — almost. More importantly, it succeeds at being funny. And during one of the most stressful times of the year we could all use a few laughs, right? Good luck finding your piano, Apollo. Godspeed.

If you have any clues to the whereabouts of the piano in question, please let the folks at Apollo know immediately. We’re not sure how much longer they can hold out without it.

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