Victoria man transforms junk into acclaimed musical instruments

Gregory Kozak will never forget his dad’s 1953 Pontiac.

Although it looked like “a beautiful beast” when young Gregory tied the car’s old hubcaps to the eaves trough in the rain, they made an “incredible percolating” sound that changed his life.

“I listened to it for days,” Gregory recalls with a smile.

It was so satisfying, the then 8-year-old started collecting all sorts of things that made sound — nails in jars, piles of keys, clothespins and paper in bike spokes.

“You have this mobile soundtrack that you made yourself,” Gregory recalls fondly of the his bike roaring around the neighbourhood. “It just made me happy.”

So it wasn’t a surprise when Gregory grew up and pursued music in New York. But despite learning to play blues, jazz, and rock — even orchestral music — it didn’t feel the same as the sounds he made before.

“[One day] my wife looked at me in the eyes and said, ‘What do you really want to do?’”

Gregory responded by blurting out something to Justine about inventing his own instruments.

“And she said, ‘Okay! Let’s do it!’”

So, Gregory started scouring industrial and building sites for just the right junk.

“I have a 'Spidey sense' about it,” Gregory says.

Then he taught himself welding and metal fabrication, before building more than 145 sound-making sculptures.

“So it no longer looks like the trash it was,” Gregory says. “So it actually looks like something that no one would throw away.”

His collection of instruments (which he refers to as his kids and vows to never sell) includes a rotating drum, fabricating material from a failed “fast ferry project” and a percussive apparatus compiled from pieces of an amusement park ride.

There’s also the discarded washing machine hose, which Gregory attached to a bagpipe reed and a balloon that he dubbed ‘The Annoyaphone.’

After he blows up the balloon through the reed and the hose, it deflates with a high-pitched vibrato.

“Isn’t that annoying?” Gregory laughs playfully.

While that instrument is silly, what Gregory’s done with army surplus materials, like discarded artillery shells from the Vietnam War, is substantial.

He used the shells to create a xylophone of sorts, which Gregory plays with mallets, to produce the kind of resonate notes that produce goosebumps.

“[I wanted to] make something beautiful that people will enjoy and come towards,” Gregory says. “Rather than run away from.”

Now Gregory and his band Scrap Arts Music use the instruments to stage dynamic performances that earn rave reviews around the world.

“If I can do it,” Gregory says humbly. “Anyone can do it.”

He hopes his work will affect people the way those old Pontiac hubcaps changed him — to reconsider the possibilities of the discarded and be inspired to transform things for the better.

“The world is a massively creative place,” Gregory smiles. “You can keep creating.”