By Craig Matsumoto

FOR A BAND whose setup looks like Santa's sleigh crashed into a garage sale, Toychestra is plenty serious. It's not that the five-woman Oakland band lacks a sense of humor – just look at the members' dime-store costumes: bridal gowns, superhero outfits, and cowgirl regalia. They take the stage in future-shock hairdos and fluorescent wigs, unfolding ironing boards to support their arsenal of instruments – tiny pianos, hurdy-gurdies, and plastic recorders – and kitchen-utensil noisemakers.

It all smacks of a novelty act, but the music goes far beyond childish thumping (though they're not above that). The band's artsy-goofy hybrid inspired East Bay composer Dan Plonsey to team the group with Fred Frith last year for Plonsey's Concerto for Guitar and Toy Orchestra, committed to CD, What Leave Behind, by France's SK Records. And Toychestra received an invitation to Paris early this year for a toy-music festival at the artsy Cité de la Musique cultural complex.

Toychestra comes from a place where the playfully absurd turns eerie. Tinny clinks and clanks get overlaid with sinister tones from the tuned instruments, and the occasional serene harmonies make the effect at once more peaceful and more unsettling. It's Miranda July conducting the Residents in the Twin Peaks Elementary School symphony.

A Toychestra is born

The band started as a one-off experiment in 1996. Paula Alexander, a member of performance art group Better Hose and Garters, was invited by drummer Gino Robair to join a festival of experimental music by women. "For the first rehearsal, we got together and brought our regular instruments, and I brought some toys too," Toychestra member Lexa Walsh says. "We tried both, and the toys definitely won. We started sitting in a circle improvising with toys, and we came up with a set in two weeks."

The band stuck together, encouraged by that first show and egged on by local fans including Plonsey, who booked the band in 1998 at his Beanbender's music series in Berkeley. "I hope they will always be as fresh when the inevitable happens and they begin to learn to play their instruments!" he wrote on his online concert diary, back before anyone knew to call it a blog.

Most original members of the group have left since those early days, Alexander included, but Walsh still carries the Toychestra torch along with Michele Adams, Angela Coon, Shari Robertson, and Corey Weinstein. Almost none of the band members are trained musicians; most are artists of other stripes who are interested in investigating the kinds of sounds they can create. In many ways, Toychestra resembles an ongoing experiment in naive sound.

What comes out are two- and three-minute instrumentals with spooky melodies over absurd nursery-rhyme percussion. Dreamy harmonies adorn some songs, with lyrics mixing absurd and serious themes: "Ha, ha, Paris / I want another glass of pink champagne / Ha, ha, marriage/ I follow, you follow, masquerade," the group sings on the slow-moving "John's Buttons."

With most of the band unable to read sheet music, songwriting is a painstaking group effort. "We write it down any way we can, memorize it, tape it, and play it to each other. We used to just sort of remember these parts, like, 'Blue-Yellow-Yellow, Orange. Orange,' " Walsh says, describing the colored keys on the pianos and xylophones. "Now I have an organ at home, so I can at least write it down, like, C-C-D-D."

The tricky part isn't so much the notes but the rhythms, which can't be spelled out. That made Plonsey's concerto a challenge, because it had to be learned by rote – and because, at 24 minutes, it was by far the longest piece the band had ever played. "I started out writing some simple, repeating bits to play," Plonsey says. "I wanted to see what would happen, because they'd never worked with written music before. It was all totally aural."

The concerto is a modern avant-garde piece with a playful feel. In its performances, the band worked away at the marchlike rhythms while Frith added his usual scribbles and plucks.

Plonsey was impressed with the results. Toychestra had spent years re-creating the interlocking rhythms they'd heard in other music (Coon is a huge Frith fan, Plonsey notes), and that preparation was necessary for the scope of the concerto. "It hit me that their music is much more complicated than my music," Plonsey says. "When you pull apart what they've done, it's pretty sophisticated."

Popular in France

Toychestra's experience in France was just as successful but more daunting. "It was our first concert-hall experience, and it was pretty uptight. For instance, there wasn't much hospitality to speak of, and I personally enjoyed playing the punk-squatted info shop in Angers the next night much more," Walsh says. "It was a good experience, though. I think we have learned to overcome our fears of concert halls and to loosen the place up a little."

The question now is whether all this high-art exposure will propel the band into a new phase – one Plonsey worried about years ago, in which the band starts to learn the toy instruments. Walsh says Toychestra is incorporating more serious instruments such as melodica and kalimba to undercut the shrillness of the toy instruments. Even more telling, Plonsey says members of the band have asked for souvenir copies of his concerto's sheet music. "It's like bringing computers into the jungle. I hope I haven't corrupted them," he says. Toychestra performs with the trio of Jewlia Eisenberg, Maya Dunietz, and Shahzad Ismaily and DJ MC-CKA Lexica Sat/20, 9 p.m., 21 Grand, 449B 23rd St., Oakl. $7-$10. (510) 44GRAND.