t 3 NEWS photo Mike Waketiald

DARYL BENNETT (left), Jim Guitridge and Erika Florian of Ferocious Fish sound design team are an unassuming bunch. Their clientele, however, includes the iikes of Warner Brothers, PBS, Ottawa's Museum of Nature, BCTV and the Knowledge Network.

A close encounter with W. Van’s Ferocious Fish

HE SOUND design team of fim Guttridge, Dary! Bennett and Erika Florian — known collectively as Ferocious Fish — was, appropriately enough, born in

troubled waters.

In keeping with the fishy theme, Guttridge and Bennett recount their beginnings as we sit in the trendy Beatty Street Barracuda Cafe, sipping cappuccino from fish-shaped cups and saucers:

“We were together on a cruise ship that sank,’’ Bennett says almost maiter-of-factly, then breaks into laughter.

“Jim got off the day before the boat sank but | was one of the last ones to get off. We sank on a dock near Campbell River.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t a sign of things to come. The pair, along with Florian, Guttridge’s wife, garnered their first Grammy nomination this year for their work on U.S, rock band Gwar's latest video.

The Fish wrote the score and created sound for Falice in Wonderland, a satirical comment on American culture based on the arrest of one of the band members during a stage performance in Georgia. His crime? Groping a large cuttlefish between his legs.

One would expect the trio to be overjoyed with the recognition — after all, they‘re relatively small minnows in the big pond of sound design — a term Bennett defines as taking a sound and digitally

* stretching it until it becomes unrecognizable. And they were up against acts like Annie Lennox and M.C. Hammer.

Guttridge and Bennett, however, don't share the same enthusiasm.

“We laughed and laughed. Especially when you consider our vocals were on it, says Guttridge.

“Gwar are really fun guys and they're very smart,” observes Bennett. ‘‘They allowed us to put our complete personalities into the video, We added the sound of bat wings and skateboards and made. it quite surreal. And we added a tot of humor — you could say we did all the non-disgusting stuff. But Annie Lennox’ video looked a Jot better.” He pauses for a moment and adds: ‘It’s probably best we didn’t win because then we'd be known for it.”

Obscurity is the least of the team’s challenges. Try being given only one week to bang out a

Evelyn Jacob SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

polished video, or, God forbid, having your well-tuned sound yoice-over'd.

“it's tough to write music for emotions. How do you do five minutes for a dying whale?”’ says Bennett.

Ferocious Fish didn’t start out

quite so ferocious. Theirs were humble beginnings, working from Guttridge’s parents’ converted garage in West Vancouver.

A Cap College commercial music grad who studied in New York with keyboardist Kenny Kirkland (their lessons ended when Kirkland joined Sting’s band), Guttridge, 29, and Florian, 31, a composer for dance and classical music, founded the Fero- cious Fish in 1988. Bennett, 31, a freelance percussionist who has played with David Foster, Kenny Loggins and Bryan Adams, came on board one year later.

The ichthyological inspiration for the group’s name, I’m told, was inspired by the team’s pet fish — a teeny-weeny guppy that ended up devouring a much larger co- habitor, fin by fin. ““We thought it was a stupid name and that peuple would remember it,’

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