They’ve got the beet.
A touring orchestra using instruments entirely of vegetables just earned itself a world record.
The Vegetable Orchestra, which only plays instruments that are carved out of vegetables, earned a Guinness World Record for the most concerts by a vegetable orchestra.
The 11-piece orchestra, formed in Vienna, Austria, in 1998, has performed a total of 344 concerts using specially-made instruments, such as a carrot recorder, a cucumberphone, radish bass flute, percussive pieces of eggplant and a leek violin.
“We believe that we can produce sound that cannot be [easily] produced by other instruments. You can hear the difference. It sometimes sounds like animals, sometimes just like abstract sounds,” the orchestra explains on its website.
The innovative group is constantly inventing new instruments — and they have to be prepared to improvise, since the vegetables can break or dry out while they are on stage.
After their concerts, they even serve the audience soup made of the vegetables they had leftover from preparing the instruments.
The musicians — who come from backgrounds in genres like electronic, rock, punk and classical — hope to show audiences that music can be created from just about anything.
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound,” it continued on its site.
“Each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view.”
The creative bunch, which tours around the world, only asks that people stop questioning them about whether or not they are all vegan or vegetarians.
“No we are not. Don’t ask again,” they said on their website. “We’ve heard this question 3 million times.”