One of their hometown papers, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, called them “crackpot modernists and cartooning Michaelangelos.”

The New York Times said they were “a multimedia troupe of infinite jest with an imagination to match.”

Like a legendary animal, Squonk has to be seen to be believed. The group’s next stop is SUNY Oswego at the Marano Campus Lawn.

The small 10-person ensemble represents a range of diverse musical backgrounds, including classical, ethnic Celtic, funk, jazz, and rock. Like their audiences, each of Squonk’s players has a different idea of what they play. And like its namesake, Squonk the band is a misfit who wears the label proudly with pride.

But coming from the kitchen at his home in Pittsburgh, Steve O’Hearn is a simply humble person. 

“I always try to avoid categorizing the music,” he said. “It is sort of progressive rock of some sort…It’s the music we make for us.”

What actually is a ‘squonk’?

Well, to start, what is in a name? It might as well be a coincidence. According to O’Hearn, the performance art group started doing local Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania gigs as a band and named themselves for the most funny and uniquely memorable moniker they could come up with.

“‘Squonk’ was one of the sounds that we made amongst many as a band,” O’Hearn reminisces from three decades ago. “We found out later it’s the name of a cryptid from Pennsylvania, a mythological creature called The Squonk.”

The English rock band Genesis wrote a song about the cryptid in 1976. Its first mention was an appearance in a pioneering folklore field guide from 1910.

According to the 1910 book “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods,” wild squonks tend to disappear in a trail of their own tears when surprised.

It could also be said that Squonk the band exudes an equally powerful and thrilling vibe, accessible for any age and inducing a combination hippie acid trip roller coaster of theatrically exaggerated emotion.

O’Hearn proudly and openly admits that dialogue is a two-way street and collaboration and honesty between members of the band were key to their creative process.

“We were always curious what the naive opinion was,” O’Hearn said. “It’s informed by both the expert kind of level, and the amateur, audience level.”

As experimental as their performances are, O’Hearn considers Squonk to be a populist project, not pretentious.

“It’s not really avant-garde stuff,” O’Hearn said. “It’s not real self-important sh*t that you might call ‘art.’”

According to O’Hearn, Squonk started out in a Pittsburgh junkyard with rusty homemade equipment. They still retain that DIY ethic.

“It’s still us doing everything ourselves,” O’Hearn said.“We’re just ten goofy people.”

In that way, Squonk is a tangible representation of the Artswego mission. Combining the arts, humanities and even the beauty of the sciences. Squonk has had an equally long and diverse history with SUNY Oswego.

Professor Jonel Langenfeld of the theatre department worked with the group when they were Artswego’s artists in residence.

The Oswego stop of their newest show Brouhaha will be the fourth time in more than 15 years Squonk has visited campus. The Oswegonian covered their last visit in 2019 on the Eastern/Hewitt Quad, when they performed their 2014 show Pneumatica. All performances are outdoors in the elements and free to the public.

They also roam far past their stomping grounds geographically. Besides their home state, their current tour includes stops in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, the Carolinas and eastern and western Canada.

In years past, Squonk visited prominent venues like New York City’s Lincoln Center and Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center for the Arts. The group has also toured Europe and Asia, visiting Edinburgh, Scotland’s famous Fringe festival, Belgium, Germany, South Korea and China.