Why is it, right, that some people who you already know to be talented in a particular, hm, let’s say ‘business sector’, then go and astound you with something in a somewhat distinct creative realm?
And so it transpires, y’see, that David Firth, the visionary* behind various ominously surreal (and mostly exceptional) cartoon shorts – perhaps most (in-) famous of which is his creation of Salad Fingers, but this author’s current favourite is Jerry Jackson: Life & Death – also produces some quite wonderfully attention-grabbing audio under the guise of Locust Toybox.
Of course, we’ve all known about Firth’s musical ‘dabbles’, but one has to wonder how many people recognise quite how deviously exquisite the sounds of Locust Toybox actually are.
And here we are, sitting at the temporal coordinates after which Locust Toybox alleges to be on its 9th album: Noon. It was released at some point this year (twenty-eleven, common era; dunno exactly what day or time) and it’s hosted for FREE DOWNLOAD from Firth’s site. It even has an album cover:
Locust Toolbox - Noon
Firth’s never been too quiet about his musical interests. In his animated work, strains of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada have been stitched into the soundscape of his cartoons since Fat Pie’s earliest days.
However, aside from the similarity to the playfulness to those two artists, the sound of Noon recalls a less bleak Autechre; a more propulsive Freescha. Some of the atmospherics even bring to mind touches of Avalanches or even Orbital. Maybe also a hint of, er, Hint.
It’s as if there are all these organic-sounding squirgles, played by humanised machinery with broken-down minds, trying to fix themselves.
This author IS going to stop trying to describe this music now, cuz as the cliché quite accurately states, what is the point of dancing about architecture?
All you need to know is that iTunes states it is Scribblepop, and that’s good enough for this protagonist.
Look, it’s free. Download it. Stick it on yer iDevice and plug in yer ears. If you like it, share it with all yer social notworking fandangles and let’s see if we can get it played on the radio.
If you’re feeling flish – or even flush – donations are accepted over Paypal.
(Oh, and yeah we realise that just because someone can do TWO things rather well, well, that doesn’t exactly make them a polymath. Perhaps a duomath? But it’s art, not math. Perhaps duoart? I’m leaving the title as it is though. Whoever said journalism was a representation of truth?)
*Doesn’t that sound terribly pompous? It’s fun to ascribe questionable attributes sometimes, isn’t it?
