ToiToiToi – Im Hag (Ghost Box)

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Toi Toi Toi, aka Berlin artist Sebastian Counts produces delightfully off kilter electronic music, where odd unexpected sounds like a dot matrix printer can become a rhythmic component, tape is stretched, bongos hit, soupy synths sequence and everything just comes across a little playful and wrong, albeit quite poppy. With the kind of hauntological feel that much of the releases on Ghost Box seem to effortlessly possess, there’s also an abundance of humour and playfulness here, a certain idiosyncratic carefree genius. There are full songs alongside fragments of sound; it’s a collage of sorts. It’s the kind of fully contained world that you just surrender yourself to because anything can and will happen at any moment. It plays on so many memories, so many ideas, from kung fu films to court music, from dub to baroque, it all pops up at some point. There are links to the mischievous melancholy of Plaid or even Plone, yet there’s also this strange other element, feeling like the soundtrack to a black and white Eastern European children’s documentary made for state TV. There’s a monotone with the mischievous that is truly difficult to pin down.

This is Counts second full-length album. His first was a 2011 cdr. It’s both assured and absurd. The combinations of instruments are strange, the compositions odd, yet it’s also bold and his melodies just seep into your consciousness feeling like they have always been there. A truly strange and beautiful work.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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