ToiToiToi - Vaganten (Ghost Box)

Germany’s ToiToiToi returns to Ghost Box with Vaganten, an LP of wayward electronics, Medieval plunderphonics and Chaucerian machine music

In the real world, you might expect to hear electronic music informed by foundational tracks from Chicago and Detroit. Not so much in that other place where Ghost Box resides of course, but even by the label’s own standards of strange, an electronic album steeped in Medieval Germany and evoking Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales sounds like an unpredictable proposition. Yet that is what Sebastian Counts, who returns as ToiToiToi, has brought to the feasting table, with the even more wayward follow-up to Im Hag (2017). That LP alerted psychogeographic investigators to the fact that Ghost Box hometown Belbury was in fact twinned with Ethernbach im Hag, Germany. This made perfect sense, as ToiToiToi’s wonky electronics were at once familiar and alien to the label’s listeners. Here was continental Ghost Box steeped in folk tales of the forests and Vaganten goes even further down paths untrodden, while also sounding more at home than ever on Belbury’s finest.

The doors creak open with “Schlendersilber”, an unspooling of unstable electronica that somehow evokes The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the closing dance with death from The Seventh Seal and In the Night Garden (a series of comparisons it is safe to say I won’t be making again). “Life is dull and everything in the world bores me” opines the first narrator on “Never a Dull Moment”, before his jaunty companion steps in with the counterpoint: “How can you say such a thing? Life is wonderful and the world is an exciting place.” The track thus goes from BBC Drama Workshop to Rainbow with a spring in its retro-futurist step. “Kuckuckswalzer” remains in the daylight, despite taking a decidedly sinister turn, with its wound-up mechanical gait and threateningly innocent samples.

Something akin to the beer bottle percussion from the Head Hunters version of “Watermelon Man” lends form to a gentle electronic suite on the title track, before giving way to a Medieval marching band. Therefore Herbie Hancock does Chaucer is the new genre you never knew you needed. Elsewhere, “Durch die Glut” is a swooning march with shades of Kompakt co-owner Jürgen Paape’s “Ofterschwang”, albeit traveling further sideways and in the shade. Whereas “Goliards” is abstracted chamber music which unfolds from brittle Squarepusher-like organic glitching to Middle Eastern orchestral vistas and “Corpus” projects Balearic dawns with its way-off-kilter house music stabs. That these seemingly competing time periods and styles form a cohesive, if discombobulating, whole is quite the wonder. Sebastian Counts can ultimately be excused for his mad archaeologist approach to electronica (Medieval plunderphonics anyone?), since the resulting sound world is so invitingly peculiar and Vaganten such an oddly satisfying experience.