Thomas Truax | Heart Ships | Michael Rossiter

British Wildlife Presents
Thomas Truax
Heart Ships | Michael Rossiter
Saturday 21st May 2011
The Fox & Newt
8pm | £5 otd | Tickets

Facebook Event


http://soundcloud.com/thomas-truax
http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/thomastruax
www.myspace.com/heartships

heart-ships.bandcamp.com/
www.myspace.com/michaelrossiter

Thomas Truax (pronounced troo-aks) travels the world singing into a contraption he invented called ‘The Hornicator’. Constructed on the shell of a junk gramophone horn it resembles something that might have been dreamt up by Dr. Seuss. He taps out live rhythm loops, plucks assorted strings, springs and attached noisemakers, building a backdrop of layered hypnotic sounds on top of which come some of the most striking stories about clones, butterflies, dogs, technology, loneliness, and other beautiful and sad things. Splendid magazine called him “one of the five or ten best singer/songwriters in the world that you’ve never heard of…an exceptional talent, unique and resistant to comparison, yet fairly accessible even to casual listeners.”

His acclaimed full length albums ‘Audio Addiction’, ‘Full Moon Over Wowtown’ and ‘Why Dogs Howl At The Moon’ are available on Psycho Teddy/Real Time and SL records, as are a handful of singles and compilation tracks.

Born an illigitimate son of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as a young man Thomas attempted to build a synthesizer out of an old radio. He put on magic shows and made stop-motion animated films with a Super 8 camera. He has done mandatory day-job time as an animator on MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch and Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken. Time travelling with the Toby Tyler Circus inspired him towards a career in show business. His acclaimed rock noir trio Like Wow toured and released several CDs, but Thomas grew frustrated with a seemingly endless line of drummers with strange misconceptions of rehearsal times. He finally decided to build his own motorized mechanical drummer and ‘go solo’.

‘Sister Spinster’ is a variable speed, proudly pre-digital ‘Flintstones-era drum machine’ that features spoked wheels and percussive parts which can be readjusted between songs to create different rhythms. Newer instruments include The Stringaling, Mother Superior, and the Backbeater, a rhythm wheel made to be worn on the back, which Thomas promises will eventually also double as a mechanism for flight. He has no engineering background and while constructing these inventions has repeatedly subjected himself to inadvertent electrical shocks which he claims have stimulated his creativity and expanded his vocal range.

Wowtown is a surreal place from which some of the characters and events in Thomas’s songs originate. He’s been writing The Wowtown News, an email newsletter that he sends to a long list of faithful subscribers, for many years, and did a season of audio versions which broadcast weekly on London’s Resonance FM station. These are now available as free podcasts via itunes or http://www.pmpmusic.co.uk

“Inventive and Romantic” -TimeOut

“Beguilingly Bizarre” -Uncut “Genius.” -NME

“Thomas Truax is not of this earth…I still can’t think of a single show I’ve seen that was as beguiling or as charming or as plain bananas as this one.” -AlexKirk, Gigwise.com