TOITOITOI - VAGANTEN (LP)

"Vaganten is the second Ghost Box album of quirky, melodic & inventive electronica by German artist ToiToiToi (aka Sebastian Counts). It plunges the listener into a surreal, witty and richly entertaining sound world that's totally unique and impossible to classify. Coming on like a mad Mittel-European Chaucer, Counts leads a merry dance; a tipsy pilgrimage through a unique sound world of lost European landscapes, odd folk customs, cod-medievalism, sample detritus and electronic melody. Vagant is an old German word equivalent to the English Goliard and related to vagrant and vagabond. It refers to a class of itinerant monk or clergyman of the Middle Ages known for their poetry and song and notorious for their idle, debauched lifestyles. Up until the early twentieth century it was a tradition still loosely followed by young men with nothing more than a knapsack and guitar, wandering in central Europe as modern troubadours. ToiToiToi (and his musical alias Sebastian Counts) is better known as Sebastian Gräfe, a Berlin-based conceptual artist, who in recent years is increasingly found in the countryside where he strolls through woods and wetlands to track down the myths of the landscape that feed his artistic work both visually and musically." (label info)