Gibson & Toutant

A bit more than a decade ago, Josephine McRobbie and Joseph O’Connell met in Bloomington, Indiana. McRobbie played in a host of local bands and O’Connell had released many albums of exploratory folk as Elephant Micah. When the mood struck them, they recorded music together. Spacious, patient, and strange music, to be sure–drawing a line, as the crow flies, between the high lonesome cowboy-folk of the American west and the whisper-soft Welsh post-punk of Young Marble Giants…or, perhaps, a bit of Nancy and Lee and a dash of Ira and Georgia.

Gibson & Toutant isn’t just a musical project, but an attempt to document the interstices of Josephine and Joe’s life together–starting as a home recording and voice memo project for their own amusement. Their songs emerge quickly, from a collaborative process in which one of them literally finishes the other’s thoughts. As they traveled and established a new home base in Durham, North Carolina, their music rooted them. Gibson & Toutant was derived from McRobbie and O’Connell’s mothers’ maiden names, and they titled the songs on their debut EP after the rockabilly lyrics of McRobbie’s late uncle.

Gibson & Toutant is DIY roots music, if, along with the more tangled and earthen variety, we acknowledge that fiber optic cables pulse with life deep under the soil, and they get twisted into one another if kept in close proximity for too long. At times, a dusky Lynchian surrealism surfaces in Gibson & Toutant’s music, as if those omnipresent electric hums surrounding modern humans are transmissions from another dimension, waiting to be harnessed. At others, G&T simply evoke dozing off with the calm drone of broadcast snow emanating from a Motel 6 TV. Perhaps what we’re hearing in this music is the sound of the roots that have grown between two humans who live and work in the same physical space, grasping at the ubiquitous electronic pulses surrounding them, waiting to be heard.

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