"Where he's from the birds sing a pretty song..."

Review of Thomas Truax's superb new album Songs From the Films of David Lynch on Dogmatika alongside poems from Paul Perry and Susan Tomaselli's roundup of all thing alt-lit.

"Through accident or design, Thomas Truax has so far successfully avoided absorption into the colonic tract that is the mainstream, amassing a considerable following in the process. It’s a folly to attempt to pigeonhole such singular and changeable a style though some do (Anti-folk? Steampunk? Truaxian?). His is music constructed from clockwork and junkyard cast-offs, instruments seemingly fashioned from bits of bicycles, gramophones and washing machines. He takes the stage half-crackpot inventor – half bedlam escapee, armed with a briefcase filled with instruments with names like the Hornicator and Mary Poppins (built from “spoons, aerodynamics, centrifugal force, a motorcycle headlamp and a playing card”). He sings songs about being inside the internet, hunted butterflies and the doomed space-music producer Joe Meek. To his fans, he issues The Wowtown News in which he reports local happenings, from dark tales of spider families and groundhogs baptised Al Camus to ominous headlines such as “Continued Meteor Rain, Roach Exodus” and “The Bee Bonnet Plague.” By admission, his primary influences are “toxins in the water supply.”