TOYs

After years of online collaboration, Herman Kolgen and Kenneth Kirschner met in person for the first time in 2008, and were overjoyed to find that they were both profoundly silly people. They immediately resolved to do a 'comedy album' together. Emails began to fly back and forth between Montreal and New York with words like 'naive!', 'childish!', 'algorithmic!', 'aleatoric!', 'absurd!'. They began sampling a wide array of ridiculous objects: children's toys, bits of wood, little drums and mallets, flutes and whistles, Kolgen's cat's water bowl, Kolgen's cat, tiny harmonicas, telephones and walkie talkies, weird figurines, field recordings from a toy shop in China, cardboard boxes, a plastic cow, junk found in the recycling bin, etc. Drawing on this shared set of sounds, Kolgen and Kirschner independently built compositions from these objects, each offering their own perspective on the same underlying material. This project documents what two silly people can do with a lot of silly sounds.