OPERATING FROM THE SHADOWY SPACE BETWEEN THE GLASS-BLOWN AMBIENCE OF YANN TIERSEN AND THE “WHAT IS HE BUILDING IN THERE?” STURM-UND-DRANG OF BROKEN CLOCK-PARTS ERA TOM WAITS, MUSICIAN / INVENTOR THOMAS TRUAX IS SOMETHING OF A VISIONARY.

The American’s creation of his own arsenal of mutant junk instruments means an ugly-beautiful sound that’s altogether difficult to pin down.
In Truax’s world (which he’s christened Wowtown) spindly drum machines are built from broken bicycle wheels, the sci-fi jet-pack Backbeater pounds out wing-like rhythms, the microphone-cum-everything-you-might-need Hornicator is fashioned from an old gramophone player and (our particular favourite) the multi-purpose Stringaling – a combination of dryer hosing, whistles, wheels and guitar strings – offers seemingly endless sonic possibilities. Truax exploits them all, like the wired ringmaster at a vaudevillian carnival freak show.

Dry dustbowl melodies sting like baked sand blowing up in your face, invoking hallucinatory visions of a caravan of Gothic oddities creeking through a parched desert, renegades on the run from the metallic clang of a marching band advancing from the underworld, and leaving a sprawling trail of bones and marrow, rocks and dust, sinister marionettes, copper fire forges and black blood – all the while a chrome B-movie flying saucer hovering overhead. Truax makes an occasional velvet curtain stop off to display the bastard children of his imagination for local townsfolk, before loading up the caravan and wheeling on to the next (un)settlement.
When the curtain rises on his perversely strange – and occasionally hilarious – pantomimes Truax, aided and abetted by those twisted antiques-gone-wrong instruments, builds up his songs from nothing using loop pedals and, occasionally, a little luck. Usually always in control – but seemingly only ever one step away from the instruments taking over the asylum – Truax’s shows are voodoo Heath Robinson songwriting in action, an utterly compelling experience.
Six albums in the last decade (from FULL MOON OVER WOWTOWN (2002) through an inspiringly mangled 2009 collection of covers of songs featured in David Lynch films, to the accomplished SONIC DREAMER (2010) and 2011’s ambitious MONTHLY JOURNAL project) have each in some way captured the highly individual Truax sound – but it’s in live performance that the full picture becomes, well, if not clear then certainly more apparent.

On a spare evening during a particularly road-heavy week, we invited Thomas Truax and his instruments to pitch caravan and tether the crazy horses for the night between UK-spanning gigs. Here, over breakfast and damn fine coffee the next day, he gives The Mouth Magazine a glimpse into his world…