The local duo Gibson & Toutant stopped by Live and Local this week, ahead of a show in Durham on Saturday to celebrate the release of their new album “On The Green.”
Visit Gibson & Toutant’s page on Sleepy Cat Records’ website.
Gibson & Toutant are Josephine McRobbie and Joe O’Connell, who originally met in Indiana before relocating to the Triangle. “Gibson” and “Toutant” are their mothers’ maiden names – but the duo’s name was actually inspired by their respective uncles, both of whom had their own unique musical legacy.
“(They) were big record collectors and aspiring musicians, and both had this love of Americana music,” says O’Connell. “And we found ourselves in the midst of their possessions, their belongings, their instruments, their records, their tapes.”
That included all the instruments belonging to McRobbie’s late uncle in Australia – the genesis of Gibson & Toutant.
“We were at his place outside Brisbane, and we were among his instruments,” says McRobbie. “And that’s really where our band started: just playing around on a little chord organ, a handmade cigar box guitar.”
The duo released a pair of EPs in 2019 and 2020, but “On The Green” is their full-length debut – an unclassifiable, hypnotic collection of seven tracks that blend acoustic folk and electronica, with a bit of nature thrown in. (Think of the Beatles’ late-period studio experimentation: “we were going through a big period of Beatlemania when we worked on this album,” McRobbie says.) Reviewers and critics have fun trying to describe it: Gibson & Toutant’s music has been variously characterized as “ambient and analog,” “Lynchian surrealism,” and – McRobbie’s favorite – “robotic cowboy country.”
The album’s title – a line from the golf-themed closing track “The Fairway” – nods to all of those ingredients at once. “It had a British pastoral feel to it,” McRobbie says, “(but) I had (also) been reliving my early days as a raver, and I was watching a lot of clips of 1990s outdoor festivals. So ‘On The Green,’ even though it doesn’t seem to be influenced by electronic music, it is.”
Follow Gibson & Toutant on Instagram.
Released by Sleepy Cat Records, “On The Green” dropped in March to great acclaim. Now, McRobbie and O’Connell are celebrating with an album release show Saturday, June 8, at Perfect Lovers in Durham, starting at 7 p.m. with Alli Blois and DJ Anne.
Josephine McRobbie and Joe O’Connell stopped by Live & Local and played three tracks: “The Click,” “Car Parts,” and “Quoth My Baby.”
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