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	Artist: Toy Box Trio CD: "Miniature Menagerie" Label: Self Released -- Brief disclosure: Toy-Box Trio and Sepiachord.com are well acquainted. They even wrote the opening theme the "Sepiachord Companion" CD: Details Here So it would be hard for me to pretend I don't love what they do. There is no one to compare Seattle's Toy-Box Trio to. Yes, there are other "contemporary classical" musicians out there, and, yes, there are "contemporary baroque" composers as well. But none of them are creating work like that of Toy-Box Trio's mastermind Harlan Glotzer. The instrumentation should tip you off that you're not in the usual musical territory: English Concertina, Toy Piano and Tuba make up the core of the sounds presented on the band's first full length. And there's no "rock" instruments added to this, no guitar/bass/drums. The secondary instruments are typewriter, violoncello and (the harpischord like) virginal(s). But nothing is tossed in for the novelty of it. Sure any band could add a typewriter to a song to be cute. But the typewriter on "Miniature Menagerie" is completely incorporated into a number of songs and is played by each of the main trio members at various time. Nothing on this album is just tossed off or thrown in for the heck of it, everything is carefully... well, composed. Though Harlan plays the concertina it is the toy piano that most frequently strikes me in these songs. Performed by Dana Wen, this instrument is the one that infuses the work with the fractured fairytale quality that draws me back to the band. The low end could come from a number of instruments but Nate Lee presents it on tuba. A daring choice really and by using this piece of brass the bass is given both a liquid fluidity and the occasional abruptness that punctuates these pieces. There's a distinct lyrical quality to "Miniature Menagerie" and as there are no vocals found here we've been acculturated to hear this music as "cinematic". That is to say because most of the insturmental music we encounter is from films we tend to approach all intrumental music as if it was from movies, even when it's not. In this case that's a good thing. We're free to create little stories and shows in our head that fit what we're hearing. Since the music is frequently whimsical and occasionally creepy and the (lovely) cover art evokes a toy box bursting at the seams with magical contents I always envision the music accompanying old, grainy, lost cartoons where pixies frolic about sleeping heads and cobbler elves transform our mundane world into something special, beautiful. When you add all of this together you get markedly intimate retro-future circus music, transforming baroque sounds into a stranger version of 'The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy'. And it is well worth your investment. Highly recommended. -- Toy-Box Trio~ http://www.toyboxtrio.com