Commissioned and titled by Josh Fruhlinger. (2007)

Josh gave me the title before I started the piece. Gil Thorp is the name of a surreal American newspaper comic which is supposed to be about high school sports. Josh runs a blog discussing newspaper comics, called the Comics Curmudgeon.

I recorded (British) football from my TV, which included my housemate clapping after a goal. Then, I decided to use white noise, because it’s very similar to crowd sounds. I filtered it a lot to make sort of screetchy sounds. The football announcers didn’t exactly have the accent that I would expect Marty Moon to have, so I kept them in the background. My girlfriend said that it struck her as very Mark Trail-like, so I raised the volume of the background at the end, to make the sports connection clearer.

Bird-like sounds remind me of high school sports, but that’s probably because my high school had a terrible seagull infestation.

I suspect this particular piece might get especially high traffic, so I made a little YouTube video to go with it, but feel free to grab the mp3 if you prefer.

Shorts #27: Gil Thorp (2007)