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The Sound Of Animals Fighting
Biography
For the purposes of mystique (and, one assumes, legal reasons due to the various participants own recording contracts), the experimental noise rock collective the Sound of Animals Fighting appear in public only in cheap creepy cute children's Halloween masks with cartoon animals on them. Furthermore, the members of the band -- really more of an always shifting musical collective in the manner of Broken Social Scene -- are referred to only as the animals their masks represent. Therefore, their debut album, The Tiger and the Duke, lists the Walrus, the Lynx, the Bear, the Nightingale, the Ferret, the Armadillo, the Hyena, the Octopus, the Skunk, the Llama, the Swan, the Dog, the Raven, the Tortoise, and the Tiger as participants. As gimmicks go, it's a good one.

Of course, in the age of the internet, no secrets stay that way for long. It's generally agreed that the leader of the Sound of Animals Fighting is singer and producer Rich Balling (the Nightingale), formerly of the southern California ska-punk act RX Bandits, and that 2005's The Tiger and the Duke was recorded by Balling in an unconventional manner that owes something to John Cage's theory of indeterminacy and Frank Zappa's late-era methods of mixing live recordings made in different times and places into a single piece of music.
Selected Discography