Colin Ward · CRFW

animal coinages — absurdist creature collisions

The most distinctive feature of Colin’s title-coining style: real
animals in impossible combinations or collisions. “BIEBER JERBOA” — Justin
Bieber + jerboa (a desert rodent) — is the canonical example, but the
pattern runs deep.

This motif is what makes Colin’s catalog instantly recognizable as Colin’s,
and is probably the strongest candidate for a website “linguistic
fingerprint” page.

Tracks / coinages (selection)

Real-animal-meets-impossible-context

  • BIEBER JERBOA/... (entire release is the canonical example)
  • BIEBER JERBOA/06 toy lemurs.mp3
  • BIEBER JERBOA/08 aah real monssters.mp3
  • BIEBER JERBOA/07 (getting astounded by) blue whales on videos.mp3
  • SUNPOWER3/04 sunkissed goose.mp3
  • BESTUV09/13 angler fish lantern fights.m4a
  • SUNPOWER2/01 rooster.mp3
  • jul_aug_09/04 lemur toes sneak attack battle outs.m4a
  • jul_aug_09/03 dreamy mountain giraffe voice.m4a
  • samplebooks/starfish mobiles.mp3
  • underwaters III/02 walk it crabs.mp3
  • underwaters III/09 sad whale.mp3
  • underwaters III/07 punkd out screamer dolphins.mp3
  • underwaters III/01 glam fish bubble barf.mp3
  • 2011 [_]/goose.mp3

Robot/machine-meets-animal

  • fantazia2010/15 robo goats howl and bang.mp3
  • DEC09SCIFI/04 robodogs nighttime cage howls.mp3
  • LIFEBEFORETIMESOUNDTRACK/05 sounnds 2_animal ghost bumps calls.mp3
  • @PRILOSAURUS09/13 pterodactyls catching stars in metal buckets.m4a

Mythic/extinct-animal

  • BESTUV09/11 plesiosaur howl outs and swim bump.mp3
  • @PRILOSAURUS09/... (release title coins “Aprilosaurus” — April + dinosaur)
  • CAVE RAVE/10 dino.mp3

Animal+verb-state

  • CAVE RAVE/08 snakey lady.mp3
  • CAVE RAVE/03 cat tats.mp3
  • CAVE RAVE/09 way way meow.mp3

Insect / micro-animal

  • SWEATBEE (release; bee-as-rave)
  • MARCH09hopdanceshakebump/... (no animal but the rhythm-rhythm coinage style is the same family)

Reading

Three operations Colin reliably runs on animals:

  1. Pop-cultural collision. BIEBER JERBOA is the apotheosis: a global
    pop star + an obscure desert rodent. Same operation: “punkd out screamer
    dolphins” (the “punkd” is mid-2000s MTV vocabulary).
  2. Robot/machine fusion. Robo goats. Robodogs. Pterodactyls catching
    stars in metal buckets. The animal is upgraded to a sci-fi creature.
  3. Verb-state attachment. “Sad whale”, “snakey lady”, “way way meow”,
    “starving mammal belly”. The animal is given a temporary mood or
    gerundive state.

Across all three operations, the move is the same: take a real animal
(taxonomic specificity matters — jerboa, plesiosaur, angler fish,
pterodactyl) and put it next to something that doesn’t belong there.

This is consistent with Colin’s broader title-coining style across motifs —
words colliding from distant registers — but the animal anchor is what
gives this motif its weight. He is literate about animals: it isn’t
generic “creatures”, it’s specific species. The taxonomic care is part of
the art.

Notes for future passes

  • The animal-coinage motif pairs naturally with the cosmic-ghost motif
    (pterodactyls catching stars, maywolves hum and talk with shooting stars) — many tracks belong to both.
  • A tighter sub-motif is “underwater” coinages — the underwaters,
    underwaters II, underwaters III, BIEBER JERBOA (whales, jellyfish),
    samplebooks/starfish mobiles group. Could merit its own page if the
    user wants a tighter web of pages.
  • Colin’s own self-descriptor “alien safari rainforest style” (Bandcamp
    Daily, 2020) sits at the exact intersection of this motif and the
    cosmic-ghost one. That phrase is probably the most efficient single-line
    framing for both motifs combined.

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