Shropshire Star

Someone played a cover of Toto’s Africa on a squash and two sweet potatoes

Toni Patanen made ocarinas out of the vegetables to extract music from them.

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Toni Patanen playing Africa on vegetables

If you’ve spent a lot of time on the internet, the chances are you’ve heard at least a couple of cover versions of Africa by Toto – but probably not one like this.

Toni Patanen, an ocarina maker from Finland, crafted instruments out of a butternut squash and two sweet potatoes to create his highly unusual cover.

In the video, Toni can be seen hollowing out the vegetables and carefully crafting the holes over which he places his fingers to get the tone just right.

And the result is something quite special.

“I just covered Africa because it was requested the most, and had risen to meme status somewhat recently,” he told the Press Association. “Of course I also very much enjoyed covering this legend of a song.”

This isn’t Toni’s first attempt at making sweet music with vegetables.

Previous efforts include Darude’s Sandstorm on a potato and Mask Off by Future on a carrot.

Toni’s first forays into crafting the unusual organic instruments began after he saw Junji Koyama doing something similar online.

“Playing Darude’s Sandstorm on the recorder and later the ocarina has been a gimmick I’ve been performing since high school,” he said. “I got the idea of combining those two concepts, and thought it would be good marketing for my ocarinas. This gave birth to the first video I uploaded.”

If you’re interested in buying one of Toni’s ocarinas – the ceramic ones, not the vegetable ones – you can check out his website here.

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