Rollin Hunt
The Phoney
MNKR-014

In the 27 years since arriving here from the fifth dimension, cosmic pop-singer Rollin Hunt has learned a great deal about human emotion. Incredibly, he's almost become one of us: walking the streets of our cities, admiring our women, dancing in our nightclubs--and finally understanding us, crying big, salty tears over our species' violent destiny. And now he's dropping one of the first Major Albums of the 2010s, bringing the message of celestial love that's already earned him a cult-following in England and Canada. 

Fans of Rollin's far-out R&B ("Unearthly shoo-be-doo," Jessica Hopper has called it) know him as a lo-fi underdog, an oddly-charming savant who recorded some of his best material on an answering machine. But The Phoney, his first real LP, finds Rollin working it in panoramic, technicolor hi-fi that's light years from the bedroom studio. The not-so-secret weapon is whiz-kid producer and multi-instrumentalist Doni Schroader, who worked for months with Rollin in manic, all-night studio binges, bringing his songs to lush and lavish life. The gorgeous production that emerged from that west-side Chicago warehouse--jaw-dropping orchestral arrangements and pyrotechnic studio wizardry, an awesome synthesis of organic and electric that's both warm and futuristic--is as inventive as anything this side of Frank Ocean, with whom The Phoney shares a kind of Tumblr-era sense of digital melancholy. 

Most shocking of all, The Phoney has what might be called crossover potential--that is, it speaks not only to the human experience but to intelligent life across the space-time continuum. Unlike, say, Ziggy Stardust, Rollin is the type of otherworldly messenger that you can imagine having a drink with; as a messiah, he's remarkably accessible--one of us!--and for a 'phoney' he seems awfully real. Still, this is a big and important album that threatens to launch Rollin right back through the galactic portals --let's hope it doesn't, he's urgently needed here on earth.

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The Hecks
Trust and Order b/w The Time I Played With My Puppy
MNKR-013

Adorned as Chicago’s Best New Rock Duo in 2012 by the Chicago Reader, The Hecks are critically acclaimed newcomers that cannot be contained by classification. Commonly connected with critical genres “garage” and “noise,” on their debut Moniker Records 7”, Zach Hebert and Andrew Mosiman move beyond those confines to create winding pop gems that steadily shift between pulsating rhythms, unexpected fragments, and unrestrained feedback.

Conveying their open-minded creativity and development as a young band, the ringing guitar theme on “Trust and Order” weaves between a celebratory drum introduction and rhythmic left turns. By contrast,  the echoed-feedback vocals of “The Time I Played with My Puppy” jump from a rowdy country (religious? Spiritual? Revivalist?) stomp to blistering signal degradation.

This is not cerebral noise. This is a joyful fantasy gone awry, or a surprising, friendly memory restored from the wreckage. The Hecks ultimately show that playing as two results not in basic dualities or opposition, but a diverse series of adventures. 

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Kraus
Supreme Commander LP
MNKR-012

Class is in session: if your world is one where Supreme Commander is a shoot-em-up video game, 'electronic music' is something perpetrated by sleazy guys in tracksuits and bling, and the only noteworthy sound ever to have emerged from New Zealand is the neutered yuppie-pop of Crowded House, Auckland's wildly inventive Kraus is sitting you down for some hardcore re-education.

The latest and strangest import from Oceania's exploding scene, Supreme Commander is a mind-fucking 36-minute filmstrip of Kraus' animatronic alternate-reality, where the deep-fuzzed guitars and modular electronics have minds and souls and personalities of their own, gurgling and stuttering, screaming and warbling and melting and hissing with total unpredictability. Like the underwater exotica of Raymond Scott, or the squishy 'visual sounds' of electronic—music pioneer Norman Mclaren, Kraus' singular vision refuses to moor to any particular time or place, dripping scuzz as it lurches lysergically from alien cockpit to opium den. Some seriously skewed and utterly unclassifiable shit from the onetime drummer of N.Z. space-punks the Futurians, this is the surprise jam of late 2012.

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Lazy
Party City 7in
MNKR-011

Lazy explode as a refreshingly direct ball of energy straight from the Heartland. These Kansas City collaborators play punk rock equal parts smart and gritty. Catchy, buzzing anthems evolve from jagged rhythmic chaos, as dark drones and found sound snippets populate percussive, gang-vocal boy/girl rave-ups. 

On Moniker's first vinyl release from Lazy's 2012 "Obsession" sessions, Lazy capture punk that could come from anywhere -- "Party City, U.S.A." -- yet few match their immediate intensity. The group's art impulses and collages suggest that anything goes in the course of these brief, emphatic statements. Then there's that inspiring, trebly clatter, a grittiness that ensures this is as real as punk gets. Lazy smash it into a million pieces then tie it all back up, in three minutes or less.

SOLD OUT

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ONO
Albino LP
MNKR-010

To non-locals, ONO's stunning Albino might have fallen from the sky, but to an enlightened and ever-growing bunch of Chicago heads the band is already full-on legend, and the release of their first recorded music since 1986 is a majorly epic landmark that needs no introduction. For the rest of y'all: ONO is a unit of transcendent noise-making now in its fourth decade. Both notorious and neglected in their early years, ONO's unholy bitches' brew of noisy snarl, avant-garde R&B, gospel-heavy blackness, queer sensibility and extravagant, performance-art theatrics (they once played a concert at Navy Pier in which singer travis was dragged through the audience in a steel cage, naked but for a jockstrap) was in a whole 'nuther galaxy from the macho Chicago punk scene that spawned them.

Reemerging in the late 00s with astonishing vehemence and an expansive, multi-generational lineup, they've been embraced by a more fertile and experimental Chicago scene, and are about to explode skulls internationally. travis has always referred to fellow-founder P. Michael ONO as the 'leader of the band,' but anchor might be more appropriate—P. Michael's groundswelling bass and nasty, insectoid beats are unquestionably the glue that binds the sprawling noise. But then there's travis, whose fierce brilliance carries echoes of punk prophets like Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Gil Scott-Heron but is always pure, raging ONO. As for the rest of the band, check the sick, Beefheartian groove of Veil, or their revelatory cover of the Velvet Underground's All Tomorrow's Parties, which manages to excise much of the song's innate sentimentality while upping its sonic generosity, the wall-of-sound sprouting weeds and flowers in its cracks. ONO's original mission statement (1980) runs through this music more truly and deeply than ever, so to quote it in full and let it speak for itself: ONO1980// Experimental Performance, NOISE, and Industrial Poetry Performance Band; Exploring Gospel's Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises. Some deep-listening shit--beyond recommended!

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Stacian
Songs For Cadets LP/CD
MNKR-009

Songs for Cadets is not a 37-minute barrage of Krauty, synth-drenched dance-pop from Milwaukee's scorching Stacian—it's actually a coded training-manual for intergalactic mercenaries, sent back in time from the year 2112. Life on earth has become unsustainable, and groups of young fighters have been enlisted by what's left of the global government to colonize Jupiter 6, a lush, earthlike planet out on the hostile fringes of the universe, populated by reptilian humanoids and robotic pterodactyls.

A 22nd-century Joan of Arc in dayglo armor, Stacian heads the sonic warfare division, wielding her synthesizer like a light saber in a life-or-death contest for control of the cosmic dancefloor. Crisp, relentless drumbeats and rocket-engine bass vie with the echoing cries of those weird, metallic birds as Stacian rallies her troops into action—mandatory listening for future cadets (literally)!

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Limited Clear Vinyl SOLD OUT
Black Vinyl

Hot & Cold
Border Area LP
MNKR-008

Inverting expectations, a shop in Yangon, Myanmar advertises "Hot" and "Cold" in blue and red, changing the typical association between words and sensations. One stop along the way of Josh and Simon's lifelong musical journey, the interchangeable sign mimics the brothers' adventures with noise and melody. Border Area, their debut LP, is their signpost, marking the intersection between restless psychedelia and steady drum machine beats.

From origins of gong, keyboards, and bass during their first official show in 2006 in Beijing, Hot & Cold developed their wild, abstract sound into structured explorations. These transnational brothers perfectly embody the universal, borderless approach of krautrock with their roaming and buzzing minimal set.

Hot & Cold build their sound around relentless beats, looping, driving bass, and blown-out keys. The duo's energy and emotion jump through the speakers, creating a vitality that is greater than the elements alone. Anticipation builds, leading to unhinged release, carried by the brothers' execution of songcraft and experimentation.

Border Area signifies a drive to follow creativity across borders, across cultures, delivering music that moves beyond expectations or trends. Simple elements allow Hot & Cold to fully explore their warped sense of traditional pop or rock song structures; energy and delivery ensure their sincerity. This is not simply pop or rock music; shifts in rhythmic patterns or vocal delivery or song structure materialize instead of expected songwriting moves.

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SOLD OUT

Dan Melchior
Ghost In The Supermarket Record Store Day 12in
MNKR-007

From the wilds of England via North Carolina, visionary stomper Dan Melchior has been working on the devil's music since the 1990s . A move Stateside in '99 (for love!) seems to have perversely anglified Melchior, whose subsequent albums (with-and-without slammin' Americanos Broke Revue behind 'im) have tapped into a stridently British-eccentric stratum of pop sensibility more akin to Syd Barrett or Mark E. Smith than the swampy swagger of his earlier work.
This hotshit record-store-day-exclusive wax finds Melchior really letting his metaphysical hair down. The title track is a properly-skewed addition to the Supermarket canon (the Clash were Lost in one; the Raincoats imagined a Fairytale in one; Melchior has his hungry consumer-ghost haunting one, eating trail mix in the aisles and reading tabloid magazines in the checkout line, starving for news of the living), while the outsider-punk of Strange Antennae offers up a healthy dose of 21st-century dislocation and paranoia, and the trippily sweet Wild Starlet Shuffle sketches out a day in the life of a truly unusual heroine. Basically, this is Melchior doing whatever the fuck he wants--which is what he's always done, but, y'know, now more than ever. Mandatory!

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Yva Las Vegass
I was born in a place of sunshine and the smell of ripe mangoes LP/CD
MNKR-006

_
I could go on at length trying to explicate the force of nature that is Yva Las Vegass, just as I could try to lasso a tornado or play fetch with a rabid dog, but she does a pretty good job herself in the opening moments of this album: YVA LAS VEGASS, she announces, no time for verbs or adjectives. 


A VENEZUELAN-BORN SEATTLE NATIVE. A MOTHER FUCKER. 

And how much weight that word carries, how many meanings! A mother fucker, yeah, and let me count the ways: she's a mother fucker of a singer, a mother fucker of a songwriter and a dead-sick mother fucker of a cuatro player. She's reckless, outspoken, a brawler, on both the giving and receiving end of black eyes, split lips, broken hearts and blown minds, so that kind of mother fucker too, as in one badass; there's a sexual connotation as well, and a cosmic one: to be a mother fucker is to give everything, and take no shit. 

Yva has been giving everything since she first picked up a guitar in the early 90s and headed out to busk in the streets of Seattle. Over the last twenty years she's gotten beat up for her music, been homeless and a drug addict, suffered heart attacks mid-set, starred in a full-length documentary film and played all over the world and she still rages harder than ever. That said, this record is no blast of harsh noise. It's an often-gorgeous collection of tender ballads, raucous cuatro workouts, soul-purging epics like Crack Whore and traditional Venezuelan work-songs, a raw and astonishing distillation of Yva's vast and varied life-experiences. 

Born in 1963 in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela to a musical, middle-class family, Yva earned a ticket to boarding school in the states as a result of teen rebelliousness—which suited her fine. “I'd just seen Porky's, so I really wanted to come to the US,” she laughs. After a series of educational mishaps (“No school would hold me,” she says), she ended up in Seattle and decided, with a friend, to try her hand at street performance. “We played for like five minutes and we had enough money to buy a Whopper,” she remembers. “We were so excited.” She was soon a staple around Seattle, and after a chance gig playing Krist Novoselic's birthday party the former Nirvana bass player invited her to jam. Impromptu sessions led to a proper band—Sweet 75, after a poem by Theodore Roethke—and, within months, a major-label record deal and opening slots for heavy-hitters like L7 and Dinosaur Jr. 

For whatever reason (take your pick: lackluster marketing, musical differences, the vagaries of the music industry, a listening public not ready for a queer woman of color who was also an unrepentant badass mother fucker) Sweet 75's debut album failed to find much success and the band fizzled out in the late 90s. The intervening years have found Yva Las Vegass living, loving and singing her heart out, honing her craft to razor-sharp precision. 

There's not much catering to the English-speaker on this album, the bulk of which is sung in Spanish, just as there's not much excuse for a 21st century American not to speak at least conversational Spanish. But the blood and sweat that are all over this record don't really need translation, either. Guaranteed, no one on this earth sounds like her.

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Jealousy
Viles LP
MNKR-004

Arguably, some of the most potent ravaged music of the last half-century has come out of sunny California. "Light reveals shadows" and nowhere is this more evident than in schizophrenic San Francisco; where a "free-spirited, open, progressiveness" has always lived alongside total depravity--wealth, drugs, culture and claustrophobia lend the city (and this S.F. recorded album) a sense of ominous urgency. However, Jealousy maintains that it's debut album √iles is not a sketch of the dark. "This is a luminescent map from an avid lamp collector," insisting on being, "Hell-bent towards perfect light."

The metaphor is necessary yet administered casually. Jealousy models it's presentation on the Dream Machine; a free hanging light bulb in a rotating perforated cylinder totem which corresponds with the brain's alpha-waves producing a "drugless high". Invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in the early 60s (popularized with the help of William S. Burroughs) for it's hallucinogenic effects induced by it's rhythmic pulsing of light. Dream-machine methods are often employed in Jealousy recordings and performances, the music itself, a Nachtmusik rendering of the dream-machine experience; for a systematic derangement of the senses. 

There is also an obsession with language and its striking delivery; spiritual second-cousin to eternal rock + roll poet laureates such as Jim Carroll and Genesis P.Orridge (or even fellow Californian Jim Morrison, without his messianic imperative); the voice of Jealousy is intoxicated and dissolute. "Music consumed by street lust", he says, by way of introduction, explaining right off the bat that he's come for our sons and daughters. "I'll feed them with a copper spoon," slurring, slyly; "And teach them ecstasy." Which he proceeds to do--surgically ambiguous--for the duration of the album, offering up anthems of drug sores dedicated to corrupted outcasts and wheelchair pharmacists, doctoring the city's lost children, before a malignant psychedelia is administered as a commercial last-ditch inoculation.

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____Stacian
Pul EP
MNKR-005

For her debut single on Moniker, "one-woman Krautrock storm" Stacian (aka synth-sorceress Dania Luck) weaves a wildly fantastical backstory involving a medieval child and his imaginary pet swan, who use synths + drum machines to do battle with repressive forces in a "treacherous valley where fur traders and militia-men reign supreme". This backdrop is hardly requisite for digging into the EP's thick, galactic grooves, but the songs are evocative enough that swan-conjuring hardly seems out of the question.

This lush, grimy short-player will serve just fine for the dancefloor--provided the dancefloor is made of primordial gunk and populated by writhing weirdos. Shorthand it as synth-pop if you must, but the sheer otherworldliness emanating from these tunes is a far cry from 80s revivalism--this is synth not as an end but a means, with a storytelling bent and a rare quality of deep feeling at its core. Stacian  (alongside fellow-travelers like Fielded and Zola Jesus) brings a rich, textured and experimental sensibility to a genre long-dominated by gearheads and revivalists--fur-traders and militia-men be warned".
http://stacian.bandcamp.com/

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Rollin Hunt
Criminal/Castle Of Nothing 45
MNKR-003

Rollin Hunt doesn't say publicly what planet he's from, but it's safe
to say it isn't ours. Disguised as a healthy midwestern boy, Rollin
began infiltrating human society at an early age. As a teenager in
Chicago he was never seen without a tape recorder or video camera,
using the flimsy pretext of "art" to collect data for his
extraterrestrial research. By his early 20s, he began recording
pseudo-popular music as a way to synthesize and transmit his findings.


A capable anthropologist, Rollin's songs deftly penetrate various
human types--the Criminal, the Bum, the Waitress--while his music has
the odd quality of being both robotic and soulful. Rollin Hunt may in
fact be a cosmic being who has been programmed for earthly love.
There are echoes of other aliens who've come to visit our
turntables--Joe Meek, Roky Erickson, Sun Ra--but Rollin's outsider
take on humanity has the unique quality of tenderness. Much of his
charm comes from his bumbling attempts to approximate our
culture--like  Balki Bartokomous of TV's Perfect Strangers, he can be
painfully foreign, employing stilted grammar and forgetting the names
of holidays. His pop sense is likewise skewed; Jessica Hopper, writing
in the Chicago Tribune, describes his sound as "unearthly
shoo-be-doo... as if someone was trying to imitate the Shangri-La's or
the Ronnettes but only knew them from a thirdhand description."  It's
not surprising, then, that he's caught on among certain warped
segments of music-lovers. A bunch of worshipful foreigners have even
put together a tribute album, cryptically titled Him Who Is There,
that portrays Rollin as some sort of oddball Messiah. There's a sense
that this visitor, this interplanetary innocent, might have something
important to teach us about human life.

The two songs on this 7" serve as a raw and startling introduction to
Rollin Hunt. Already hailed as "savant-garde," his musical
explorations of Life on Earth will continue with a full-length album
due later this year on Moniker Records (recorded with whiz-kid
producer Donny Schroeder).  As suggested by one of his early home
recordings, titled (significantly) Dear People of the World, Hunt's
musical messages are meant not only for aficionados but for our entire
species........................................Are we ready to listen?
http://www.myspace.com/rollinghunt

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Trailblazer
Gut Reaction/Mallard 45
MNKR-002

"This one might have gotten lost on the way over to Alter’d P’zones, as it speaks to the sort of chILLness that they like to push over there. Regardless, I’m on board with Trailblazer, a one-man band (gtr, zynth, drum machine, vocals), single-minded in purpose and theory (two-note structure, v. repetitive), but executed with a good ear and way more interesting than such a description would imply. “Gut Reaction” starts layering the guitar early on, creating a busy haze of textures and exciting, additive chaos, until it’s turned into cataclysmic storms of feedback and distortion. The drum machine is turned up to a nice gallop, which keeps things boppin’ along in a nice goth/shoegaze pace – imagine the Cure’s “A Forest,” but maximal where that song might have crept around in the shadows. “Mallard” adds a little rinkadink organ but essentially repeats itself in the same way. Still good. It’s nice to hear this sort of thing when it’s got a little bit more energy than the average bedroom Adderall enthusiast can muster. Great record, possibly out of Lexington, KY, and one of the Hair Police fellows did the artwork, so an association with that camp seems logical. There are a lot of chances for you to take these days, in music, as always, but this one’s worth it."(Doug Mosurock) 
www.myspace.com/totallytrailblazer

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John Bellows
Clean Your Clock LP
MNKR-001

The son of Kentucky pig farmers, John Bellows' adolescent mind had been seriously warped by the discovery of punk and an extended acid binge. He moved to Chicago in 2001 with a Tascam home recorder and a growing collection of songs. Clean Your Clock, his debut album, was completed in 2005, and self-released in a very limited pressing of CD-Rs.
  Bellows has spent the last eight years freaking out the Chicago underground with just a guitar and his singular vision. He has ingested and regurgitated virtually every form of popular music, from his father's beloved Carter Family to the heavy riffage of AC/DC. But the psychedelic feast of Clean Your Clock is very much his own. With a playfulness rarely heard in modern music, Bellows veers effortlessly from face-shredders like "(You Just Got) Mutherfucked" to the shocking tenderness of "Imaginary Friend". And while the album covers an astonishing amount of musical ground, Bellows is no ironic dabbler. He means every last bit of it.
  With the long-overdue re-release of Clean Your Clock, Bellows is ready to turn on the world at large. Rural Kentucky's first and only rock savant, Clean Your Clock is his primal first statement, an almost-lost treasure of post-millennial purging. An incredibly intense live performer, Bellows continues to evolve, his musical imagination as vast as America's rock 'n roll landscape. 
 
www.myspace.com/iamjohnbellows

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Distributed by Carrot Top and Revolver USA.