Tongues
I Really Need To Get My Life Back On Track Before I Cut All Of My Hair Off
MNKR-029

Like the trickster troll from Billy Goats Gruff and the tragically puzzling Kappa from Japanese folklore, Tongues, Kansas City noisemaking duo, live under a bridge. Sure, it’s a little damp down there, but it doesn’t hinder them from making filthy, absurd proto-industrial tuneage a la Greed/Holy Money eraSwans or a slowed down Big Black. Unlike those bands, though,Eric Horn and Dillon Joeckel, the two-pronged attackers behindTongues, have rooted their music in humor - black, albeit - rather than simply overwhelm the listener with misanthropy and melodrama, if the LP’s title I Really Have To Get My Life Back On Track Before I Cut All My Hair Off doesn’t tip you off. ​

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Various Artists
Desire Will Set You Free
​MNKR-028

Based on a true story, Desire Will Set You Free is a feature-length narrative film that portrays artistic and marginalized life in contemporary Berlin.  We talked with writer/director Yony Leyser about the new soundtrack releasing on September 6th.
ME: ​How much of Desire Will Set You Free is autobiographical?
YONY: ​Desire is biographical, it is my story and the story of my friends and acquaintances.  I was inspired to write the film after I had a visitor from Riga, Latvia that came to visit me before the "end of the world" December 21, 2012. He came two weeks before to spend the end of the world with me. He met my friends and just before the end of the world he came out as Trans, talked about getting electroshock therapy in Latvia for coming out to their mother. They enjoyed Berlin and I saw ​Berlin through her eyes. I started working on the script a few months later.
​ME: ​Obviously, living in Berlin has given you a lot of insight to the movie. Could this movie have taken place anywhere other than Berlin? How important is Berlin to the movie?
YONY: ​In a way, I made Berlin the main character of the film, just as it was in a sense in Christopher Isherwood novels. I almost saw it a follow up to his works.   
ME: ​How did you get together the artists for the soundtrack?
YONY: ​I think music is the life blood of the scenes and countercultures. It is so in Berlin and other places. That’s why I cast so many musicians to be in the film. Many are referencing Berlin history. For example, Blood Orange made a cover of the great girl punk band Malaria! for the film and Peaches did a cover of Claire Waldoff the great lesbian cabaret singer from the 1920s. There are a lot of great musicians in Berlin and we included them. Music played a major part of the film. I was very inspired by trash music films from the 70s and 80s like Times Square.
Across 120 sprawling, electrifying minutes, the soundtrack to Desire Will Set You Free, written and directed by Yony Leyser (director of William S. Burroughs: A Man Within), paints a picture of contemporary underground Berlin. The movie, a queer, rambunctious odyssey through sex clubs, bars, and unearthly parties, draws influence from paragons of cult cinema like Slava Tsukerman, director of Liquid Sky, and John Waters. The soundtrack, an appropriate companion piece, also draws the film’s subcultural wellspring, featuring selections from alt-royalty like Peaches, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Rummelsnuff, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange and Samantha Urbani, Molly Nilsson and more.​

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​Pariuh
Passed Lives' Excessive Future
​MNKR-026

​Pari∀h, Miami absurdist art-rock trio, have a mission to disorient and elucidate. The band, rooted in Chris Dougnac’s hyper-composed, synth-dipped pop treats and detailed recontextualized ephemera, works to transport the listener to a complex metaphysical reality. Pari∀h’s debut LP, Passed Lives’ Excessive Future, introduces us to their humor and youthful vigor as they unearth the altered history of the Passed Lives’ Excessive Futures Foundation – a time before Heaven's Gate took the f-u-n out of community function and ruined salvation for a generation.

1986. A reverberating, cataclysmic year. The world watched and gasped as Chernobyl exploded and the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated seventy-three seconds post-launch, killing all seven astronauts on boards. And the world found wonder as the Rutan Voyager made the first continuous non-stop flight around the world without refueling. And, in a remote corner of rehabilitation and redemption, a young runner we now refer to as Passed Lives made us believe that maybe second chances aren’t reserved for crucified messiahs and reunion rock reconnoiterers, but for anyone willing to take up their pair of running shoes and follow.

Pari∀h is out for big game, and they’re willing to take on recruits for their odyssey through a wild, untamed rendering of these American United States in this Year of our Excessive Future 2016.

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Jealousy
Paid For It
MNKR-024

Jealousy's sophomore LP, Paid For It, is a hyper-tactile, hyper-sensual meditation on solipsism brought on by shattered idealism and sensory overload. Songwriter, lyricist, bassist, sound manipulator, and sole member Mark Treise seems unable to stop from steeping himself in the lurid and the lascivious, in masochistic discomfort and gratuitous hedonism, to consider the value of self-destruction as a vessel for self-actualization, to approve knowingly of his own defeat in order to transcend its redundancy. 

Paid For It oscillates between a series of isolated conversations with oneself and the sublime, layered and spliced in alternating abstractions and cognizant declarations. At times, the exchanges reach uncomfortable levels of saturation, but frequently they settle in the psyche with surprising ease. These are songs that contain neat and tidy pop hooks like small glittering diamonds in fields of loops and keys. Other tracks feature the heavy hitting drum work from Don Bolles (of legendary punk band The Germs), placing Mark Treise's bass playing in pounding beds of tension and brash driving chaos. Throughout, Jealousy's narration is unwaveringly calm, laying down graphic, forked tongue-twisters like common law. With its sonic combustion, hypnotic rhythms, and distant, powerful percussion,Paid For It is both a nod to dark-glam, post-industrial greats - Coil, Psychic TV,Love and Rockets, Chrome - and an evolution of their premise. This music represents the kind of discomfort that can be craved, and lyrically showcases the sort of outpouring that must be grating in order to be gratifying.

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ONO
Spooks
MNKR-025

"Webster Dictionary defines spook as a ghost or a spectre, and ONO's brutal, daunting new LP is teeming with them. But spook is also a racial epithet, and this double-meaning informs the album from start to finish. The spectre of race, of course, has defined our nation's history from its inception--it's the "long shadow," in Obama's words, that's with us always. Spooks, as bandleader P. Michael puts it with typical bluntness, is America--past, present and future. 

It's hardly the first time the almighty ONO have brought their vision to bear on the dilemma of black life in the 'New World', but Spooks is ONO going deeper, darker and denser than they ever have before. Joined by a slew of guest performers and fellow travelers, including Ministry's Al Jourgensen,  Lamont Thomas of Cleveland's Obnox, Hilal Omar Al Jamal of Night Auditor, and longtime collaborator Shannon Rose Riley, the core band is at its most punishing, their Afro-industrial rhythms driving and ruthless. Singer travis, meanwhile, has never sounded so terrifying, or prophetic, as he conjures up, in his many voices, the "bleeding haints" of (pan)-American life: cotton gins, sugar plantations, CIA coups; "Brownsville" slumlords, South Side arrest rides, drive-thru funeral homes. "I try not to think about Spooks," he explains. "Spooks burns my loins.  Spooks buries my unborn children. Spooks illuminate the (US) American landscape." 

Spooks is no history lesson, or dry polemic. Its ghosts are still rattling their chains, their haunting perpetual and highly personal. It's hard to imagine where they can possibly go after as grueling (and brilliant) an album as this, but after heating up for some 35 years ONO is positively aflame--whatever they thrown down next might literally melt the wax."

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Gel Set
Human Salad
MNKR-023

"For something so reliant on modernity, Gel Set’s 'Human Salad' screams something primal, as likely to plead the fifth as plead for companionship. Who’s guilty and who’s complicit, you or me? Something slithers out from the South Side of Chicago, like that beast towards Bethlehem, its roving eye shining light on perennial abandonment. “If you were here, I’d have nothing to dream of. If you were here, I wouldn’t believe you,” Laura Callier incants on album opener “Phantom's Ring.” Who is the ever-present “you”? Me? The listener is made conspirator, an added ingredient to Gel Set’s human salad.

There’s something uncannily nerve-wracking about the phrase “human salad,” though, upon inspection, it is not only an appropriate signifier, but an inviting one. Let’s digress, just for a second. A salad gets its strength from variety – the best salad-maker combines colors and tastes to surprise and satisfy the salad-eater. Similarly, Gel Set combines the human experience from Spanish transgression (“Mi Puta”) to a sensorial game of dozens (“Double Vision”). Unexpected? Yes. Undesirable? No. Surprisingly, as the listener immerses him or herself in Laura Callier’s one voice, he or she is made aware of different narrators – how can you make a human salad with only one human, after all? Trust me, we tried.

Tying the record together is Gel Set’s rhythmic mastery – ultimately, 'Human Salad' is easy to dance to. As serious and all-encompassing as the lyrics are, the background music is, to put it simply, fun. This is darkwave at its artistic peak, dispersed in common experience, all the while retaining nuanced affectation and hip-moving backing tracks. This salad shakes!"

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Toupee
Leg Toucher
MNKR-022

"Representing Chicago’s robust network of outsider artists and house punks, Toupee spare no one from their sharpened, penetrating vision on Leg Toucher. From behind their masks, they lend observations to their listener. They offer heightened sensations that hide nothing. Toupee lurk beneath gentle and ferocious vocals and wicked sonic blowouts, piercing their listener with their glare.

Placing slow, soft frequencies against frantic, unchained crashes, Toupee carefully extract the supernatural from mundane life. This sublime sense results from a refusal to be silent while facing pain or decay, which are two key elements of the quartet’s alchemy. Toupee spin otherworldly punk tales from drowning rhythms and hidden current.

Dynamic, wide-ranging voices and propulsive, deliberate instrumental interplay amplify those heightened sensations. Intense stage energy translates into unexpected twists. Ghouls sing, as does innocent youth. Toupee bring their listener to fragile edges of glass, into sticky, swampy muck, and rapid transit. Leg Toucher will give you the chance to unmask those transformations in everyday life."

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Jimmy Whispers
Summer In Pain
MNKR-021

"Who is this Jimmy Whispers," you'll ask yourself the first time you hear him, whether he's leaping out at you metaphorically from your speakers or leaping out at you literally from the stage during a live performance fraught with physicality and emotion.

It's a good question, who this guy is, and there's no easy answer. He's been called Chicago's "greatest new homegrown musical enigma" by the Tribune's Jessica Hopper, and a "weirdo loner" by himself. While both of those descriptions are correct, neither one's complete. He's an enigma, true, but one who sings directly from the heart about the broadest of human feelings: the need to love and be loved. Yes, he's a loner, but one who spends his free time organizing basketball tournaments to raise money for community nonprofits, and ends his concerts by mashing audience members together to slow dance to Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World."

Jimmy Whispers is a walking, talking, singing, and dancing bundle of paradoxes. Greatest among them, perhaps, is his ability to transform the most seemingly basic melodies sketched out hastily with an electric organ on an iPhone voice message into such a profound racket, or how this dirty weirdo from Chicago managed to insinuate himself into the tradition of great American sentimental balladeers.

His music will make you laugh and cry and dance and, unless you're terminally jaded and hardhearted, it'll make you genuinely feel something. And no matter how many times you listen you'll keep asking yourself, for a multitude of reasons, "Who is this fucking guy?"

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SOLD OUT

Kraus
Interior Castle
MNKR-020

NZ’s iconoclastic Kraus—hailed as a ‘national treasure’ by the New Zealand Listener—has always been an intrepid explorer of sonic scenery, and Interior Castle finds him on the move again, following up his acclaimed Supreme Commander LP (2013) with another highly adventurous outing. Borrowing recklessly from various epochs—stone-age drums meet futurist synths; slot-machine electronics are layered, perversely, over what sounds like a plucked lute; warbling flutes vie with blown-out guitar—his time-traveling brand of exotica stomps playfully through medieval set-pieces and b-movie locales, conjuring mindscapes and dreamworlds at once familiar and strange. While much of the current Kiwi crop tends toward loud and gnarly, Kraus’ inquisitive approach has more in common with mavericks like Arthur Lyman and Joe Meek. A founding member of onetime space-punk legends the Futurians, Kraus continues to broadcast sublime, singular weirdness from his corner of the southern hemisphere.

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The Pen Test
Interstate
MNKR-019

The mental and physical setting of travel under duress, induced by sleep-deprivation, lack of stimuli, sense of isolation, delusion of grandeur, and destabilized neuro-chemistry. Physically taking place on the I-90 West leaving Billings, MT (or I-XX anywhere). Unlit roads lacking reflective shoulder and center-line markings, unable to discern if the oncoming semi traffic is emerging over hill in your lane, combating the intrusion of gentle theta-wave micro-sleep cycling.

An examination of the decline of car culture in American civic religion and the lose of its romanticism. We no longer act as operators but as a continuation of the machine...the levels of separation are blurred or irrelevant and the resulting master-slave relationship we submit to unwillingly or in totalitarian zen-like acceptance: The Eisenhower Interstate system as a force of self-annihilation, seeking to take without malevolence, duty, or permission.
Inspired by Kraftwerk's Autobahn as both document a theoretic trip on limited access roads, invulnerable to limitation of speed and stoppage. While Autobahn induces a sense of wistful imagination, Interstate is the folding over and collapse of playful and lightly-contemplative thoughts into the purview of delusion. The interstate may act as a facilitator of leisure its demesne includes the erosion of one's self. A chiseler or cleanser, amoral and of supernatural stature (and capability), the Eroder (Interstate) espouses itself with the act of seizure.

Recorded in Olympia, WA at Dub Narcotic Studio under the supervision and capabilities of Ben Hargett (of K Records, The Evergreen State College), mastered by Mikey Young (of Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring), and championed by Bryan Hitchcock and Patrick Scott-­Walsh.

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The Pen Test
Biology
MNKR-018

The exploitation of ecological systems to affect biological
systems funded by military-industrial-media systems are
abstracted into cascading, overlapping sequences, and
fixed-note arpeggiators, expressing a sense of triumph in
what appears to be mastery over the natural and its subjugation.
The result, seemingly existent synergistic order, is only an
illusion induced the by human fallacy to withdraw a sense
of pattern and order in independent sequences. The same can
be applied to our sense of rhythm. Biology was an extraction
of those principles to induce a sense of engineering where the
use is discovered during or at the end of the process. Creation
of a place where rigidness and chance dictate the event through
the forcing of the accidental.

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Stacian / Gel Set
Voorhees
MNKR-017

Laura Callier and Dania Luck will tempt with ethereal vocals
and blissful pop, but their lure works best for the dancefloor
on their aggressive electronic split. Gel Set and Stacian combine
forces for the first time on their Moniker Records 12", translating
eternal, lucid longing into catchy synth riffs and repetitive oblivion.
That tempting sound: it's so easy to call this outer space, or
otherworldly, but these grooves are better on earth. Stacian sets the
tone with immediacy and urgency. This synth cadet is refueling,
tarnished and returning to battle. Fragile layers shine through
relentless beats. Gel Set veils this urgency with the inviting fallout,
stripping Stacian's layers to core beats and synth excursions. Yet,
those vocals tempt, again and again, luring listeners with a simple
urge: dance.

If you're tempted to dismiss synth pop as space-age posturing, Stacian
and Gel Set answer with a left turn back to earth. Here, their beautiful
language translates into an electronic fantasy: Keep spinning this, keep
dancing.

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ONO
Diegesis
MNKR-016

Rarer than a phoenix is the band whose ‘comeback’ is more vital than its original incarnation. But ONO’s second coming has lasted longer and turned far more heads than their early-80s configuration ever did, and this harrowing LP shows a band at the height of its visionary powers. Their legendary ‘gospel-noise’ has never sounded so furiously focused, from the loping, industrial thwonk of Travis Wax Madonna to the corroded funk of Spare, reminiscent of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad productions. P. Michael’s warped beats remain the adhesive, binding the band’s maximalist, gestural noisemaking—guttural bass, swooping guitar feedback, delirious chanting—while travis, more high-priest than frontman, dons his ritual white gown and presides over the sonic feast.    

But as always with ONO, the music is scarcely half the story. ONOMATOPOEIA BEFORE MUSIC was the band’s founding principle, and this conflation of language and noise has always been deeply, if not explicitly, political; Diegesis is their most aggressive, most militant document yet, digging unflinchingly at the unhealed wounds of the Body politic. BLACKPOWER.MOVE is a growling, onomatopoetic invocation of the MOVE bombing of 1985—one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in recent American history, in which the city of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on its own people, killing eleven men, women and children and allowing the resulting fires to destroy hundreds of homes. Language fails in the face of such insane tragedy; hence the screams, the sirens, the echoes of barking dogs and machine-gun fire, a dystopic soundscape held together by P. Michael’s squawking, insistent bass riff. More punishing still is the nightmarish CQCQCQ, part of travis’ ongoing, “savagely personal” explorations (as DJPTSD) of the profound traumas he experienced as a radio operator aboard the USS America in the late 60s. The final cut, a swelling, funereal rendition of Jimi Hendrix’ Burning of the Midnight Lamp, seems to offer a glimmer of redemption, but the album’s dark clouds never quite lift; an unsettling crackle remains in the air. Unquestionably a Major Statement from these untiring Chicago giants, Diegesis is a defining record that demands and rewards in equal proportion.

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SOLD OUT

J.T. IV
Cosmic Lightning
DC 378/GZD-001

"Like a flash, ‘Cosmic Lightning’ is back among us. The sounds of J.T. IV were barely heard to begin with, and the 2000 or so that the label made back in 2008 - 2009 didn’t sate the public appetite, so here we are again.

For the official third version of the album (the second Galactic Zoo Disks / Drag City pressing), further research from Robert Manis (the sonic voyager who brought us Death, as well as J.T. IV) has led to the cover artwork being changed and, additionally, the enclosed DVD contains the entirety of John Henry Timmis IV’s 1985 splatter-core opus, ‘Cannibal Orgy’. Additionally, a new insert has been created out of additional archival materials, including a brief excerpt from his as-yet unpublished memoir, ‘From The Inside’, and the cover sleeve for the ‘Cannibal Orgy’ VHS tape.

Timmis was a damaged young man who’d survived a fractured childhood and a period of institution during his teenaged years. After attending New Trier High School on Chicago’s North Shore, he hung around the big town and taught himself how to play guitar. Within a couple years, he’d adopted the name J.T. IV, under which he recorded and pressed a 7” single entitled ‘Waiting For The CTA’. The A-side was lifted wholesale from an early Velvets song, but infused with a new wildness in J.T. IV’s hands.

A couple of years after that, J.T. IV had a second single to offer, entitled ‘Destructo Rock’. Most of these records were given away in the hopes of attracting listeners to his very occasional shows, but nothing came of it, and few of these records have survived.

In the mid-80s, Timmis directed his energies towards the writing of his memoir and the production of ‘Cannibal Orgy’ before returning to rock with what would be his final 45, released under the name Frankenstein. A compilation of his recorded output soon followed, but the original ‘Cosmic Lightning’ LP was mastered in a higher pitch than the songs were originally recorded.

A film that the Guinness Book Of World Records regards as the longest in history (‘The Cure For Insomnia’) was produced in association with local multimedia artist Lee Groban, along with a pornographic film called ‘The Love Quest’. By 1988, Timmis was gone; moved to Ohio, never to be heard from again. He passed away in 2002, after a long struggle with drugs and alcohol.

John Timmis wasn’t a punk, but his music was clearly energized by the punk and glam movements - specifically Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, of whose music he was a great fan. His approach to rock and roll was clearly coming from the outside; his extremely rare performances were self-promoting events, none like real rock shows, more along the lines of make-believe parties. He certainly wasn’t a part of any music community in Chicago, but he was a legend in his own mind, which is why his music is so unique, even after all the years. ‘Cosmic Lightning’ is just about all that’s left of the bolt of madness that was J.T. IV - and it rocks." - Drag City

“Alien prince silk earworm glowing in the streets. The lost prophet returns! Pen and reel revealing the lost rock opera. J.T. IV the unsung rock god. The Midwest messiah. The sounds of warm honey and Quaaludes. Feeds all. No adult supervision required!” - Ty Segall

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Lazy
Obsession
MNKR-015

LAZY are anything but--after near-constant touring throughout 2012 the art-fucked troop from Kansas City has ponied up to deliver their brazen debut LP, Obsession, an all-fronts punk assault. Kinetic, hook-filled rockers bristle with the frantic energy of Wire or the Buzzcocks, while an experimental bent unifies their twisted anthems: chaotic guitar rustling, gnarled-out bass grooves, machine-gun drumming, desperate vocals.

Aiming for the outer reaches with flamethrower intensity and heartstopping pop sensibility, Obsession is a defiant collection of snotty, upbeat punk tunes with dual male-female vocals and a high-octane heart, snapping and crackling with unhinged exuberance and getting better and better with every upward nudge of the volume dial.

Lean and nasty at nine songs and 23 minutes, LAZY's scorching summer platter will claw its way right into your skull.

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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
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
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.

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ONO
Albino
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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LP SOLD OUT

Stacian
Songs For Cadets
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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SOLD OUT

Hot & Cold
Border Area
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
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
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
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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SOLD OUT

____Stacian
Pul
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
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
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
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.