Yva Las Vegass (Out March 13th 2012) 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.

MNKR-004 Price $11.99

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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MNKR-005 Price $5.99 Click to set custom HTML

____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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MNKR-003 Price $5.99

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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MNKR-002 Price $5.99

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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MNKR-001 Price $13.99

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.