MONNO
Candlelight
technology
CD, Subdeviant / Conspiracy
The name of the record label is wrong – this is not subdeviant, this is
completely deviant. I can not imagine a single occasion, where it would be
okay to put on this record. Yes, that means, it is great. A weird, spastic,
ecstatic, noisy trip trying to drag the structural out of chaos with big
meathooks. Long lines of rhythmical yet deadly grooves, meandering through
time and space, transforming along small lines or blowing out in bursting
eruptions. As of yet, I was completely unable to get behind the mystery of
Monno, but I have been enjoying the trip enormously. But I also enjoy movies
by David Lynch, I like to read
books by Buckminster Fuller and Carl Hiassen and I liked to listen to John
Zorn, especially Naked City-era. And Monno is a lot like Naked City, only
slower, less scripted and much more freely. I guess, the only place where
you will here Monno live are festivals for avantgarde and free jazz and they
will even startle the audience there.
The four people forming Monno are all professional and renowned musicians
with long histories in free improvisation and other forms of orchestrated
noise as well as works with artists of all ranges of the spectrum (theatre,
video, installations, you name it). One drummer, one bassist, one sax-player
and one electronic musician. Their main aim is to find new ways to play
their instruments and to make their music sound new and fresh. Nevertheless
they set down to play a pounding bass/drum-riff over and over again a
hundred times if they feel like it. The most innovative part is of course
the usage of a computer for free improvisation, though it is hard to make
out, which parts exactly come from hard disk, and which are only sax or bass
or drum run through an array of effect-machines or synthies. For instance on
a soft ambient-noise-track like “Contonuous” the swishing sounds and
hushes of white noise could easily come from both sources, analogue and
digital. (The difference never made real sense anyway, since the ear is only
capable of decoding analogue data, so every music is analogue finally.) On
other tracks, like the opener “Torboyau” you will exactly know what is
happening, because Monno sure ain’t hiding a thing.
“Candlelight technology” uses a wide range of sounds and dynamics and
thereby is a beautiful diversification from the main part of avantgarde- or
experimental records which are trying to establish a certain sound or idea
over the course of a whole record. Which makes a lot of free improvisation,
on record or in a concert situation, rather boring. No, I’d put Monno into
a category of improvisers which are very lively and almost organic in
movement, maybe also counting Animal Collective or Jackie-O-Motherfucker,
though the background of Monno seems to be more academic and theoretical. A
fact, which they manage to hide luckily. In their own fuzzed and psyched-out
way they come close to impro-noise-barbarians (in the sense of idiot savant
in an artistic sense) such as Iran
or Del. Most people I have played this record to, were convinced that Monno
come from Japan, such is the myth of Japan Noise and the power of Monno.
