Monostadt 3 were a trio that originally came out of Miami, Florida and that featured Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy on drums, Priya Ray of Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa on violin and Robert Price of Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa on electronics. Evidence of their reign is thin on the ground with a sole release on Phil Todd’s Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers back in 1998. Experiment 8.2 is the long-coming follow-up, an LP that bundles an amazing recording of their final triumphal show from the early 2000s with a buncha fucked-up remixes of original meat. Monostadt 3 have a similar relation to free jazz as Harry Pussy although their sound is very different. The playing here roars and screams at the apex of high almost from start to finish and while at points it’s as unforgiving as early Merzbow there’s the feel of a group playing – of actual interplay – even when the speed of response seems beyond comprehension. There are moments when the strings and electronics cohere in flashing, amphetamine takes on the iconoclastic Americana of Sonny Sharrock with triumphal melodies shot down in flames while Hoyos outplays Denis Charles with time-killing stomps and gargantuan lop-sided tattoos that steamroll the whole deal into the kind of instant energy zone of Borbetomagus. But there’s a pro-rock logic here, a warped hands-on hardcore, that situates the group’s overall aesthetic somewhere within the realms of ‘free music’, albeit with a ton of primal hunch. The live set is absolutely dazzling, a singular display of improvisatory firepower that is euphoric in its ability to birth form from energy and as such it’s as transformative as all of the best fire music. The flip is a little more confusing, a bunch of remixes by Friends Forever, DJ Le Spam, Tibetan Beef Garden & Ladyfingers, Captain Ahab w/Brian Miller (of Deathbomb Arc) – but it still makes for an interesting listen, w/a bunch of mixes that expose the groups exo-skeleton in a way that breaks down the individual contributions and helps give you some kind of sense of just how the group worked and evolved. Hardcore VT followers will need little persuading to pick up anything involving Adris Hoyos but this is much more than a footnote to Harry Pussy, with the live set alone a stunning document of ferociously aformal high energy rock/roll/freedom at some kind of peak. Highly recommended!

Wild warehouse find of a bunch of original copies of the first studio album by Monostadt 3 – the trio of Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy with Priya Ray and Robert Price of Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa. Released by Phil Todd of Ashtray Navigations on his legendary/short-lived Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers imprint, Experiment 7.3 sees the group thundering through hysterically powerful instant compositions that take Michel Sampson’s power-sawing violin work with the Albert Ayler Orchestra to delirious new free rock peaks, with microtone thick electronics dancing around singing strings while Adris detonates time and makes with some wild vocalisations. The perfect marriage of free jazz energy and high velocity destructo-rock power. Kinda has to be heard to be believed. Features artwork by Graham Lambkin. Highly recommended. 

It’s interesting to note the way that The Shadow Ring – in common with Whitehouse – became increasingly obsessed and – yes – perverted by language as their careers progressed. By the time of the strange, melancholy later Shadow Ring albums – Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs - the earlier surrealist narratives were gradually being replaced by a discomfited Sebaldian grey and a focus more on word as sound and sound beyond meaning. Like Whitehouse they began to deliberately manipulate syntax and sense, corrupting words and smearing tones in order to illicit less defined reactions in the listener while moving further away from ‘vocals’ altogether. In many ways Elklink – the duo of The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin and Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy – take this tendency to its very extreme.
Last time I encountered Elklink they were being introduced by Heather Leigh at the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, with Lambkin and Hoyos accompanied by Matt Krefting of Son Of Earth and Scott Foust of Idea Fire Company et al. It’s not often remembered or remarked upon that Elklink played the fest but then their performance was so confusing, so defiantly arch – Foust grated carrots for most of the performance while wearing a trademark orange jump suit, Krefting sat on the floor and played cassettes, Adris faced away from the audience and played a single cymbal – that it doesn’t quite fit the overarching free folk aesthetic that was the festival’s main conceptual thrust. Now, this, a vinyl reissue in an edition of only 500 copies – inevitably immediately sold out at source – that restores their elusive cassette on Polyamory (James Toth’s aka Wand’s great early imprint) from 1999 alongside their contribution to the Colour In Absence Sound compilation from the same year. Recorded at the same time as The Shadow Ring’s Lindus, The Rise Of Elklink magnifies and implodes the early narrative style of The Shadow Ring with a heavy air of suburban ennui somehow transformed into a series of ghostly transports that move well beyond simple sound poetry and into a form of composition that is intimately tied up with the body and the space around it, forsaking the formal satisfaction of poetry and ‘sense’ for a sound with endless subliminal depth, rich with an almost occult sense of implication, suggestion and otherworldly power. Recorded at home straight to four track the songs are accumulations of variously treated monologues and sounds that dissolve into rich miasmic fields of chatter and non-specific drone/environments in a way that owes as much to the work of Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti as it does to Michigan noise. Indeed, the degree of acoustic/electric confusion is immediately disorientating, as body sounds break down into machine patterns, extraneous domestic sounds take on the form of voices and microphones record the speech of empty rooms. The atmosphere is similar to Whitehouse at points, though paradoxically enough it’s the early Come Org recordings that it most resembles, where Bennett’s vocals were almost impossible to fully decode. The generally malevolent air – which the deliberate breakdown of sense inevitably seems to conjure – also brings to mind the darker Nurse With Wound material like “I Was No Longer His Dominant” or “Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree” although a more contemporary reference might be the amazingly disquieting series of recordings released by Relay For Death over the past year or so. And of course it has an umbilical straight to the profoundly alienated lost-in-the-fog aspect of the last few Shadow Ring recordings. With a guest appearance from The Shadow Ring’s Tim Goss and some absolutely gripping performances from Adris and Graham, trading vocals, blurring roles until each seem to be a degraded reflection of each other, this is one of the most remarkable, disturbing, impenetrably deep broadcasts from some of the key figures in contemporary underground music. File it alongside Lindus, Put My Dream On This Planet, Total Sex, Automatic Writing, Let’s Build A Pussy, Crowley’s cylinder recordings and Coil’s ELpH workings in the part of your collection reserved for modern classics. Highly recommended!

Warehouse find of this completely off-the-radar anthology from 2000 that compiled a buncha scorch laid down by this pre-Harry Pussy group formed by guitarists Bill Orcutt and Mark Feehan. Trash Monkeys’ sound comes out of hardcore but takes in a buncha disparate influences. It’s not hard to imagine them sharing a bill with Sun City Girls back in the day, with the kind of scabrous fourth-world punk of the early SCG sound combined with goofy vocal stylings ala Alan Bishop but the combination of wise-ass songwriterly smarts, amphetamine rock breakdowns and occasional acoustic mindbenders lines em alongside a buncha weirdos that range from the kinda zonked Portland punk that came under the influence of Smegma, Cleveland doofs like Pagans, even the kinda under-the-counter-culture post-Meltzer/Teenage Wasteland Angry Samoans. It’s particularly fascinating to hear Orcutt and Feehan power-wrestling their guitars into the kind of protean forms that would eventually give birth to the ultra-complex white heat sound of primo Harry Pussy. A fascinating document of the earliest experiments of two of the greatest six string thinkers of the modern age. Recommended.