prockwell wrote:those guys were awesome. the fuzz bass sound was fucking cool and that infinite zero cd was packaged really well. they went bankrupt right? infinite zero, i mean...

yes. apparently no one wanted alan vega's solo stuff, the monks, flipper, devo or troublefunk.

go figure.

It kills me that I didn't get some of those Infinite Zero CDs in time. The Monks were the shit.

I've got the reissue that tacks on the weird "commercial" singles they did before breaking up.

I'm rarely in the mood for the Monks, but they were a great band underneath the 'novelty'. It's sort of a shame that they get press as a garage-punk band, because I think people tend to expect fuzz riffs and all.

Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy and It's Monk Time are my favorites, by a long margin.

Apparently they played *last night* at a bar in Bemidji, MN -- kind of the middle of nowhere. They're gearing up for a European tour. I have no idea if they're playing elsewhere in the US, but then again, I haven't looked.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/displa ... /12/monks/

http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/ney/en2913613.htm

KinoTalks: "Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback"
Screening
01/29/08
7:00pm
Goethe-Institut New York
1014 Fifth Avenue@83rd Street
New York, NY 10028
Free admission
212-439-8700

Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback.
A film by Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios.

Germany. 2006. 100 min. Digibeta.
Director Dietmar Post will be present to discuss the film.

The monks were five American GIs in cold war Germany who billed
themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism
and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black,
mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties
counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, punk and
techno music.

The genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop
music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural historic contexts,
but also reveals the monks project as the first marriage between art and
popular music, months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.
The five protagonists of the film came to cold war Germany in 1961 as
soldiers and left the country in 1967 as avant-garde monks. For more than
thirty years they were not able to talk about their strange experience.
In Monks they recount for the first time their adventure.

I don't get what this thing is with calling the Monks a novelty band. The only thing 'novelty' about them was the riduclous haircuts. Other than that I think they're fucking great. Rarely a morning goes by without at least one Monks song on my iPod while I walk to work. I'm currently in the process of talking my band into doing a cover of Drunken Maria.

Some of those later singles were a tad candyass though. Not crap but nowhere near as good as anything off Black Monk Time.

NOT CRAP

can you think of a better rock&roll banjo?

because i can't.

the monks and the sonics are far too overlooked in the history of rock.

i think we've caught up to them and given them their due, but still.

Brilliant.

RIP you banjo playing chaos-meister.

I have a feeling this has not, nor will ever happen again with a bunch of young kids in the military, in germany, in the 60's with a fetish for monkish costumes and a cacophinous penchant for feedback.

Fucking brilliant.

No one's even mentioned this compilation.

This is a pretty good tribute cd, as tribute cds go. I really like the Alec Empire / Gary Burger track in particular.