reviews
Born (Free)
Arizona-born guitarist Derek Monypeny has spent his life roaming the deserts of several continents. Currently based in the Mojave, his new tape answers the question of what it might be like if Popol Vuh recorded an album for Siltbreeze. The sound of Monypeny’s electric guitar does capture a bit of 1970s Manuel Gottsching in it’s strings, but Monypeny’s music often has an overt Eastern tinge that has served him so well in groups like ALTO! and Sir Richard Bishop’s Freak of Araby Ensemble. For it’s part, the Siltbreeze label is known for some amazing New Zealand guitar records, so maybe he was just saying some of the more overloaded segments (and the ‘noise’ interlude) were done as a nod to Dead C or Alastair Galbraith or the Terminals. In which case, yeah! Personally, I hear a touch of the late Jesus Acedo’s playing mixed in as well. And I think you’d be nuts to pass up a tape that managed to conjure up all those names with six simple strings and an amp. Monypeny’s albums are all highly recommended.
-BYRON COLEY, The wire
Unjust Intonation
Having already crafted a wide-ranging double album this year, guitarist Derek Monypeny keeps pushing boundaries with the four extended tracks on Unjust Intonation. To explore his own playing in detail, Monypeny took four snippets of guitar recordings and applied a time-altering digital effect, which he says on the album’s Bandcamp page “pulled the sections into various long-duration forms like so much salt water taffy.” The results hum and buzz while gradually shifting, evoking slow-motion footage of bees circling a hive. It’s easy to get lost in these droning tracks, but focus on individual sounds and you can watch them move together, wrapping all the overtones and echoes. Each time you listen, Unjust Intonation seems to produce a new color or shape.
-MARC MASTERS, BANDCAMP
The Hand As Dealt
On Derek Monypeny’s first album in seven years, the windows are wide open and the fresh air is bringing the dead back to life. The Hand as Dealt was hatched deep in the Mojave Desert and those ancient energies are baked into this sprawling double album. Monypeny’s work always reaches for a higher plane, but with The Hand as Dealt, he finds those spirits dancing on solid, sacred ground.
Sunlight blinds the senses as opener “Yoncalla/Drain” begins with bright, psychedelic guitar invitations. It’s a bit of a ruse, though, as you are quickly pulled under the current and enveloped intense, aqueous tones. This juxtaposition of opposites permeates The Hand as Dealt. The shine returns as “Waves of Nightingales” grieves for essences we have lost to the fire as a precursor to the fall. With such heavy undercurrents, it’s incredible that Monypeny made this record before the hell of the past year because it predicts everything. Inside the sprawling sonic maze of the title track, the inevitability of it all becomes clear.
In 73 minutes, Derek Monypeny breaks open the darkness and meditates on the path lost, and laments that there may be no way back. Hellish chaos and brittle fear collide like aural explosives when “The Tamarisk” opens up. Howls and screeches give way to subterranean bulldozers, all moving hurriedly toward impending doom. “The Tamarisk” is intense, like a 16-minute long lightspeed solo that never relents, never comes up for breath. It’s the centerpiece, though, where the weight of it all becomes too much and something has to break.
Circling around to album closer, “(You Are Just) Playing In the Entranceway,” though, the burden and denial turn to acknowledgment. Monypeny’s guitar excursions breathe catharsis. Tight timbral passages glow. They are freeing, boundless. Dusk’s shadows loom ahead, though, and through melancholic explorations, a stolid peace is found. Monypeny taps into that desert wind and lets it carry his spirit into the sky.
-Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis
How Can Be
Monypeny’s resume of collaborations reads like a who’s-who of the deep-seated underground freak scene of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. He has played with Richard Bishop of the iconic post-everything pranksters Sun City Girls, and also with the ego-destroying force of nature that is guitarist Bill Orcutt. He has recorded with the idiosyncratic sax/reed/voice mangler and Indonesian music maverick Arrington de Dionyso, and served as a founding member of desert psych rock jammers Oaxacan. The music of this latter project probably lands the closest to the material that Monypeny offers up on his solo LP How Can Be, recorded in 2013 and remastered/reissued in 2019. Monypeny operates in a liminal space between old-west-cowboy country jams, Arabic and North African music such as Chaabi and Tuareg desert blues, south Asian and Indonesian styles including Carnatic music and Gamelan, and psychedelic rock of the mid-20th Century. The fact that all of these genres and more fuse together in the space of his solo guitar performances is a testament to the specificity of the tropes that he incorporates into his songs, and his mastery of the narrative through which he presents those ideas.
If you’re not familiar with the oud, it’s basically like a miniature lute – a cousin to the guitar, typically with 11 or 13 strings, used across northern Africa, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The instrument allows for complex polyrhythmic and polytonal performances where individual fingers might be pounding out a steady pulse on the lower set of strings, while more complex finger picked or plucked melodies sound out from the higher strings. Similar to a prodigious player in the American Primitive style of finger-picked guitar such as John Fahey or any number of his disciples including Jack Rose and Glenn Jones (or, better yet, Fahey’s antecedents in the blues and folk world who are often overshadowed by his legacy), a good oud player can play single sessions of music that sound like two or three different brains firing at once, each with its own rhythmic and harmonic goals. Monypeny’s tracks, among them “Nastaleeq,” fall into this category, as his oud flies through captivating upper-register melodic runs, while hammering through a network of steady open-string rhythms all the while.
How Can Be takes a stylistic left turn with its last track, the 15-minute “Peace Be Upon You,” which funnels what sound like prayers and holy songs in Arabic through a tunnel of delay and looping/processing gear. The result is a swirling piece of low-key musique concrète that dilates time as it stretches onward. Layers of additional effected sound creep in around the margins as the stereo spread becomes more and more dense. At the track’s halfway point, it splinters back apart and opens into a more open passage of blown out field recordings, struck through with heavy clipped bursts of wind and feet on gravel, which then breaks down even further into a solitary voice incanting a beautiful, tumbling melody through delay. In total, the track seems to present a travelogue and cultural survey through just a few of the many influences that inform Monypeny’s music.
Max Allison, River City Reader
Don’t Bring Me Down, Bruce
Magisterial private-press collection of psychedelic acoustic/electric oud work from Monypeny, a member of Sir Richard Bishop’s Freak Of Araby Ensemble: long time since I was so blown away by a solo string release, but Monypeny brings an amazing haunted architectural sense to his constructs that is comparable to the best of Sandy Bull with a high, devotional style that suspends single notes over a void that’s as deep as nada while navigating melodies that combine middle eastern patois with aspects of early music and even some of the Takayanagi-plays-rural-downers feel of Matthew Valentine’s most radically inflected Environments. There’s also a heavy loner/late-night vibe to the playing that makes if the perfect early am stone, the kind of heady/melancholy nostalgia of John Fahey’s Days Have Gone By with a feel for odd note placement that’s the equal of the early Kazuo Imai PSF sides. One of the most gripping, adventurous and atmospheric documents of solo string thought to pass through our hands in an age. Highly recommended.
—David Keenan / Volcanic Tongue
Bay Area folks might remember Derek Monypeny from the ferociously explosive, improvisational trio Oaxacan. Their fiery brand of Eastern flecked, face-melting psych mastery was truly amazing to behold live. Sadly their time as a band was short-lived, but guitarist Derek Monypeny continues his journey into the desert cosmos with his debut lp of solo oud. Though he has also played guitar in Sir Richard Bishop's touring band, Mr. Monypeny decided to put the blaring fuzz and virtuosic six-string tendencies aside and opted for a more traditional approach here. These beautifully minimal pieces of eloquent, contemplative oud unfold like ancient narratives, evoking dramatic images of ghostly mirages, shimmering horizons and the desert sun sinking under pale dunes.
Side A unfolds with gorgeously sparse, delicate movements of slowly picked oud, each note rising up then dropping down like diamonds in the sand. We love the patient, reflective pace of the songs, each note carefully plucked and sent off like a gentle offering into the night. While side A reveals Monypeny employing the art of restraint and patience, side B finds Monypeny on the periphery of tradition, drenching the oud in hazy reverb and other effects that tastefully reiterate the instrument's Saharan roots. Reminiscent of Sandy Bull's oud outings, these final two pieces warble and melt in the hot sun, tremolo washes and smeared melody hover in the arid sky as the rhythmic haze and gentle noise lull you deeper into the cosmic badlands. So gorgeous and so perfect. Highly recommended for fans of anything related to Sublime Frequencies for sure.
—Jon Porras / Aquarius Records newsletter
Some of the most beautiful music being made today is played on the oud- a versatile, haunted-sounding string instrument with ties to Arabic and African music. And Don’t Bring Me Down, Bruce, the latest set from the brilliant Derek Monypeny, is perhaps the most complex and forward-thinking set of music for oud in recent memory. These are just breathtaking compositions—stunning in their simplicity and fascinating in their meditative and even mind-altering power. There’s some awesome use of percussion (especially on the sublimely effected second side), but this LP is truly a spotlight for Derek Monypeny and his oud to shine in. Powerful stuff.
—Zen Effects blog
Meditations for oud, an instrument tuned to Eastern sounds, to the point where it sounds easier and more fun to just go with it rather than push it into a Western songwriting context. Derek Monypeny, who named a previous project Derek Monypeny Parties Hard, is in more of a contemplative mode here, with some spare, folk-inspired compositions on the acoustic side of this LP. These tracks are fine, but when he plugs in an applies some reverb/wah effects to the longer pieces on side B, the records eternal gaze widens, a serene and cosmic sea of placidity and tension in their battle for the psyche. Late late night burner here, be sure to blow out the candles before you achieve total consciousness.
—Doug Mosurock / Dusted Magazine
Limerence
‘Limerence’ finds Derek’s odd yet unerring sense of space and time fully intact but replaces the serenely solitary mood of his Don’t Bring Me Down, Bruce LP with a much more restless and aggressive take on the loner/stoner vibe. Stylistically diverse but thematically linked semi-improvised pieces culminating in the 16+ minute title track. Derek’s work on both guitar and oud is truly unique and exists outside of any trends or styles currently in rotation underground or elsewhere.
Full disclosure: Derek Monypeny has written for Blastitude, has had a beer with Blastitude, and will likely have a beer with Blastitude again. He's also carving out new heavy psychedelic space with the solo electric guitar and electric oud, and I like to listen to it, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you about it even though he and I know each other in real life. An Arizona native, Derek lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, where he played guitar in a few different band contexts, most notably Oaxacan, a group that also served as Sir Richard Bishop's Freak of Araby Ensemble for a 2009 US tour. Not too long ago Derek moved way up the coast to Portland, where he has been doing solo performances on the aforementioned stringed instruments. This tape release documents some of these from the summer of 2011, in which Derek, using tastefully deployed effects and small and patient gestures, digs deep into those thin places where all kinds of inner space visions can flourish. You could talk about the complex social organization and communication among undiscovered species of highly intelligent insects deep under the sands of Mars…or any pulsing pattern of pure electricity hurtling somewhere through deep space…or shortwave radio broadcasts of the latest tunes by mutant Touareg troubadours roaming the dark side of the moon…etcetera. I also can't help but think of a few lines that have always stayed with me from an essay on solo improvisation, written by Jeff Fuccillo way back in September of 1995, in the third issue of his Woolly Bugger zine: "…every sound made by the solo acoustic improviser plays into empty silent space and thus 'adds to the empty space of silence' that is the only (non)accompaniment given to the solo acoustic improviser's playing." This awareness of and interplay with silence is, paradoxically, the only way for music to truly be heavy (bands can use it too, not just soloists), and it's all over this tape. 100 copies on professionally duplicated chrome tape, buy it from Underwater Experience or Zum (though I think he/they/someone should put this on vinyl as it makes a nice followup to his 2011 debut solo oud LP Don't Bring Me Down, Bruce).
—Larry Dolman / Blastitude 'zine
Cassette album follow-up to electric oudist and guitarist Derek Monypeny’s outstanding vinyl debut, Don’t Bring Me Down, Bruce LP. A collection of studio jams and massively treated string duels, this set is a world away from the post-Sandy Bull fourth world stylings of his debut, with variously stringed instruments treated to the point of illogic explode and fast slashing collages of six bleeding strings that come over like knives ran across electricity pylons or fast modal drone/dirges with the kind of screaming noteage that would reconcile the late John Coltrane Orchestra with Hototogisu. Monypeny is best known as a member of Sir Richard Bishop’s travelling ensemble but here he makes a stake for a conception of the parameters of variously translated formal/cultural/biological folk modes as the keys to the goddamn kingdom that is every bit as persuasive as Sun City Girls at their most alien. A massively potent listen, highly recommended.