MonkeyShuttle: Artificial Intelligentsia

MonkeyShuttle are perhaps New Zealand's greatest ambient electronic group of the mid-1990s whose members had the names Michael, Andrew, and Stuart. This album captures them at their finest, performing a New Zealand Music Week live-to-air broadcast on Radio Active in August 1995.

The tracks:

These tracks are free to a good home, and can be downloaded individually using the links above, or as a whole set (ZIP file, 64MB), or check out the whole album at LastFM.

MonkeyShuttle in their own words

Michael

At the tender age of 18, knowing everything about the world, I quit the fun, dubby dance act I had formed with some friends (people who could actually play instruments and write songs). Those guys had girlfriends and did drugs and loved to party. I had realised it was time to concentrate my musical virtuosity into the more socially retarded world of electronic listening music. Although I had more than enough skill and ability to go it alone, I am known for my incredible generosity as much as my gifts. It was in this light that I decided to take a couple of guys I met through a Classical Studies class at university under my wing. I had known Stuart when we were 12 - growing up on the mean streets of Ngaio, I had some intimidating memories of his mastery of a home telescope and chemistry set. He was pretty far out, even at that age. Encountering him again in my first year at university caused an unprecedented shift in the course of New Zealand's musical history. Stuart had advertised for some fellow travellers to join him on his journey towards a musical paradise. While my raw musical outbursts shone as bright as a binary star system I knew that Stuart's focused, meticulous craftsmanship would be able to fashion my intensity into a powerful weapon against the tedium of modern living.
We came together in Khandallah, the roughest, bleakest area of Wellington's infamously dangerous urban sprawl. Looking back now it's hard to believe that my parents' house was left standing after the outpouring of musical genius that spewed forth at our first practice. Many came to bear witness to my skills and Stuart's interesting vintage synthesizer. Many tried to ride the sound-comet we were summoning from another universe. Only one wasn't reduced to so much ash within an instant. A man called Al.
Al was friendly, kind and could also play a musical instrument. Understanding the ways in which he could further guide our musical spirit-flight, Stuart and I revealed to him the full extent of our teenage communication skills, telling him one day that "we were just going to do our own thing" for a while and wanted to "get serious". After more devastating assaults on the savage, inhospitable environment of my parents' recently upholstered lounge, Stuart noted that there was another in our Classics class who shared something approaching my astounding abilities and Stuart's complexion. We cautiously approached Andrew, the tall stranger Stuart had been observing, and found that he was our kin in the brotherhood of musical truth-seekers. He also didn't live too far away, so the round-trip in my mum's car to collect him wasn't much longer than it had been when I was just picking up Stuart.
It was thus that MonkeyShuttle began in earnest - a trinity of like-minded souls, cleaving through 10-dimensional space to seek out the essential core of musical expression that lies beyond the reach of everyday people.
Andrew loomed large over the proceedings, brutally forcing us to maintain the cruelest of regimens, involving Sysyphian tasks designed to first test, then strengthen our resolve. One week it would be driving to Johnsonville to get cheese rolls and pick up sweets from the pick'n'mix bins at the local supermarket. The next it would be driving to Johnsonville to get cheese rolls and pick up sweets from the pick'n'mix bins at the local supermarket. The next it would be driving to Johnsonville to get cheese rolls and pick up sweets from the pick'n'mix bins at the local supermarket. It was a (momentarily) confusing time for me, having someone so clearly inferior in all capacities but height attempting to control my actions, but I quickly understood the situation. The extent of my genius was such that it would take the tempering forces of two less musically-endowed bandmates to finally forge the MonkeyShuttle experience into a kind of beauty that could even be glimpsed by ordinary human listeners.
From this point on those who looked upon our live performances were instantly driven insane.
It is difficult for me to speak of our live-to-air performance that day in 1995. It is not unfair to say that there are not yet words in any human language to describe the brilliance of my work, as commited to tape that night. Andrew and Stuart both served as worthy vessels in my endeavours, but it was clear to me that we had witnessed the closing of one epoch and were now basking in the new dawn of a world forever changed by the gravity of our brilliance. Any further work, any attempt to best what we had done would be worse than meaningless, so MonkeyShuttle disbanded.
Radio Active wisely moved their station to a new location, safe from the attention of curious otherworldly entities drawn to the eldritch energies unleashed on that fateful day.
In the intervening years I have vainly attempted to write and release into the world of men the most banal music possible, driven by a fool's hope that I may someday redress the cosmic imbalance brought about by that mind-shattering event.

Andrew

MonkeyShuttle was the exciting sound of naked ambition colliding with a total lack of a clue about what we might be trying to achieve. Our motto, if we could have agreed on one, would have been "innovation through compromise"; which is to say we agreed on so little that once a track had been stripped of everyone's particular dislikes, all that remained would be richer and stranger than anyone intended or wanted, and if it wasn't greater than, it was certainly unrelated to, the sum of our attempts to write anything at all. Looking back on it, I'm glad that I obstructed the others in exploring their own ideas, almost as much as I am that they refused me mine.
'Human Enclosure' began life one day when Stuart was off sick: Michael and I were trying to prove that we could be productive without him. We had a series of immensely-slowed-down guitar samples and some longer guitar parts recorded onto tape - the tape parts were mostly rubbish and I kept erasing and rerecording them. None of the replacement parts were any better, but when we heard one of the earlier parts cut by overrecording, we decided to throw that one in the mix. The result was formless kaleidoscopic waffle - the closest we came to rewriting Strawberry Fields. When Stuart returned, he naturally disapproved but contributed to it anyway, with a news bulletin about enraged chimpanzees. They also provide percussion.
'Gloomy Forests' dates back to the days of Al Wilson, who played the thumb-piano that gives the tune its backbone. The thumb-piano may not have been part of the first track to be called 'Gloomy Forests' though. From memory that track was a big messy shit, and the whole thing was rewritten for the Live-to-Air anyway. Much time was squandered trying to work out how to keep everything in tune with the thumb-piano (not an even-tempered instrument). I can't remember if we gave up or not. The doomy atmosphere is an evocation of Sister Wendy's speech, yet the speech itself manages to lighten the mood considerably.
I think Stuart named 'Dung Beetle' in reference to an Egyptian myth of the dung beetle rolling the sun across the sky, but mostly I liked the way it gave us a track with the word "dung" in the title. We seemed to spend a great deal of time working out how many variations we could get out of two chords of equal length, and probably got very bitter at each other as well, but I felt it was the first track we'd done as a trio that made the grade. I'll bet the others don't. My brother liked it though. Sample trivia: Stuart had grown a beard when we started work on the track, and we recorded the sound of him rubbing a microphone through it. Everyone agreed it sounded a bit cunnilingual, which might explain why he's now blocked the memory and thinks it was Michael whose stubble was rubbed. And the beats are the sound of kebab skewers tapping on the sampler itself.
Sadly 'A Pint of Dennis' isn't as playful as its title. I suppose Dennis Potter had intelligence and maturity, but we gave these samples of his last interview an embarrassing tone of adolescent earnestness. The world fell apart around our ears when we played 'Dennis' during the Live-to-Air. Somehow the Juno switched effects in the middle of things and we wound up with our ethereal chords played out on a big fuzzy squeeze-tube sound. I'm sure that our wind noises were never meant to be as Antarctic and blizzardous as they sounded here; and Stuart mentions the consequences of overcompressing the kick drum. By this stage in the evening, as well, I was busting for a pee. Urgency may be detectable in my brief guitar solo at the end of the track. The difference between playing on stage and on the radio is that on the radio you can take a leak between solos.
Back when Stuart and Michael were first looking to work with me , they played me a tape with 'Moon Bus' on one side and something called 'Plaque Remover' on the other. Actually, they only intended to show me 'Plaque Remover' as they thought I wouldn't think 'Moon Bus' serious enough. 'Plaque Remover' was serious: it was everything its title promised. Needless to say, once I discovered the b-side, 'Moon Bus' became our signature tune and 'Plaque Remover' disappeared. For the Live-to-Air Stuart played the keyboard solo. I'd been deputed for another guitar solo, till Michael and Stuart realised I was using it to deconstruct 'Heart and Soul'. Stuart's solo was far more worthwhile, though he was enraged by his own performance at the time.
The interludes were thrown together for the show (Stuart explains the need for them) and they were a lot of fun to make. Perhaps there was nothing to fight about. Our source material included Blake's 7, Thunderbirds, Big Ben, pigeons, zebras and my grandfather reading Gulliver's Travels.

Stuart

For the live-to-air we used the following gear: Andy's Rickenbacker guitar clone, an Akai S01 sampler, Yamaha CS5 and DX100 synthesisers, a Roland Juno 106, and a mighty 386 PC to do MIDI sequencing. There were also chorus and delay pedals to add further textures.
The Juno provided most of the grunt work, including that "early Autechre sound" on 'Gloomy Forests'. The CS5 was mainly used as a dynamic VCF on most of the tracks, especially the interludes. (We needed between-track interludes because we needed about a minute to load new samples and repatch our gizmos.)
The sampler was obviously heavily used. The S01 had a sample limit of 16 seconds (total) of mono-only sound, which isn't too bad for short drum samples, but is limiting for the lengthy vocal samples and loops we tended to employ. Listening back there is a LOT of repetition on the vocal samples, especially fucking "Pete, Fritz, and Freddie", because that's pretty much all we had to work with.
As for the live-to-air, at our sound check, Paddy Moran put a crapload of reverb and compression on our signal, perhaps to shield the listeners' ears from our music's cthulu-esque insanity (see Michael's memoir above). The reverb was exciting for us as we didn't have anything that could make reverb up to that point, but it would be fair to say the reverb level Paddy slopped on was a bit loud, and fair swamped the mix. As for the compressor, at the time we didn't even know what it was - we were simply puzzled that all the sound disappeared whenever a kick drum sounded.
Andy has mentioned the gut-wrenching terror of the performance. At the time I thought the set was disastrous, but listening back now it's all so abstract that it would be hard for listeners to know what was a mistake and what was intentional. When I came home afterwards in a funk of despair my father declared "MonkeyShuttle? Monkey puzzle more like". This was a pretty accurate assessment, though it certainly didn't improve my mood.
My favourite tracks now are the first two interludes, whose mid-90s daftness compares very well to the daftness of today. I agree with Andy that everything was a tussle of competing interests. Since MonkeyShuttle collapsed under the gravitational weight of its own pretentiousness in 1996, all three of us have collaborated successfully with each other, but only in pairs. Three was definitely a crowd for us.
This recording of the live-to-air was taken off the radio onto standard iron oxide cassette tape. Miles did present us with a quarter inch tape reel after our "performance", but Michael's lost track of it (pun half-intended), and in any event we don't have the equipment needed to play it.