by monopark has just released a record called “on a plain.” They’re a largely instrumental duo focused on ambient and growling synths, hip-hop-adjacent percussion, reserved breakbeats, bells, soft acoustic melodies, and verbed-out lead keys with a lot of character.
The band is recommended for fans of acts such as Boards of Canada, Múm, El Ten Eleven, and for people who might enjoy Adult Swim bump music. They also bare some similarities to minimalist electronic music like Gui Boratto or Autechre, with an ear for delicate sonic structures.
Most of the tracks are relaxingly downtempo, with sprawling pads or atmospheric samples, whereas others (like “blue”) make you feel like you’re running around in Ape Escape 2 or something.
A brief interview with them follows—
G&F: This album is very cool. It seems like a lot of attention was particularly given to meaningful texture and timbre here, can you describe what the production process was like?
monopark: We pretty much only worked on the music together in the same room. We would start by finding a chord progression or melody part. Once we found an idea we liked, we would add/subtract new parts until the section felt complete.
That process of working in tandem worked well for us. It forces you to just put something down, with the benefit of being able to respond & build on each other’s choices, which would often bring something totally unexpected to the table.
We definitely spent a lot of time messing with the sonics of each element until the blend felt right. This kind of detailed, highly layered music also focuses less on having a singer or one top melody, so we naturally put a lot of that focus on the instruments & sound shaping instead.
We started around 25 tracks for this album, and just kept the ones we liked and put the ones we didn’t into a folder called “no.”
G&F: Can you give a bit of conceptual background about this album and the band?
monopark: We never actually talked about what kind of music we wanted to make. We’ve known each other for over 10 years, and our influences have a healthy balance of overlap & contrast, so it seemed like a recipe for a good band. Everything that followed was pretty organic and naturally found its own definition over time. That sort of abstract space is what leads us to a lot of different places musically, and the cohesion of it comes through inevitably in our sensibilities & personalities.
G&F: There’s also a significant visual component to this record, can you discuss how approaching animators and working with them went?
monopark: We have always loved what visuals and music do for each other, how they nearly always seem to sum up to something greater than their parts. Spotify came out with the “canvas” feature where you can add an 8 second video to your track, so we thought it would be cool to ask animator friends from our time at CalArts to do some visuals for each track. That’s pretty much all the direction we gave; they ran ideas past us, but we were on board with everything they brought us. It was really cool to see the process of animators coming in with visual ideas just from hearing the music.
Embedded Youtube playlist of visuals for “on a plain”
