MR BUNGLE | 25 Years


On August 13th 1991 Mr. Bungle released their debut self titled album.


Entertainment Weekly

'Adjectives like puerile and unlistenable take on entirely new dimensions when applied to Mr. Bungle.'

Kerrang!

'The entire album crackles with a weird electricity and the air of a rock and roll circus gone insane. Which is possibly the closest anyone will ever come to describe Mr Bungle'.

Hot Metal

'The puerile rantings or wretched mutations of American youth, or one of the most original forms of noise to be committed to vinyl this year? Take your pick, Mr.Bungle are at once chaotic, cataclysmic, powerful, deranged and uncomfortable listening.'

Rock Power

 'Mr. Bungle rears his malformed skull and gyrates through the pores of an audience now primed and willing to accept anything.'





Press Release

Vlad Drac -- vocals
Scummy -- guitars
Heifetz -- drums
Trevor Roy Dunn -- bass
Bär -- tenor sax
Theobald Brooks Lengyel -- alto / bäri intonation

Post metal, post modern, post logical, the sound of Mr. Bungle has been setting off sonic shock waves from the group's Northern California home base since 1985. Now the seismic activity is spreading nationwide with the release of the group's debut Warner Bros. Records release, Mr. Bungle. Featuring such apocalyptic anthems as "Slowly Growing Deaf," "Love Is A Fist," "The Girls Of Porn" and the terrifyingly original "Quote Unquote," Mr. Bungle by Mr. Bungle makes hamburger out of every cherished cow within rifle range...and cooks up something compelling, totally committed music in the process.

Spawned in the bovine and redwood hinterlands of Eureka and Arcata, Mr. Bungle was distilled from a cluster of stragglers, rejects and misfits thrown out of local death metal groups in the mid-Eighties. Taking its name from an arcane grade school hygiene film, the original quartet, which included vocalist Vlad Drac, guitarist Scummy and bassist Trevor Roy Dunn, built on their grindcore roots with a stylistic spread that included everything from white noise to raw jazz, recruiting various co-conspirators along the way, most notably drummer Heifetz.

In the spring of '86, Mr. Bungle made their first of four home-brewed demos, a collection of original tracks that quickly became a hot item on the region's bustling underground tape trading circuit. The group's musical reach, meanwhile, continued to grasp new styles of endlessly incongruity, necessitating the enlistment of horn players Bär and Theobald Brooks Lengyel. By '88, Mr. Bungle's line up had jelled, even as their galvanizing live show spread the word south to the Bay Area and beyond. A final independent demo captured the band's increasingly, and aggressively, original musical impulses and attracted the attention of several major labels.

By late 1990, Mr. Bungle had selected Warner Bros. as their label-of-choice and, by January of this year, they were in the studio recording their debut outing. At the production helm: John Zorn, whose skills as a composer and sax player for the avant jazz ensemble Naked City, helped enhance and expand the group's already formidable musical vernacular.

The result is Mr. Bungle, an album that splinters sound into a thousand chards before putting it all back together again into a whole, and wholly original, new kind of music.





"The main thing we see when we look into an audience is people laughing at us. It's perfect. We laugh at them, we laugh at ourselves. They don't dance. They just have this look on their faces like they're watching a cartoon or something."


 "Once we were actually introduced to porn movies we decided it would be a good topic for our tunes."


"Anybody who's teased to the point of hanging themselves is Mr. Bungle."


"People will buy the record, some for the right reasons, others for the wrong reason.
Regardless, they're definitely going to hear the difference immediately. Look, you can sell the CD back for about four or five bucks.See ya in the used bin!"


 "The music sounds like shit when we play it live. We're a tape band. When we're concentrating, we can sound good, but we never even try to sound good."







Comments

  1. I saw mr bungle three times on California tour. Was too young to see them for first album, wish I would have seen them on DV tour. Disco Volante is probably my favorite album ever made. Hats off Mr Bungle, what an incredible, creative band. In a perfect world they would still be together making music and whipping the camels bootyhole with a whip

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    Replies
    1. As opposed to whipping the camels bootyhole with a log?

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    2. Did this Ryan Murphy live in st louis then move to Florida? Curious

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. @Ryan. I do not think they ever toured for DV...I was in the same boat. That is why they played a few cuts from that record on their tour for California. I don't know this for sure, but I worked in music back then and that was my understanding at the time.

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  4. They toured DV in 95 (US) and 96 (Europe).

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  5. Yep, they even toured Australia in '96 for DV.
    I saw them at Metropolis Fremantle.
    Here is the Freo setlist:
    http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/mr-bungle/1996/metropolis-fremantle-fremantle-australia-3bc030a0.html

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