MR. BUNGLE released their debut self titled album 28 years ago!
On August 13th 1991 Mr. Bungle released their debut self titled album.
'Adjectives like puerile and unlistenable take on entirely new dimensions when applied to Mr. Bungle.' - Entertainment Weekly
'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'. - Kerrang!
'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.' - Hot Metal
'Mr. Bungle rears his malformed skull and gyrates through the pores of an audience now primed and willing to accept anything.' - Rock Power
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.
"I would say that Trey and Mike and I, considering our ages and penchants, where destined to find each other. We disliked everyone/thing else and we gravitated toward each other in a very small, impoverished, and isolated area. I would say that every song reflects, in some way, our collective introspection, confusion, disdain and resultant social commentary and self-reflection that developed as teenagers in the ‘80s. While many of our peers were turning to drugs and alcohol, we found comfort in music."
"Perhaps the creepy artwork and kooky lyrics were enough to make a 13-year-old boy feel different than if it were a Human Nature record. I have met quite a few people (boys/men - what a surprise!) that had been about that age and told me what an effect it had on them. What I find most incredible is that several of them are now school teachers and, as if that weren't enough, some among them are award-winning teachers at that! I guess that's high regard coming to fruition, so I'm happy with those results."
"There wasn't an overt intention to educate kids on how clever we could be, no. As ever, it was just us amusing ourselves and trying to make the coolest music we could with what we had."
"A further thought looking back, to be real, it really says a lot about the state of things that there were so many people who responded so favorably to the sociopathic and ultraviolent aspect of early Mr. Bungle. We famously had those people in our faces throughout the band’s existence (although the Disco Volante era helped re-orient the fervor somewhat). But I find it super interesting that in that early era, Mr. Bungle's influence struck such an intensely and clearly mentally disturbed chord almost exclusively out among the 'masses' serviced mainly by media like Warner Brothers. Those were times when GG Allin and the Dwarves and that type of thing were still happening, and I went to their shows. I couldn't help but notice that elements of the Mr. Bungle audience, minor rural/suburban phenomenon that it was, with no crossover in any hardcore underground scenes at all, did have a somewhat similar fanboy variation of the Stockholm Syndrome thing happening out there. It was pretty out..."
Comments
Post a Comment