SNAPSHOTS | joe's bangkok
Mono Returns
Monumental Japanese post-rock band Mono returns to Bangkok with a new album and a new drummer
M
ono, who manages to sound 10 times bigger than their four-piece membership might suggest, will make their fourth concert appearance in Bangkok on the 24th of this month. In the world of wall-of-sound post-rock, the band has no peer, at least live. Taking their increasingly devoted audiences through heights of joy and depths of melancholy, they’ve been touring relentlessly for 20 years now. That’s almost as long as the now-getting-musty term “postrock” has been around.
30 | SEP/OCT 2019
It was nearly 40 years ago that journalist James Wolcott used the term to describe the musical explorations of Todd Rundgren on his 1975 album Initiation. Rundgren had dumped his psych-garage band Nazz in 1969, passed through a commercially successful Philly soul stage in the early 70s, and with the release of Initiation, probed a partorchestral, part-fusion approach to rock that saw the 35-minute suite “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire.” By the late 1970s, German bands were exploring sounds explicitly inspired by post-modernism, including
Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), Tangerine Dream and others. The expanding Krautrock movement reached the British music scene via David Bowie and Brian Eno, following their two-year sojourn in Berlin in the late 1970s. In particular Bowie’s so-called Berlin Trilogy–Low, Heroes and Lodger (only Heroes was entirely recorded in Berlin)–applied influences from orchestral minimalists such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Eno, sometimes referred to as the prophet of post-rock, teamed with Bowie to elevate timbre, texture bangkok101.com
