Monde UFO + Ignatz

In a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, on 7th Street, Ray Monde began writing songs on an old Yamaha church organ for a project that eventually became Monde UFO. Utilizing the organ as a bass, alongside keyboards and a drum machine, he began making demos on a four-track cassette recorder, adding only vocals and guitar to the organ pieces. He explored making haunting and optimistic sounds while living in Skid Row as a one-man band. Heavily influenced by the musician Sandy Bull, sonically landing in a similar no-man’s land of Worldly Jazz and Psych Folk. Monde experimented with the themes mostly of meditation and UFO lore.

In time Ray moved in with the artist Kris Chau. With little crossover in musical tastes, they exclusively started listening to jazz, ambient and new age music in the house. Increased interest in sound baths and experimental music led to seeing music in a different light. Ray thought it would be interesting to add Chau into his slow burner music project envisioning something that would sound like Don Cherry making a record with Yo La Tengo. Chau, with no previous musical experience, would play a sacral singing bowl mic’d up though various guitar pedals and singing. Ray would write songs that fit these 436hz drones and in addition to the old drum machines added modal jazz alternatives to more limited song structures. By incorporating Kris, a non-musician, there was an added emphasis on simplicity and an innocence akin to Beat Happening and K records. Alongside a Community-College taught conservatory-rejected jazz musician the duo reached back to a more youthful punk foundation; without over rehearsing, they empathized more on creativity than virtuosity.

\---

Ignatz is the alter-ego of Belgian musician Bram Devens. Bram Devens uses Ignatz as his alter-ego, and comes armed with his own pile of bricks; sparse, emotive songs, wrapped in effects, corroded by tape, driven forth by improvisation and spontaneity.

Ignatz’s songs stem from a stripped folk framework, being compared to the primitivism of Velvet Underground or Henry Flynt – but these songs sound inverted, cast adrift, from beneath the surface. Where Devens’ fretwork is adorned, it is executed with a refined coarseness. Autonomous loops entwine each other. Songs brush past percussion, bass notes, or a scant keyboard motif. A voice recedes from the heart of the song into a dislocated, cracked drawl.