Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Monocle: Those crazy Berklee kids are at it again

I went down to the WERS office one day to pick up a session that these Berklee kids had come in to do for our techno show, Revolutions. Turns out the thing was over an hour of hypnotic beats, the likes of which I had never heard before (to be fair, I'm not usually the kind to be shuffling around in a Red Bull-induced stupor in a club around 4 a.m. either). I then did some recon work on the musicians and came up with some interesting info: did you know that you can actually major in musical synthesis at Berklee? It's like the culmination of a conspiracy between progressive rock bands the Buggles and Yes. This is exactly what they had in mind. Well, that's just one theory. But here's some interesting evidence:

Monocle is a vision of the future, where instead of quantum physics or art history, students study the intricacies of sound. The band is comprised of two Berklee College of Music students: Christina Chatfield, musical synthesis major, and Danny Patterson, the artist formerly known as Sex Therapy, who both have seemingly grown more sophisticated with the band’s new name. While Chatfield is at the top of her class, having recently earned Berklee’s "Laurie Anderson Women in Music Technology" award, and Patterson describes his pre-Berklee persona as a “computer science dropout,” the two have an undeniable chemistry as precociously professional producers. We don’t know what they’re teaching them inside the designed-with-acoustic-in-mind walls of the famous music school—but we like to think of it as a top-secret music laboratory, where students experiment with formulas to make a person want to nod emphatically and move their body like an ocean wave. They may even be learning hypnosis.

Monocle’s live mix in the WERS studios lasted over an hour, as the two scientists of sound broke out their explosive lab kit, mixing hard-lined atomic riffs into boiling beakers of beats. The recording took place during the witching hour between 11 p.m. and midnight, during the Revolutions techno show, as the WERS technicians unwittingly released the mind-altering substance into the airwaves for listeners around Boston. We haven’t gotten any calls on the results, and we’re hoping it’s not because those who heard the music are still dancing in a dark room somewhere, having put Monocle’s MySpace page on the screen and left its mesmerizing loop playing. This music is a little before its time, and as such is certainly not approved by the FDA [or the FCC], so listen at your own risk.

To download the hour-long WERS live mix for free, visit Monocle’s MySpace page at www.myspace.com/monoclemusik (not to be confused with monoclemusic, a different band from Brooklyn).

-Ryan Weaver

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