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ducktails



Last Updated: 12/4/2009

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Status: Single
State: New Jersey
Country: US
Signup Date: 2/17/2007

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Saturday, August 22, 2009 

Current mood:  awake

album cover DUCKTAILS Landscapes (Olde English Spelling Bee) lp 21.00 
Ducktails is another one of those bands that went to zero to sixty in no time, in terms of releases. Before, it was a tape here, maybe a 7" there, now every week brings a new slab of Ducktails' twisted tropical pop, but hell, we're not complaining one bit.
Especially this time, as Landscapes might just be one of the strangest Ducktails record yet, The first track is what we've come to expect, and dig big time, swirling lo-fi, tropical soft fuzz pop, antiquated drum machine, warbly synths, playful woozy sun dappled melodies, plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz, definitely raw and muddy but also weirdly lush.
That, however, is just the first song, from there on out, Ducktails bounces wildly from sound to sound, all held together by a strange hard to describe thread that runs through all the songs here, keeping this from being just a mish mash of sounds and songs, and instead smearing it into a crazy yet cohesive dizzying drift through some seriously tweaked eighties retro future fuzz Ducktails dream pop. Weird buzzing Eastern sounding new age gives way to some groovy hard pop, with warped guitars, lots of flange, rad leads, like an alternative dimension instrumental lo-fi Loverboy (?), before switching gears and unfurling some looped almost African sounding warble, which then transforms into fuzzy jangly blissed out garage pop, then falsetto crooned jangle and swoon, then a bit of bluesy bedroom slow jam and finally a wicked, twisted late night infomercial soundtrack, all of the sights and sounds in Ducktails' soundworld hazy and shimmery and otherworldly and gloriously washed out.




album cover DUCKTAILS / JULIAN LYNCH split (Underwater Peoples) 7" + dvd-r 8.98 
Yep, another Ducktails joint, and it's a goodie. Maybe our favorite mode of sonic Ducktalia, the sort of faux eighties outer space new age drift. These days nobody does it better. Bleary eyed, sparkly, glimmery, glistening, crystalline, otherworldly new-age-wave, bloops and bleeps and softly effected melodies, all woozy and warbly and oh so dreamy.
Julian Lynch is the garage bliss pop new kid on the block, but what we've heard so far has been pretty awesome, and these two jams demonstrate just why folks are suddenly all aflutter about this guy. The first track is a warped minimal soundscape, breathless vocal drones draped over detuned twang, which eventually builds to a sort of stumbly wah wah garage pop dirge. The second track sounds like a warped Beach Boys 45 spinning at 16 rpm, fuzzy and washed out, more of that twisted and looped wah guitar, some almost-funky bass, and some surprisingly lush harmonies that brighten up the murk just a bit.
Comes with a dvd-r, featuring a bunch of videos too from Richard Law 
6:20 AM 
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Thursday, August 13, 2009 
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/07/matt_mondanile.php

Perhaps even more than James Ferraro, de facto godfather of what the Wire has decided to dub "hypnagogic pop" (they must've known what they were getting into), Matt Mondanile is seemingly an octopus. Separating what normally could be called sessions, or maybe EPs, into different projects, the dude from Ridgewood, NJ is behind Ducktails, a solo effort specializing in hazy, muffled beats and meandering, breezy guitar delay. Now, along with his bands Real Estate and Predator Vision, count the Parasails as a second (or third?) solo project.
There really isn't an ocean standing between Mondanile's Parsails and Ducktails (they rhyme, after all), but let's try and make one, since isn't that part of the fun? Based on the tracks floating around, the Parasails rely less on phasing and delaying the signal than Ducktails, and the result is a slightly springier mid-day intensity, like Mondanile recorded Ducktails at 4am, and Parasails came at noon.

5:10 PM 
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Thursday, August 13, 2009 

Ducktails - Backyard

with edits by matt mondanile
[Release the Bats; 2009]
OOO/x
Styles: psych pop, surf, children’s music
Others: Predator Vision, Emeralds, Pocahaunted, James Ferraro
Link: Ducktails - Release the Bats
First of all, if you are a diehard fan of pop composer Matthew Mondanile, if you collect the tapes and splits and LPs of other clever and likeminded musicians releasing music through Not Not Fun, if you’ve got ’em and love ’em all, this CD may not be for you. A glorified reissue, this Release the Bats print contains within it Ducktails’ previously-run 1992 demo, Mondanile’s side of a split cassette, and the outstanding Ducktails II. So if you have these releases, don’t waste your money, because there’s really only a few minutes’ worth of previously unreleased material on here.
Yet, as increasingly more cassettes and 7-inches are run and printed in this lazily-lumped “hypnagogic pop” movement, as fanatics of the sound get wrapped up in every release and every run, we are all slowly but surely losing sight of the general lack of cynicism, the naïveté, the dream-like niceties that are each and every little track of each and every little group that’s pressing each and every little tape. Decades down the road, musicologists and music therapists will look at the music of Ducktails and wonder how, without sampling music of yesteryear in any literal sense, each release manages to evoke memories of years past, memories in no way associated with music that came out years, decades later. They’ll look at chord progressions, at the melodic movement, at the recording circumstances and techniques and scratch their heads in confusion. It may be a false nostalgic construction, but each little bedroom recording seems to harken back to a more "innocent" time. It is almost precious to see these scrawny little guys, who normally obsess over harsh noise and drone, hording little tapes and singles like little boys collecting baseball cards, swapping and bragging. Got it, got it, want it, got it, want it. An adorable and fitting sight for music like this.
Matthew Mondanile’s music is silly, tacky, kitschy, and incredibly bright. His self-titled LP blew minds with how competently it was executed, how obvious and genuine it was. The music sounded like what a young New Jersey suburbanite imagined the sounds of the West Coast to be, which is exactly what the album was. Indeed, the music seemed to be the aural equivalent of a plastic flamingo, just some processed mold of the tropical experience to put in front of your homogenized lifestyle in a housing development. It was escapism, simulacra — it was whatever you want to call it. Yet its brilliance lay in the hints of possibilities made, how it doesn’t only have to be this funny little brand of fake surf music, how it can be something more bizarre, more psychedelic, more cerebral. Indeed, this potential is put to use in Ducktails II, Mondanile’s little cassette, not even breaking the 30-minute mark. Ducktails breaks boundaries established by the debut, with opener “Tropical Heat” washing ears over in sonic mescaline, in a desert of chords and echoes and reverberations over hiss and oscillations. While a few songs on Ducktails’ self-titled effort make second appearances not only here, but also on 1992, it seems natural and fitting, albeit a tad redundant.
One of the most tolerable aspects of the music of Ducktails is its general inability to sound like a retread of ideas from prior releases. What separates it from the music of Skaters’ James Ferraro, or of Emeralds, is how short each song is, how pleasantly infectious the melodies are, how happy it all truly is. The whole purpose of this type of music is to forge new musical ideas through the means and moods of nostalgia, right? Well, I simply do not see how that is possible through a 17-minute tape side. This is where Ducktails wins eardrums over and how it one-ups Mondanile’s other project, Predator Vision. It’s also why the 13-minute “Dreams in a Mirror Field,” the last song on Backyard, fails to affect in the same way “Let’s Rock the Beach” does, with sounds that massage your lobes while you remember being seven and riding your bike on the sidewalk.
The aforementioned “Let’s Rock the Beach” is four minutes and fifteen seconds of memory. With the snare relegated to rim clicks, the percussion sounding distant, down the hall, and nothing else remaining but two guitar lines dancing around each other, the song feels like it was recorded as an incidental score to Super8 footage of a family outing, of pre-teens skateboarding in an abandoned car lot in the 90s. It’s pretty and innocent without being patronizing, yet it also feels so strangely like childhood, like glorified examples of children’s music — and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Ducktails’ 2007 demo, 1992, honest-to-god sounds like the basement tapes of a young and ideal teenage musician in 1992, obsessed with the arcade and equipped with only a karaoke machine and an instrument or two. The title is very much an extension of the year’s aesthetic. Even the title of the opening track, “Crystal Vision,” sounds like a goddam arcade game, and the song doesn’t stray too far from that notion. While the last minute of the song sees Mondanile getting a little ambitious and noisy, the rest of the track is cheesy guitar chords and an upbeat synthesized drum loop, but all real damaged-sounding, like the tape had seen its share of wear and tear over the years. Meanwhile, “Theme to Cruising” actually sounds like the theme to a video game called Cruising, with a big corny guitar melody pushing through years of static, as if this hypothetical game came out in the 80s or something. The song then takes a psychedelic turn, with the fuzzy bass line and that signature NNF vocal style squealing and shooting through the mix. The track ends in a house full of ghosts.
The experimentation doesn’t end there, however. Time opens up and tones turn to opiate noise on the split’s “Why Am I Here?” a standout here that, surprise, is actually longer than four minutes. At a little over six and a half minutes, the track is without a time signature, concerned with nothing but fuzzy tones and negative space. Yes, the melodic lines are ever so pretty, and yes, they hint at a seemingly more simplistic time for mainstream pop, but this track seems more concerned with the path each sound is forging, with the trail of beautiful sounds stoked out of simply a keyboard, guitar, and tape deck. Notes cascade up and down, phase in and out, and a few even poke through and distort with the volume.
The moment the vanguard of noise and psych players are digging into low culture of decades past is the moment when one begins to wonder what at all is good with the experimental community. Indeed, reading interviews with James Ferraro can get grating in how pretentious he seems about his music. Yet listening through Backyard, one can’t help but imagine how nice the person on the other side of the magnetic tape is or appreciate the general lack of pretense or relate to the excitement he exudes when simply thinking about his brand of pop music. This album is noisy, is poppy, is childish, is druggy, is weird, is normal, is fuck you — just listen to it.
1. Crystal Vision
2. Pizza Time
3. Rhubarb Girl
4. Theme to Cruising
5. Double Dream
6. Vanaselian (Trees)
7. Why Am I Here?
8. Extending Self
9. Chill Jam
10. Sun Out My Window
11. Topical Heat
12. Backyard
13. The Mall
14. Afternoons Tray Sliders
15. Boating
16. Island Flavor
17. Let’s Rock the Beach
18. Status Quo
19. Udelco
20. Neptune City NJ
21. Dreams in Mirror Field
by Tyler Craig
4:13 PM 
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009 
Ducktails - ST (Not Not Fun) .....LP $17
Debut LP by Matt Mondanile’s lo-fi, artificial tropical solo project. As with a lot of first releases, this is an up and down affair. There are some great tracks and some others that sound a lot like music that I cannot stand. Ocean Point Pleasant (the single), Friends, and Gem all acquit themselves quite well. The long final track, Surf’s Up, abandons the rhythms and oozes along nicely. It could almost be part of the soundtrack to Aguirre and is the LP’s standout track. This record, for some reason, made me think about the current interest in late 70s/ early 80s New Age music in some extremely misguided circles. (I don’t know if Matt likes that kind of music or not, so don’t hold anything against him.) Why this interest? What is wrong with these people? I lived through that stuff AND worked at a mall record store where I had to hear a lot more of it than I certainly would have liked. I really thought that shit was consigned to The Dustbin Of History. Are people really that bereft of ideas? There is plenty of beautiful and thought provoking music out there that will do a much better job and not turn you into a drooling hippy moron. (Eno’s ambient music, mid 70s Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, or Cluster, Gilbert & Lewis, IFCO, etc) For fuck’s sake. The people who made all that New Age crap were nothing but money grubbing opportunists who cashed in on a market and rolled off the same records again and again assembly line stylee. (Oh wait… I’m starting to see the connection.) They all claimed to be Mystics too! (At least for their audience.) The meat market of spiritualism never seems to die. I guess most people like to be controlled a lot more than I do. What can you do? Don’t get me started. (OK. Have a cigarette, Relax, Remember who The Commander is,) Anyway, a promising first release. Mastered by Graham Lambkin. He’s mastered me too. Quite a few times. - Scott Foust (Idea Fire Company, Tart, Anti-Naturals, Swill Radio)

buy this record from here @
http://www.anti-naturals.org/swill/
9:27 PM 
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Monday, June 08, 2009 
Here's some seriously warm, wobbly, surfy, tropical sounding lo-fi gems that have totally captured our attention! Dripping with such melty, melodic yet slightly tripped out perfection. Ducktails had a lot going for it before we even heard the music, the name obviously (!), the great cover art by Jan Anderzen (Kemialliset Ystavat) and the fact that it was mastered by Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring already lead us to believe there might be some kind of magic being brewed under the colorful, inviting cover, so we threw this on the stereo right away and it's been beyond the perfect soundtrack for the bright and sizzling sunshine days we've been baking in for the last couple weeks. Ducktails is the work of one person, Matt Mondanile who has found such a unique sound, melding elements of the lo-fi pop movement that came out of New Zealand in the '80s with a tropical undertone and wandering spirit that sounds like bits and pieces from some gem of a find on a Sublime Frequencies compilation, the kind of rare multidimensional sound that Pumice is able to achieve, or the more pastoral side of prog that folks like Bo Hannson explored, or a sun-soaked instrumental passage from an Ariel Pink record (actually this actually reminds us a lot of the great Holy Shit record Ariel Pink made with Matt Fishbeck a while back), or maybe White Rainbow shining their hypnotic rays through the bodies of a band on Woodsist. The album's closer "Surf's Up" is almost like a new generation's version of Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air!
This record is like a soft edged maze that leads in a million different directions and takes you around on a sonic adventure that isn't as concerned with destination as it is in creating a totally and wholly encapsulating journey. While many in the new wave of one-man-band lo-fi noise pop combos have been focusing their sonic scope more on the fuzz, and burn, and rocked out side of things, Ducktails have a much more languid, dreamy and enchanting approach to finding lo-fi bliss through conjuring up so much warm sun soaked color in their hypnotizing sounds. Highly Recommended!
12:12 AM 
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Wednesday, May 06, 2009 
DUCKTAILS S/T LP

AVAILABLE NOW AT NOT NOT FUN RECORDS




Black vinyl LPs mastered by Graham Lambkin (of The Shadow Ring) housed in matte jackets with cover artwork by Jan Anderzen (of Kemialliset Ystavat/Tomuttontu), plus a photocopied insert. Edition of 600.

3:16 PM 
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Sunday, March 29, 2009 


There is an interview that I am pretty psyched about on the Vice website. here is a link and transcript:

http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2009/03/new-jersey-ducktails.html

NEW JERSEY - DUCKTAILS
Sun jammer extraordinaire Matthew Mondanile glides solo as Ducktails and with a pack of childhood friends in the more song-bound efforts of Real Estate . He’s not from the beach but his songs are about the beach. Let's talk to him about that.

What’s a typical day for you?

Hmm. Well I wake up around ten and eat a bagel. I live with my parents,
so there are always bagels. And then I go down to the basement.

What happens in the basement?

I go out to the car I use, grab an amp, my guitar, and my backpack and
then I set it up in my basement. Then I try to record jams.

Do you need any extra inspiration? Or is the basement enough?

Charles Berlitz is my inspiration. He was my travel guide through the land of Pacific City.

Pacific City?

It’s on an island off the coast of Europe. It’s where I started to make psychedelic music.

What’s it like?

It’s a pretty amazing place. There are cheap kebabs and all the
musicians hang out at this place called New World Hot Dog, so I met a
bunch of them there. And they loosened me up--they showed me it’s
easier to jam when you look out the window.

It’s a basic tip, but it sounds like a good one.

Yeah. So at New World Hot Dog we’d listen to music and drink beer.
Before I was introduced to Pacific City I was pretty bummed and didn’t
know how to focus my jams. I was scatter-brained--I traveled to
different places while I was in Pacific City, like Finland, Spain,
Granada and just chilled with my friend Brittany. Granada’s one of the
most beautiful places…

Hold on--what island did you say Pacific City was on?

I’m not really sure. It’s somewhere between New Jersey and Asia.

Does it exist in the physical world?

For some people, yes. But not for others.

OK. A lot of people make the beach reference with Ducktails.
They say it sounds "tropical" or whatever--is that a direct experience
of tropical climes, or is it more imagined and projected?

Yeah well the one thing is that it’s all imagined. I don’t live near
the beach but I love warm weather. It’s more of a nostalgic aspect that
I express within the music and that reminds people of good times at the
beach, I think.

Do you think that nostalgia is what drew you to music that drifts and drones?

Honestly I wasn’t too familiar with drone music. I was living in
western Massachusetts and there is a lot of noise, experimental, free
acts up there, so I was always surrounding myself with stuff like that
but I grew up listening to pop music and driving around in cars with my
friends in Jersey. So that kind of meshed together--and then I started
listening to more progressive kraut music, y’know, repetitious stuff,
and African music and really finding major similarities in repetition
in music from different parts of the world. So it’s not necessarily
drone but more repetition that keeps me going.

Like loops?

I use loops live. But in the studio it’s just me jamming.

Is it a private process?

Yeah, it’s pretty private… I mean, because I’m the only one there. I
want to start recording more with friends in a creative way, not just
playing the parts but improvising onto tape.

Does Real Estate give you somewhere to do that?

Martin Courtney, my best friend who I grew up four houses away from, writes the material for Real Estate--I mostly just play his parts. But it’s fun to do that ’cause it’s so different to Ducktails.

What did you listen to growing up?

My first CD was a weird 80s Greatest Hits comp of the Beach Boys, but
then in High School it was like Sonic Youth, Neil Young, Little Wings
etc.

Heard anything good recently?

I like hearing stuff my friends give me the most. I try not to pay too much attention to new music.

What music are your friends making?

My other friend I grew up in New Jersey with, Julian Lynch, lives in
Wisconsin now. He makes amazing bedroom pop music and plays the
clarinet exceptionally well. And my friend Dan Lopatin lives in New
York and plays the synthesizer under the name Oneohtrix Point Never.
His jams are really good. There are others, but that’s enough
shout-outs.

OK. Do you have any specific images in mind when you jam?

Sometimes I think about girls? But no...I try not to distract myself
from the sound...I really like to use as few tracks as possible and
have it sound raw. Very basic and simple, but still a bit
abstract--like "Beach Point Pleasant," that’s a sample from an
Ethiopiques song, pitched down, and then I played some keyboard over it
in my room. Then I played guitar over it--it’s like two tracks, it took
me ten minutes to record that song. I mixed the songs down quick onto a
four track and then I listen to them in the car and drive around.

Where do you drive to?

I drive in circles around the block.

Does it make the block seem different?

Not really. It’s the same old block. The music changes.

So it’s not like the music transforms where you grew up or anything?

No, not really.

Sorry.

Hahaha.

I guess I’m just trying to dig into the music a bit. The
woozy feeling of nostalgia you get from it. But it’s a nostalgia for a
place I’ve never been. Just somewhere I’ve seen on TV or in travel
brochures or whatever.

Hahaha, yeah that’s cool. It’s funny, because a lot of people say my music has to do with their memory.

But I guess you’re jamming, so it’s kind of the complete opposite.

You think so?

Well isn’t it? It’s improvisation, surely?

Yeah, it’s in “the now."

So where do you think the memory and nostalgia thing comes from?

I think it’s from the fact, uhhh...I don’t know how to answer that.
Other than sometimes when you record something right away, like without
thinking, it’s more of a document or an archive. Those things are used
to preserve memories. That’s a major part of my recording process.
Preservation of ideas.

Like sound photographs? But of things that aren’t physical and couldn’t be shot by a camera?

Exactly.

Like sound photographs of Pacific City?

Yup!

Interviewed by Kev Kharas of No Pain in Pop
nopaininpop.com




5:46 PM 
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009 

Current mood:  accomplished
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

AUSTIN SXSW SCHEDULE

Tuesday, March 17th The Parlor
100 E. North Loop Blvd.
7 PM
w/ Golden Triangle, So So Glos, Graffiti Monsters, Factoms
Real Estate playing

Wednesday - SXSW - March 18th
@ Club 1808
Real Estate playing 8PM

Thursday, March 19th
Mexican Summer Showcase
Club 1808  
Real Estate playing 5 PM

Ducktails @ 2908 Cole Street
w/ Blank Dogs, Woods, Pocahaunted   
7:15 PM  

later that night:
Real Estate @ Natrix Natrix House
3222 John Campbell's Tr.
Austin, TX 78735
11 PM

Real Estate/ Ducktails
@ Mrs. Beas Acoustic BBQ Show
www.toddpnyc.com
12:40 AM

Friday March 20th
 Real Estate @ Peacock Lounge
515 Pedernales St
 4:00 PM hopefully

Gorilla Vs. Bear Day Show
 Ducktails w/ Nite Jewel, etc.
@ Quack's Bakery
411 E. 43rd St.
 6 PM

Not Not Fun Showcase   
Ducktails w/ Robedoor, Sun Araw, Wet Hair, etc.
@ the Hideout
617 Congress Ave
10 PM

Saturday March 21st
@ Mohawk/Club Deville
900 Red River St, Austin, TX 78701
w/ Girls, Jeremy Jay
Real Estate playing 12:30 PM

Woodsist Showcase
@ Mrs. Beas www.toddpnyc.com
1104 East 6th St @ Medina St
Real Estate playing at 5PM


3:04 AM 
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Thursday, January 01, 2009 

Current mood:  artistic
Category: Parties and Nightlife
coming up in 09 on Future Sound


BONGO - LIVE AT SLEAZY'S
cassette featuring members of ducktails, real estate, lese majesty and brittany botz
this one features a band created in one day during winter break during there first show on the same day they created the band and the practice before the show in julian's basement. recorded straight to handheld.
"DADDIES IN THE BACK"

JULIAN LYNCH
cassette of beautiful songs for you to listen to.

myspace. com/julianlynch

TEEN STONER - MEDIAFIRE
sequenced songs from Ducktails and Oneohtrix Point Never. Recorded in the future mod.
featuring the songs "Dad's Home" "Hope Your Doing Chill" "Media Basement" "Guitar Center/ Wendy's"
PERSONNEL:
MATT MONDALIEN - GUITAR CENTER, ELECTRIC KEYBOARD SYNTHESIZER
DAN LOPATIN: BONGOS, GIANT COMPLEX SYNTHESIZER WITH STICKERS

GEORGE W.
MYERS
cassette from the head of breaking world records, member of grey skull, the streamrollers, defneg, etc.


WATERHOUSE
Ben Daly of Predator Vision/ Ducktails on guitar and synth

DREAMERS CLOTH
cassette from Jonas of Denmark. Runs the label Beyond Repair Records. This kid makes the most beautiful synthesized island sounds.


COMING SOON in 2009:
Ducktails LP on Not Not Fun
Ducktails "Acres of Shade" tape on Arbor
Ducktails CD on Holy Mountain
Predator Vision/ Sun Araw LP on Not Not Fun
Ducktails/ Tomutonttu 7 Inch on Not Not Fun

This is a link to the Ducktails WFMU sessions to download for free:
http://www. mediafire. com/?dq3mzoivdy4

Happy New Year 2009

CHILLERS DELIGHT!


HERE IS THE NEW LINK FOR WFMU
http://www.mediafire.com/?dq3mzoivdy4
6:40 AM 
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008 

Current mood:  ecstatic
Category: Music
here is a link to our live band jams on wfmu! check it out for the listen...




ducktails live on wfmu
11:28 AM 
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