Sitars, tambourines, ouds, violins, harmoniums, Chinese organs, acoustic guitars, etc. converge behind simple sing-song melodies that have fairy tale/nursery-rhyme qualities about them¾ it all comes across like Hapshash meets The Fool. I can imagine the freaks in Golden Gate Park dancing frivously around the Panhandle at some "gathering of the tribes" reunion with this blaring from every beatbox within earshot celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Based on your previous [track]records and what seems to be a disdain for straightforward song structures, what ever possessed you to start a project like this?

I think song and noise structures are present throughout all [my] projects, just certain elements are more or less emphasized. Monster Island started in 1995, just after the DAM reunion. I knew the individual members from a couple years earlier. We all attended a Ghost concert in Detroit at the same time and we decided to get together soon and record this group of songs. I felt most of them were a little too "pretty" for DAM to cover, and since we all were in agreement, it seemed natural to try it out. I had this collection of Indian and African instruments and we were all into similar droney psych-folk like: Marc Bolan, ISB, Exuma, the Godz, etc., so we recorded our practice sessions in Warn's basement studio. Later I sent a tape to Thurston Moore and he said "Lets press an LP...," so the first album ["From The Michigan Floor"] consisted of our practices from that tape. They were mostly onetake recordings with minimal overdubs.

This also seems like the second "supergroup" you've been involved with—this time with some of the major players of the Detroit alternative scene?

I think of Monster Island more as an "anti-supergroup"-- no flash or talent showoffs, just friends getting together and slowing it down. My hope is we can transcend some of the trappings of our past and individual egos. I always liked Godzuki [Erika Hoffman], Outrageous Cherry [Matt Smith], and His Name Is Alive [Warn Defevre] --they were/are some of the more creative bands in Detroit. It's always a special natural thing when we get together, and it gives us a chance to try out something different.

You don't so much sing the lyrics as recite them. In this respect, are the songs more like poetry set to music, and is that MIs preferred modus operandi?

I have a very dull monotonal voice with no range, so I try to get other people to do vocals when I can. I'm getting more into storytelling and narration with sound "Peyote Mind" [see below] and "Fantomas" are examples [the band recently completed the DVD soundtrack for the re-edited version of "Fantomas" (entitled "Fantomash"), which was presented at the Boijman Museum in Amsterdam in October]—it's like adding a document into song...putting another layer on top. I think Erika interprets the songs well. Her voice is child-like, soft and lyrical, so there's a strange balance between singing and recitation. My ogre quality contrasting with something of beauty.

The communal vibe around these releases reminds me also of early krautrockers Amon Düül and the ethnic world/folk of Atman/Magic Carpathians and Japanese folk/psych band Ghost. Do you regularly "test the waters" to see what types of music are out there that might benefit from the Cary Loren Treatment-- great name for a band, that!

Thanks, that's great company to be in, but the idea or subject matter for the song always comes before the musical treatment. I was familiar with Amon Düül, Can, and Kraftwerk in the early '70s, and Atman and Ghost in the mid-'90s. [As Cary mentioned earlier, the members of what was to become Monster Island initially met at a Ghost concert!] Also, Erica Pomerance's late '60s ESP freakout disk was a real revelation. I loved Vivaldi's chamber music and Ginsberg's treatment of Blake's poems as a teenager, so everything you experience is probably assimilated somehow…. But I don't approach music as subject for a certain style or "treatment." It must have meaning first. The truth of the moment is an important practice. This gets reinforced when you perform with people focused on the same ideas. Monster Island is basically an acoustic "low volume" collective band -- the approach to improv relates well with free-jazz and junkyard "folk" creation. I'm always looking for a concept to investigate and bring into music or film.

Communal bands sometimes have this tight and responsive nature that's a reflection of love or energy within the group. Shared ideals and backgrounds work together. All bands in a sense are communal, you get together to produce something. Music is one of the most social, yet anti-capitalist artforms and there lies its beauty: it's untouchable, a non-product, in the air and free.

The name Monster Island conveys a sense of both unity and isolation, the various ethnic rhythms and instruments of African, Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, and Haitian music would identify us as a world music bastard. I've always liked the idea of islands, the flowery exoticness, isolation and genetic creativity. The island where all monsters are allowed to exist in peace seemed idyllic. The name also links us back to the "motherband" [DAM].

Was there a lot of backlash from people who didn't realize that 'Hiroshima Bop' was an antiwar song and not a tribal dance celebrating politically sanctioned murder, whether it be at Dachau, Hiroshima, Kent St., Sarajevo, etc.

I always felt it was an obvious protest against war and atrocity. The "Hiroshima Bop" is a war dance perpetrated by our global leaders. That was a song DAM did in rehearsals before we went to Japan. I thought it would be a good antiwar song to do you know, "looking at the fire thru the eyes of the dead." -- that says it all. It was written for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, to bring attention to these disasters, but no one wanted to do it! The other DAM members thought the Japanese would misunderstand it so it was dropped. That was its only backlash... I like doing that song at the end of a live set, as it always ends in a big percussion freakout. It's like our "Black to Comm"-- I was trying to link all these atrocities together. We have such a great capacity for destroying ourselves in new and surprising ways.

"Confessions" sounds like Lou Reed leading a Hari Krishna marching band with shakahachi, bells, etc. clattering around in the background. Yet this particular track was dedicated to Sonic Youth. Tell us about the connection with SY, particularly with that song?
It's about the life of Antonio Gaudi: "killed by a streetcar your work left undone"…"Islamic mosaics, pulsing hypnotic"..."walls bejeweled, and windows elliptic." He was a Catalan architect who was run over by a streetcar and never saw his major masterpiece, the Salgrada cathedral, built: "Barcelona in shadows that crumble and die…." It's a massive structure still under construction today, one of the most dazzling, organic, neo-baroque buildings.

Another theme in 'Confessions' is the Spanish Inquisition: "the torturer, he is your lover too…," which came out of the Garcia-Marquez novel, Of Love And Other Demons and the book Poison by Kathryn Harrison. Both song and books explore relationships between authority: priests/executioners and the sexual attractions to their victims and their forbidden lusts: "opening your flesh and seeking the truth…." Its really B-film material.



The underpinnings are of "catholic guilt" body/mind/soul conflicts and a commentary on social hypocrisy. These are also themes played out and rampant in Sonic Youth, I was also ripping off some classic SY open tunings to score the work. There's also the unfinished/raw soundscapes SY bring to their music, a kind of baroque form of rock 'n' roll which reminded me of Gaudi's catholic structures: odd organic angles, psychedelic and sensuous textures. I stole a few chord progressions and odd tunings from a SY song, 'Cotton Crown', that I saw it in one of those Guitar Player rocker articles, a shameless rip-off, so I thought 'Confession for Sonic Youth' could also be read in a literal sense. The band has also been supportive of DAM and Thurston did issue our first LP "From the Michigan Floor" on his Ecstatic Peace label (which also issued DAM's boxed set 1974-1976). The song was also covered by DAM on our "Silver Wedding Anniversary" album.

You're obviously a voracious reader. A lot of literary references appear throughout your various projects, from the obvious (Gysin, Burroughs, Appolonaire, Tennyson) to the implied (Artaud, Lautremont, the existentialists like Camus and Sartre, and the Soviet anarchists), and you also run The Book Beat shop. Tell us how you became involved with that?


The Book Beat opened in 1982. I was unprepared to make a living doing anything else. I collected and sold books while going to Wayne State University. In the fine-arts field you either go into teaching, or try and market yourself. Neither looked promising to me. Bookselling was something one can do while still being somewhat antisocial. It became a successful venture despite my lack of business sense and now helps to support some of these projects. I don't think I read an enormous amount, but most Americans barely read at all. Books are a large part of my life and they eventually seep into the music projects.

Tell us about The Gallery. You've put on shows there, but I'm not too sure what the whole concept is about.
The Book Beat Gallery began soon after we opened. I show artwork that I find interesting. Mainly photography and folk-art. I'm not really a "galleriest" in the pure sense. Marketing and sales are not the point. I have a small space and try to launch creative exhibits onto an unsuspecting public. It helps to keep me stimulated. The gallery is an education for me and the public, it connects us to the community. Detroit can be a bleak space, and this is one of the saner areas, a space to dream.

Throughout your career, your material also has many references to modern culture, particularly in the realm of science fiction: Dr. Phibes, Mothra [the title of a song on MIs second album, "Dream Tiger"], Godzilla, et. al. Is that just a genre you find ripe for inspiration or material, or do you think there's more to SF than meets the eye…adhering, perhaps, to the preferred translation of "S.F." as "speculative fiction"?

I'm not a big reader of SF, I think its a pretty dull genre, but I am a fan of monster movies and monster movie soundtracks. I guess it's stuff I grew up with and still find fascinating. There are parallels to how we as a society view and picture monsters and how we reflect our fears and phobias onto the face of them. Space aliens with mutated bodies, giant heads, lagoon creatures, zombies, and oozing blob liquids were prominent in the '50s at a time we were [also] hyper-conscious of sexuality, car fins, and the godliness=cleanliness=USA virtues, so our monsters were these sick gross concoctions, projections of our fears. Then the hi-tech robotic/bionic transformer Robocop look of the '80s escalated with the dominance of computer technology. We kind of sublimate our fears and anxieties and project them onto the movie screen. I also love the soundtracks in monster flicks. it's usually the most extreme experimental music. In DAM, we used to play along with some of these movies, mixing the movie background noise with our own. I still find these horror and sci-fi films fascinating and fun.b>

Both of your previous projects gave rise to accompanying fanzines: six issues of Destroy All Monsters magazine and eight issues of the Nightcrawlerz' zine. Any chance a Monster Island 'zine is in the offing?

I'm not sure a 'zine would fit with Monster Island. Recently I was asked to guest edit an on-line zine at Blastitude #13:Web of Eternity [see above]. It was a chance to try and make an online board game based on occult science, and put together various obsessions into these 13 categories. So I put together artists, writers, and musicians such as Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, Mike Kelley, Wallace and Tosh Berman, Angus Maclise, Ray Johnson, Sun Ra, Akira Ifukube, Father Yod, Byron Coley etc., and it was simple to add lots of photos and long interviews. The process just seems easier, fluid, and more "ziney" than producing a 'zine, so I think a lot of great 'zines have already gone online. You can get a ton of material onto these online zines, There are 250 individual pages (if printed out) for Blastitude #13. Although I can't do the technical stuff, it's still possible to work inside the medium. I've also been working an online gallery: "The Glow in the Dark" with Anneke Auer, my web guru. She is also the voice on DAM's Swamp Gas and the next Monster Isle LP. A new zine should be up in the near future. Anneke and I are working on a Monster Island site about the project "Children of Mu" -- it will animate the Gary Panter illustration and bring to life pages about Mu and the inspiration for the forthcoming LP. Its possible that it may appear on Blastitude as issue #23.

Tell us a bit about the "Peyote Mind" collaboration with John Sinclair? It seems like a match made in hell, marrying your collective political agendas to the avant, freeform jazz sounds that were instrumental to the overall DAM aesthetic.

Thanks, that's a project I'm very happy about. I found this early college notebook of Sinclair's while researching a spoken word CD I did on the White Panther Party. In the notebook were poems and an essay he wrote under the influence of Peyote in 1963. It was sort of the beginning, or "Big Bang" for Sinclair and the Detroit avant-garde. A year later his heightened consciousness would lay the foundation for communal ideas seeded in the Detroit Artist Workshop, the MC5, the Trans-Love Energies, White Panther Party, and Rainbow Peoples Party. This was the cornerstone of psychedelic culture in the Midwest. I've just published a book by Sinclair about this called The Realization Of Peyote Mind And After and am delighted working on the documentation of this era. I've also been writing a history about the Artist Workshop, for a University press, something I hope will clarify the value of this region and the DAW.>

It's so different from the "regular" MI releases, I wonder where you see that project heading. Do you intend on continuing in the wyrdfolk direction on studio releases, but break into avant skronk whenever you hit the stage?

I really don't know where it's headed. I'd like to do a couple more "song" albums, but it might all fall apart and go somewhere else. Playing our songs live is difficult. You need an attentive, quiet audience to pull it off, which is rare to find in Detroit, so we usually opt for the freeform improv [which the band performed with poet Ira Cohen in December]. The "Children of Mu" project is the next step, and this was also a long narration and series of songs linked to the story and origin of Mu. It is both song and abstract improv.

Source: Jeff Penczak. The complete interview which includes sections on DAM, Nightcrawlerz and Xanadu, can be seen at: Inner & Over Views