ArtistInfo

Infamous Menagerie

g, b,
Musician of Electronic and Rock

Infamous Menagerie was nominally a post-punk sort of industrial sort of music making entity which spent most of its career operating out of Seattle WA. The band originated in Atlanta GA and was formed late in 1984 by bassist Lisa Puteska and guitarist Erin Schneider (at the time–name and gender change later in the film). They went through drummers at a rate fairly standard for most frustrated bass-and-guitar duos at the time. Puteska and Schneider moved to Seattle in late 1987, taking their instruments with them. Some time after landing they decided to buy a drum machine rather than continue to chase after reticent drummers, posted some xeroxed ads looking for a “percussionist” unafraid of playing cast off industrial garbage, and became teamed up with Lisa Orth for a short time and then with Tori Roos, both of whom helped to scavenge sheet metal, oven grates, 50-gallon industrial drums, and other shiny or rusty things from the backyards of a number of unnamed businesses operating mostly south of the Kingdome, and then pressed them into service as percussive noise-generating units. Infamous Menagerie is probably best known for their contribution to the very first Kill Rock Stars compilation album. “Immediate Impound Zone” has been an underground favorite of eccentric music listeners for nearly twenty years. It features a shopping cart and several links of cast-off anchor chain from what must have been a very large ship, eight particularly piercing guitar notes, a bassline of meandering precision, and yelped vocals that stretched the upper range of what the singer was capable of producing at the time. It seems to have been a fortuitous mix. Infamous Menagerie lay their box wrenches and guitars aside in 1992, when Schneider returned to school and Puteska worked to further her career as professional dinner party thrower. Where are they now? Puteska is still arranging dinner parties and leads a life of relative leisure tending her plants on the deck of her downtown Seattle home. Schneider headed off to San Francisco to attend grad school, turned into Erik, and graduated with a PhD in Rhetoric in 2007. He is now trying to become a rich and famous poet. Roos discovered love and an especial affinity for metadata, which she has parlayed into a successful career as a librarian of images.

Instruments

• Guitar
• Bass

Genres

• Electronic
• Rock