PBK & Minoy - Cloisters

PBK & Minoy
Cloisters

Album US 2008 on The Sound Genetic label
Electronic (Experimental, Ambient)

Recorded & Mixed 1987, Remastered 2008 PBK: "I am one of the few people who actually met Minóy in person, this was in 1986, and we worked very closely together for a year, completing about 10 full length tape releases. There were two different projects we worked on together, the hoax noise-band, Disco Splendor, and our collaboration proper, Minóy/PBK. Minóy was a very interesting person, quite eccentric, and when I met him he'd already established a big reputation in the U.S. cassette underground. The New York Times had interviewed him for an article on the profound 'home taping' movement. Many artists from the 80's I met through my association with Minóy: AMK, Zan Hoffman, John Wiggins, Al Margolis, Hal McGee, Big City Orchestra, etc. At the same time Minóy was working with me, he was also collaborating with dozens of others, he was extremely prolific and his output of completed releases numbered in the hundreds. When we first began working together he said let's call our project "Disco Splendor" and asked me to set up a new post box address for it somewhere other than Torrance, California, the city where he lived. This was easy since I lived an hour away in San Bernardino. The idea was to keep the project anonymous. I started networking tape releases without establishing to the recipients exactly who we were. Das of Big City Orchestra played Disco Splendor tapes on his radio show and said he loved them. We began to get good press reviews. When Minóy realized that the Disco Splendor project was gaining some attention he decided to abandon the name and reveal who was behind it, from then on we used the name 'Minóy/PBK'. Minóy was very obsessive and he could stay up for days and nights on end, recording sounds and vocals from one cassette deck to another over and over. As heavily overdubbed as some of his compositions seemed to be, he never used a multi-track recorder. He was certainly brilliant, but used the cheapest of materials to create his compositions: a guitar, shortwave radio, Radio Shack mixer (crucial for the reverb mode switch which could make very strange analog echoes) and a Casio CZ-101. Minóy was manic-depressive, so he told me, and he was on a lot of meds for it- when he was up he was giddy and could stay awake for long periods working on his recordings, but when he was down he suffered terribly and would stay in bed for days, if not weeks, on end. He was a large-framed man, but with a fragile personality condition... His remarkable and unique approach to isolationist noise music made him an underground legend to the few who heard him, but he dropped out and disappeared in the mid-90's and no one seems to know what happened to him. 'Cloisters', being a Minóy mix, includes a lot of Minóy trademarks, the howling, anguished vocals, the remaking of song standards, in this case 'Me & My Shadow' on the track 'In Shadow', and the strange fuzzy lo-fi sound courtesy of running the entire mix through that old Radio Shack mixer. Enjoy!"