Sock Monkey Sound’s 1st Annual Clip Show! We’ve got SXSW updates from Brandon, Patrick, and Matt Youngblood. An interview co-hosted by Jesus Correa with Australia’s circuit bending phenoms Toy Death; and an interview recorded September 2010 with Kickstand Productions and Middlewest Festival founder, John Ugolini.

Toy Death

Sock Monkey Sound

SMS Ed. Note: Girl Talk is scientist by day, Gregg Gillis, mix mash artist by night. All of his recordings can be downloaded for free at his website. Click here to visit the artist’s site for free downloads. Also, a wonderful {Episode aired on 02-11-2008} interview between he & the SoundOpinions.org podcast staff (Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis, Chicago, IL) that airs on NPR is available to listen to & highly suggested. The episode also features a short, in-studio interview with the brilliant comedian, Chicagoan, Bob Newhart. Click here for the MP3 of that episode.

“i am going to review albums and i feel fwierd about it…”

By Jesus Correa

hello peopel….my name is jesus abraham correa….i enjoy music…i am going to review albums now…
my amazing girlfriend is making me cafe con leche…which is coffee…but with love involved….sarah stewart is also making cookies…
and making cafe con leche….
right now we are listening to GIRL TALK…the name of this album is uhm…ALL DAY…
it is hard to judge…hard to judge this…
ICECREAMPAINTJOB…i enjoy bad pop music…i keep my eye on it…TRL///whatever stupid teenagers watch now…anymore…
it is a very diffferent world…i could just be posting random things to my FACEBOOK page…but I am not…I am trying to focus my writing…i have not written in a long time…?I can smell the cafe con leche….?i can smell her from here…
“can i get a fuck you…”
“twerk…twerk.bounce..bounce…clap…clap..”
ELO….
my first memory of electric light orcherstra…
working in a box factory…
my bosss DAN KERN…he…we strarted playing cd’s in the box factory…
he liked the tune…ELO…
don’t bring me down bruce…don’t bring me down…bRUUUUUCE…
wow….?a cafe con leche in a grandpa munster cup….
we knitted tonight…?that is how we met…i am a romantic…i really am…
“INYOUREYES”
catch me at the hot spot
“IN YOUR EYES”
it is an odd tug at the heart strings when you last expect it…?and then right on to…
it’s nostalgia….and then a clean slate….
it’s easy to learn a C…B…B Major Scale….it is, I mean…
it’s not easy….
not easy….
it’s timing…it’s this hard sort of thing to explain…to strike not the exact chords on an instrument….you can teach that…
and even that is suspect…?to teach….
it all feels like brainwash….
“WE…BE…CLUBBIN”
“I WISH I WAS A LITTLE BIT TALLER”
I think GIRL TALK =?makes me a generally moore horny person.
i am a generally horny person in general.
i am a lucky man.

i enjoy this album because i just sort of enjoy the world around me and i am an american who has his pulse on the fingers of AMERICA….
it feels like i am fingering a young AMERICA when i listen to the album by GIRL TALK called all day…?like someone just took the history of pop music and threw it in a blender where time stood still and you could see and hear every little bit of it…as it was crushed…before it was crushed…as it was being crushed.…you could genuinely and ironically fuck a woman with five kids in a dirty corner dive bar to this album at the same time….
it is us pissing in our own faces…
it is me being nostalgic….
it is the album playing right now as i am finding out all sorts of things about me and the world around me….
jerry lawler just got a title shot at a pay-per-view event…maybe andy kaufman is still alive…maybe andy kaufman is alive in all of us…maybe i am getting old and nostaligic…maybe i have always just been this way…
i can smell the cookies…lady ga-ga is not any better or worse than i am….i hope that if i do drown in snow overnight that you all knw i always loved you more than you deserved to be loved but i had no reservations about it.

JC

Sock Monkey Sound

By Andy Whorehall

Forewords by Kevin Schwitters & Dave DeCastris
Epilogue by Jesus Correa
Video by Stephanie Barisa
Download Bootleg by Mark Muraski

“The CJ’s SYTTNN show was one of the best shows I have ever been a part of.

We drew numbers to determine the entrance order, and I drew #2. I remember being excited because I figured my entrance would be the moment when the show transformed from one guy playing music alone into something truly special and weird.

I stood in the back room with the other members listening to Jesus (#1) play the intro, and after 10 seconds, I knew he had already achieved this on his own. We filed out one-by-one and kept piling on the noise.

We had only gotten together to discuss the project one or two times before the show, and most of that time was spent making costumes, taking pictures, and playing with action figures. The music wasn’t so much an after-thought as it was a never-thought. There was a .001% chance the music would be anything but annoying, indulgent, and unlistenable. Magic. And it never happened again.”
-Kevin Schwitters (The Braves / Table & Chairs / Haunted Hayrides/Say Yes to The No-No’s)

“The moment he (Jesus) mentioned costumes & noise makers for instruments, I was sold.  We had simply agreed to be in a Jesus Correa project, which in itself is worthy of any sort of participation.  We did discuss his idea for the show and what to bring;  a cape, masks would be provided, and any noise making device.  He said he’d provide the songs.  There would be no practice which made us ecstatic but curious.  That night we gathered back room at CJ’s downtown in our costumes & pulled #s (me pulling #11) for entrances.  Jesus, #1, proclaimed that we were going to play cover songs & before you knew it, it was over to the tribal chant of “Crocodile Rock” & feedback from a rigged, audio-out space-lego noise maker toy that  Mark Muraski tweaked up for me to abuse with a pedal & practice amp. We were sweaty, thirsty, happy.  Musical therapy.

Someone yelled, “It was a happening!” as Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” began to play from the bar overhead PA.  It was only then did the irony settle in we just made ridiculous noise like masked banshees on a bender in a Rockford bar. We should have been kicked out, thinking back; but Jesus is cunning, charming and those costumes may have been the decoy in his plan to not get us kicked out.

In the parking lot afterwards, 2 guys approached me ‘loading’ the car. “Dude, were you one of the No-No’s?” Yes. “That was crazy man, space circus music man!”  Yeah it was fun. “We’re from Caledonia man, we drove in to get drunk but man, we didn’t expect that shit.”  Thanks (laughing). “How did you practice for that?” That was practice. “When are you playing again?” I doubt we will.

It’s pretty rare when I can say without irony, ‘thank you, Jesus.’ That was fun.”
-Dave DeCastris (Donkey Boy (USA) / Staasuhnator Rex / Say Yes to The No-No’s)

______________________________________________________________________

On March 1st, 2008, CJ’s on State St. in Rockford, IL played host to an unknown gathering of local musicians performing in costume by the name of “Say Yes To The No-No’s.” Armed with various noisemaking devices, percussion, toy instruments, harmonica, trombone, and slide guitar, the local ‘ironic super-group’ could be considered veteran, Rockford area musicians now who are more often ignored than actually listened to.  They were brought together by midwestern artist, musician & 2009 city mayoral candidate, Jesus Correa IV. He the brain, the No-No’s being his brainchild

Correa’s No-No’s consisted of members he gathered together from The Braves, Midwestern Death, Donkey Boy (USA), The Moment, Popeye Jonesin’, The GoMows & many more; possibly forming the first ever Rockford Area Anti-Arts Indie Super Group. (It’s ok to laugh.)  Together they created a unified sound, void of arrogance & musical discipline, with unadulterated defiance for each other and their environment.

Jesus Correa

12 members filed in  1×1, each 30-40 seconds apart to fulfill a roll call led by its leader, Mr. Correa.  They eventually created a half hour of “cover songs”- as Jesus put it lightly during the intro.  Far from being cover songs & closer to something from space, the 12 members from all walks of life and styles of music created a circus of sound. Each member being the asshole in any other band performed out of tune, out of rhythm, and proudly.  They became elephants that night, marching together to the beat of their leader’s drum machine. Yelling, banging, chanting & laughing like adult-children should do on occasion just to feel alive.

It became the sound of Rockford at night I’d dreamt of for years; elephants stampeding through, marching with the self-defeated while trashing the town into a disgusting layer of party confetti, balloon skin shrapnel & empty beer cans. The drunk women at the bar never saw it coming, leading them to bed & leaving them for a new town to trash come morning. The sound of Rockford had finally arrived & it was gone in 31 minutes. Go figure, it was led by a human being named, Jesus.

Each member performed draped in a cape with masks on made by Correa for the No-No’s to wear, an homage to the good ol’ days of wrestling, performing, entertaining the locals and releasing the demons. Together they formed something larger than the scene they pissed about in tinkering away their youth on. Large &  memorable, it was only going to happen once this way.  12 idiots, all ironic & talented with multiple issues spread out between each one for 1 night, 30 minutes in Rockford creating unrehearsed, city-circus noise.

A soundtrack for a city so sad from waiting on a train to come back that they missed these elephants trampling all over their town for 30 minutes. From the Say Yes To The No-No’s to no one else but themselves.

AW | andy whorehall

{Download a bootleg recording / Say Yes To The No-No’s / Live @ CJ’s Lounge, Rockford, IL 03.01.2008 / Recorded by by Mark Muraski}

_________________________________________________________
SMS Ed. Note, 01-26.2011: We were able to hunt down Jesus Correa for a few comments, thoughts about the 1-off event after this article’s original posting.  Enjoy.

EPILOGUE / Jesus Correa:

“At the time of the show I was performing with an odd band called Lightning Thunder Fox-Chip Copeland was actually very shortly involved with this project-and we had a show booked at Cj’s. Elizabeth Kris McQueeny was in this band, and she was unable to perform-due to a vacation I believe-and I am a sickfuck who is unwilling to cancel a show-I performed last Valentines Day after spending the previous evening/early morning in an emergency room in Chicago after plummeting off the roof of the Congress Theatre-so I started racking my brain.

At this point I had been playing in bands and performing for about ten years, and I always felt like an outsider, a weird-o, and an outcast in the local music scene. I knew a lot of other folks in bands around town, but I was never “IN” with the incrowd, and my musical projects were often spurned and overlooked, and Lightning Thunder Fox was really sort of out there. So I start wracking my brain, because I am not going to cancel a show-I probably love playing shows more than anything else I can think of-and I figure, “Well, they think I’m weird, and out there, I will show them weird and out there.”

So I start getting in touch with folks I respected around the area, mostly musicians, some other random folk that I was sort of curious as to what they would do, some just on the word of other folk I had asked. I had a fuzzy idea of what wanted to happen, and I had a name. Say Yes To The No-No’s was just something I said around the house, and I recorded a few things under the name around that time-an album called Ko-Ko Luv Good available on Greentape.

I got a basic line-up worked out, and so I set to work. We all met at my house a total of two times, maybe three. We met once to do a photoshoot at the 412 mansion-I am not sure where these photos are, I believe we used Elliot Porter of the Moment’s camera-and I think the second time we met up was before the show to finish up some masks and drink beer before the show. There may have been another get together, but I am a little fuzzy on the whole thing. I think we decided on the way out that the ultimate goal was to end up playing “Crocodile Rock” and that was it as far as the musical guideline was concerned.

I believe a couple of people backed out at the last minute from the show, and I remember trying to talk a couple of people in the back room into playing along, but to no avail. I think we ended up with eleven members onstage when all was said and done.

The masks were something I was sort of using at the time in Lightning Thunder Fox. I like to see a show as much as hear a show, I am very much into stage presence, and am all for putting on a Show. I sewed most of them myself, but I remember a few people helping out in my cramped little room just before the show, Phil Goudreu sticks out as one of the sewers.

Before the show we all drew a mask and a number from a bag. I believe I actually drew number nine, every other number was drawn, and I went ahead and drew again and ended up number one. I never told anyone that before, I sort of cheated a little, but it was my baby and I wanted to be the first one to go, sorry.

I remember walking out and being just sort of disoriented, with the mask and just the oddness of it all. We set all the instruments out beforehand, just sort of scattered all about. I just started my drum machine, and it was all just a little fuzzy from there.

I was reprimanded on two counts for the show:

• Eleanor Boersma who was in the band LIghtning Thunder Fox with me, and also underage kept trying to sneak into the place, which was my problem for some reason.
• It was just sort of too out there, it didn’t sit well with the generic rock and roll shows that typically go on around town-where was the bass player and the drums and the guitar riffs and the structure and who was in charge, where was the frontman etc. It made some people uneasy, good, I like that.

All in all it went above and beyond what I expected. It made my weird band that I was with fulltime not seem so weird. I got to play with a lot of folk I respected but who would not normally perform with me or one of my bands under normal circumstances. I got to bring a weird idea that belonged in some uptight boring art gallery into a cozy little dive bar, and weird out the Squares.

Just the experience of being there was one thing. There were some fuzzy videos on the YOUTUBE a few days later. Then I heard someone had recorded the damned thing, and lo and behold it was not as annoying as I thought it would be, it was actually sort of good in its own weird way, it sort of clicked, and it worked, godammit it worked.

This is the final line-up of performers as far as I can remeber, I think some of them kept their masks, which made me mad at first, but I hope they treasure their stolen mask, and the magical evening we shared together, just some masked men wailing and banging in the evening.

Say Yes To The No-No’s, line-up, 03-01-2008
1.Jesus Correa VII
2.Kevin Schwitters
3.Dave Decastris
4.Phil Goudreaux
5.Brandon Lutmer
6.Taylor Marie Moorman
7.Jason Judd
8.Steven Wirth
9.Spencer Scott
10.Zach Ippen
11. Barrett James

Sock Monkey Sound

Live @ Krypto, Rockford, IL
07.01.2010

By Andrew Whorehall

Lizard Skynard performed their first live performance as a 5- piece band before a crowded room of wannabe music nerds in Rockford, IL the first of July, 2010.  The Austin, TX, via Chicago to Rockford, IL electrometal band brought all reasons to NOT doubt them to the table.  A tattooed, physically manipulated frontman matched by a monstrous rhythm section pushed this listener / viewer’s experience to a level of appreciation once reserved for bands accidently caught live in larger cities in long ago times.   Imagine the Deftones with Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine as dead serious as you can be in a band on your own in America, 2010.

“There is no treatment, there is no cure” as Lizardman scientifically professes live from, “Bell & Syndrome”, is as close as you’ll get to a marriage between 1980s speed metal, mid 90s angst and 2010 space metal.  The wash of feedback is massive, the drum rolls are jah-retarded (in a good way if it matters) and the bass is the hammer to the nail in the head that crashes on in, slow and deep.

Lizardman, the perfect frontman / performance artist / poet is hard to take your eyes off of, often staring down and gazing over  the crowd with an uncomfortable smile as the band tries to fool you into thinking they’re the backdrop to this act– while failing.  Perfectly failing.

Lizard Skynard is a ferocious band with or without the Lizardman, often providing the perfect score to an unaired live documentary.  If further proof needs validation, hearing “Space Eels” live off of their recently, self-titled, debut that night – proved no validation was needed.  A spaghetti western-sci-fi metal anthem destined to be. Hearing this live rattled any doubts I had thinking this was Lizardman’s band.   This is a band of 5 guys creating very serious, well orchestrated noise as if their lives depended on each second put out, from here on out.

Sure, this is a band with a Lizardman (it’s a foil, he’s a smart-ass, well-educated, sweetheart underneath it all and too smart for this f*cking planet- it’s obvious)- that’s the catch and he’s a wonder to watch and listen to, however;  this is a poet and entertainer, with a ferocious, well-oiled and classically trained, punk band ready to rip your f*cking brain outta your skull.

Do not miss Lizard Skynard live.

dD   |  andywhorehall.com

Sock Monkey Sound

Jesus Correa

This week we welcome artist extraordinaire Jesus Correa to the monkey cave. We discuss his 2009 Rockford mayoral race experience, history in the music scene and art community, and Dave’s love of pixelated women. Call our Hotline at 815-315-9552.

Featuring music by:
Spoon
Jesus Correa
Vic Ruggiero
Blaming Tim
Otter Petter

Sock Monkey Sound