I heard a glowworm large as a house, saying to me: "I will be your light. Read the inscription. It is not from me whence comes this supreme command."
-Comte de Lautréamont | Les Chants de Maldoror
In Southern California one seeks shadows where there are none. The apocalypse may have its roots there. Castles are built in forced perspective. From Disney's Matterhorn, Mount Baldy's prefabricated competition, to the Mojave, concealer of mysteries, one is a prisoner of heat and glare in a land of twisted science and ersatz history. Disneyland and the aerospace industry share a common parking lot. Beneath the parking lot: the desert.
The good cheer and deranged healthfulness combined with the relentless maddening sulphur-infused sunshine of California produces in some of its natives the perverse desire to peel back the solar decal and see what lies moldering beneath. Toiling under an enormous, twitching, watchful Monsanto Chemical eye these natives wield crude electric instruments to build a new world: a world imitation.
In 1978, the moribund remnants of Hollywood glowed green-greyish in the landscape like the carcass of a beached whale, spent. The ghost of James Whale lurks in the Pacific Palisades at the bottom of a drained swimming pool. The bloated and confused entertainment industry that had invited the Manson Girls in through the front door at the end of the sixties has slammed the door on the unknown. This is the interim between the immediate antiquity of the Space Age and the death of praxis. Thrift shop archaeology is still a fledgeling science, and computers have yet to conquer the world. In between earthquakes and smog alerts one could buy the pamphlets of a shadowy organization called World Imitation at boutiques along the Melrose Boulevard strip (then a block long) where complete checkerboard outfits and other eager products were sold.
Walkie-Talkie 1979 booklet
Drawing inspiration from certain antique notions of the future, and with titles such as Surf Rules, Tesla-Rama, Hula Dance, and Computer Buddy, they prefigured the obsessions of today's retrograde youth. Those involved reaped no benefits from their clairvoyance, and remain secure in their obscurity. Finding a limited audience for their pamphleteering, WI branched out. Stumbling from a haunted orange grove near Los Angeles, they premiered as Monitor on Halloween of 1978 at the L.A.C.E. gallery. This was followed by a concert on Skid Row in November attended by a handful of drunks (and perhaps by the Skid Row Slasher himself), and in January 1979 appeared on Richard Meltzer's legendary radio program Hepcats from Hell. Three years later they were gone. These facts are known, the rest we must infer from smoke signals and rumor...
promotional postcard for Monitor, 1978
Monitor recorded two discs (45 and 33 1/3) in the space of three years and vanished forever after. Their project occupied the sliver of available space between the rote rebellion of Punk (the folk-art of LA) and the determined consumer ugliness of New Wave without a nod of recognition to either. The exciting breakthrough to new realms of stereo-phonic sound that began with their 45 Beak/PetWedding was carried further on their self titled album. All the knowledge gained by Steve, Laurie, Michael, Keith, Jeff and Ed (producer-sound manager) in the famous World Imitation recording studios was put to work on the album to carry out new explorations into stereophony. In their musicality, in the demands made on your sound-reproducing equipment, and in the subtlety of their inventiveness, this set marks another significant advance for the World Imitation team. An unusually demanding problem for both engineer and playing equipment is the delicate distinctions to be made between the multivarious sounds presented here. The range of of tones reaches new extremes. Rather than rendering these sounds as snuffles and grunts, they are profferred factually and with clarity. What is often mistaken for murkiness is simply layer upon layer of detail.
The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
- Charles Fort
The very special hallmark of this volume of Monitor's recordings is the faultless integration of the full ensemble as it plays the delighfully complex, surprising, and at times staggering arrangements that Ed and the gang has woven with such patience and originality. Monitor's sound is uniquely its own. The whispers of simmering ghosts open onto the scraping thud and clang of the iron gate of evolution crashing shut forever. We imagine Monitor's engineers pulling levers and turning cranks, scraping mold from a petri dish and applying it with a swab to the bande magnetique. The effect is as hair-raising as a Tesla coil, and as reassuring as moist rusty earth. To produce these syntheses, they would have had to use both electronic and occult methods, but this is only a guess. Master organist of many moods, Steve delights in exploring the full range of sounds and colors with his keyboards. From childhood he displayed a strong interest in both science and music, and has reported witnessing unexplained optical phenomena from which he derives inspiration. A comprehensive study of the nature of electricity has led him to many unique discoveries with his instruments. His technique is extraordinary and his imagination unfailingly fresh. Keith has studied and has mastered to near perfection the mannerisms and styles of the most talented and versatile drummers of all time then discarded and inverted them to better serve Monitor's unique needs. His careful choice of tempos is made withancers in mind: sabre dancers perhaps. His tom-tom holds sway, an antidote to rock's contagion. Laurie provides an unusual challenge to both engineer and amplifier in the delicate distinctions to be made between the timbres she creates both vocally and with the bass guitar. It is not enough that she is heard clearly and cleanly-but more important-that she has a definate tone, not simply the thump and drone that we've become accustomed to in today's popular music. Michael chimes in with his strangled cries and shambling zombie-guitar. His strummings and pluckings do not shatter, nor do they fuzz. The ripples of sound should ring out and away until they shade to nothingness, if your equipment is is reproducing properly: Pomp and Circumstance played backward to delirious effect. Unwilling to play their instruments in a conventional fashion, there was no jamming. Each song was lovingly chiselled from nothingness, and rigorously orchestrated. They composed their songs of joy and mystery in the solitude of air conditioned stucco huts. The album functions compartmentally much like Disney's scheme of neighborhoodization, or perhaps like a World's Fair with its many pavilia exhibiting cultures heterogenous and far-flung, yet with an overall theme of unity. It is a capsule containing many discretely functioning parts. Do not be dismayed if after the complexities and exoticism of Phosphorea, Hair seems quite simple and direct. Monitor is a totem with many profiles. Among their many gags and feints, they prefigured the cult of appropriation by appropriating an entire band, the Meat Puppets, to perform in proper Punk fashion an ode on follicular repulsion. In another attempt at disguise and confusion, Monitor was known to appear under the guise of the Tikis, impersonating a surf-pop group to spectacular effect.
Monitor opens the curtain on their Twentieth Century to reveal a televised puppet theatre of hairy dancing cupcakes. They leave it to others to profit from this revelation. Theirs was not a mercantile endeavor, but a labor of love. Joy and the excitement of discovery were the fuse to their explosion. Opening a World Imitation product was an event predicated on surprise. The artwork was always of the highest quality available. Within the original Beak/Pet Wedding sleeve one could expect to find some special insert: an autographed glossy of James Mason ("All Good Wishes...") or perhaps a yellowed circus postcard. All would be stamped with the World Imitation mark of quality. Monitor represents best the landscape which surrounded it: an astonishing juxtaposition of the real and the false. They present you with something ancient that asphalt can barely conceal. Nature's convoluted expression pitted against its own representation in fiberglas. Monitor sketches the ancient modernism of Los Angeles as a tar pit stocked with plastic dinosaurs, a glow-in-the-dark trilobite extracted from a gumball machine. An endless film festival of the forgotten and the fantastic unspooled nightly on LA's local television stations, In Southern California the past and future collide at amusement parks staffed with the undead disguised as marble eyed shampoo models. One thinks of Monitor covered in dust lurching about in a crepescular world of their own construction, or like Dead Jim himself wandering the bog. They were not what they appeared ("We're not what we say..."). In fact freshly scrubbed kids from the Valley who wanted nothing more than to make music palatable to parents. Yesterday's Tomorrowland is Monitor's HQ. Their mission is over, and has been for many years. They appeared and vanished as mysteriously as the Mokele-Mbembe, fabled last dinosaur whose rich flesh sickened the Pygmys who dared kill and eat it. A forbidden meal and the last mystery. Their project like all astounding and singular things existed only briefly and could not be sustained in an environment which threatened all forms of rogue self-expression with corporate takeover or annihilation through conspiracy. Revolutions never last long. They are destroyed by the heat and vibration they themselves generate, and are replaced with innocuous simulations. We their heirs and survivors study their monuments for hints and warnings of the future. A future that passed long ago.
-Antonio Beecroft | Hell's Kitchen, NYC 1998