SOME THINGS TO KNOW!

WHO'S PHONEMONKEY?

Glad you asked! Phonemonkey is a kick ass musical artist from the UK. He writes some incredible music and you should definitely slap a heap of it into your ear piece. Trust us, you won't be disappointed with Phonemonkey's work.

HOW DO I GET PHONEMONKEY'S MUSIC?

It's very simple my presious friend! Go to Bitcrusher.co.uk and in the Release section you will see Phonemonkey's album redily available for you to either download or purchase the full cd. Though downloading the album is only 1 buck and getting the cd is only 5 bucks, you can download Phonemonkey's free sampler as well! Of course, feel free to listen to the whole album right here on his CMD Music Profile anytime!

WHERE ELSE CAN I CHECK OUT PHONEMONKEY?

Phonemonkey is a lot of places now a days, but we aren't too proud to provide you with a few links to where Phonemonkey is often spotted.

BITCRUSHER.CO.UK

MYSPACE.COM/PHONEMONKEY

And of course, you can always check up on him right here on cutmedeep.com!! We love Phonemonkey and think it's awesome that you do too. So feel free to spread the love!

CAN MY BAND BE UP HERE?

If you think you rock enough for us to consider your band Cut Me Deep approved, you can e-mail us at fasterchild@cutmedeep.com with the URL to your MySpace Music Profile and we will give it a listen. We do tend to get kind of picky when it comes to music, so, don't be offended if we decline. It's not the end of the world for you... or is it?

ABOUT PHONEMONKEY

GENRE: ELECTRONICA / BREAKCORE / ALTERNATIVE

FROM: UNITED KINGDOM

LABEL: BITCRUSHER RECORDS

We got a chance to sit down with Joe from Phonemonkey and asked him a few questions about what he does. Talking to someone who's music is so out there and inspirational is quite the trip. Here's what he had to say.

Q: How did you get into music?

A: "At about the age of twelve I was listening to a lot of grunge music and wanted to show off, basically. That kind of music is a good place for a kid to start because it’s technically very straightforward, you just learn how to play a power chord and shout. It’s essential to get into music at that age if you’re rubbish at sport, as I was, because the alternative is a solitary life of perpetual nerdiness, at least it seemed so at the time. I had a guitar teacher who showed me lots of theory, unusual modes and rhythms and so on, and I started to appreciate abstraction and weirdness for their own sake. I always liked playing around with four-track tape recorders, running stuff backwards and at the wrong speed, and messed around with primitive music software on an Amiga. Later a bassist friend of mine bought himself a Korg sampler/sequencer and we started making all these bizarre noises and loops and introduced them into the little grunge band that we had at the time and although the college audience we had been building up for some time hated it, it was so much freer and open-ended than writing straight guitar music that I didn’t really want to do anything else for a time. We never managed to properly integrate the electronic and guitar stuff, so I started writing electronic music on my own on a PC, using Cubase, Fruityloops, Reason, a few other things. Coming across the stuff released on Warp Records was a turning-point, it was for a lot of people I guess, as was listening to experimental composers like Steve Reich and John Cage, it made me realise that the rules I had understood since I started writing weren’t terribly important. I’ve recently got back into doing guitar music alongside the Phonemonkey stuff – the major downside with writing computer-generated music is its lack of physicality: instead of sweat and adrenaline and smashing things up you get eye strain and cramp in your fingers from mouse-clicking. There’s a Phonemonkey track I made a while ago called Just Not Cricket that mixes up guitars and frenetic electro. It’s nice to bring to these two approaches together from time to time."

Q: What inspires you when writing?

A: "Lots of things. A new instrument or effect or way of getting things to work. Sampling something, for example the bits of speech I cut into Monkeycunt really inspired the tone of the track. A desire to see how much detail and speed a track can handle while retaining a strong melody is sometimes a motivation. Detail and speed for their own sake certainly aren’t enough to be inspiring. A desire to change the way I do things keeps me interested; I lack the kind of focus you would need to be a proper drum’n’bass producer or whatever, I get bored too easily. Even if the results I get are similar to others I try to use different techniques to achieve them, just so I don’t get stuck. In fact I never really decided what kind of music I wanted to do, and the stuff out under the name Phonemonkey is a collection of tracks that had a similar vibe, mostly fast and cheerful; I’ve produced piles of music that sounds totally different, some of it more conventional songwriting, some of it far more abstract, atonal and arrhythmic. Often just formal experiments with music I’ve written for other projects or abandoned will turn out to be inspiring, for instance Synglichtactoris is based on a string arrangement I came up with for a version of a Bull See Red song. I ran it backwards and it sounded great but conveyed a totally different emotion, it’s useful to make that kind of discovery."

Q: What do you use to create your music?

A: "At the moment I’m using Nuendo and Kontakt for most things, and I’ve been recording my Fender Jaguar and processing it until it’s sufficiently unrecognisable. I use very simple synth plug-ins, mostly the ones that come packaged with Nuendo, and sometimes use Spectrasonics Trilogy and Novation Bass Station for bass sounds. I dislike using complex and ingeniously programmed synths, they make the creation of interesting sounds temptingly easy and it ends up that the character of the music is determined by a software company instead of the person ostensibly composing it. There’s a similar problem with having libraries of loops. I know people that use Reason and end up with tracks that they’ve put together from other people’s samples and loops almost like you’d put Lego bricks together. To avoid this sort of trap I’ve sometimes imposed strong constraints on what I do when writing a track, like only using a saucepan and a delay unit. For drums I prefer just to start with a simple kit of single hits, make a straightforward drum beat and afterwards chop and process it to death, often starting with Roland 808 sounds, which are more beautiful than any other drum sounds, I’ve always thought."