Good vibrations: Monkeyclaus uses different formula for making music
By Liz Barry on Feb. 14, 2008
By Liz Barry, The Burg
/385-5524
Tom Peloso is hunched over his Fender Jaguar guitar, playing to a sparse backdrop of piano and bass. He pauses, lifts his head and peers into space, wrapped in the cocoon of the moment.
“Wow, what a good chord,” he says to nobody in particular.
Peloso resumes his hunch, fingers strumming his guitar. The room quivers. Melancholy drips from the walls.
“I like that, too,” he says, striking a note.
Peloso, who lives in Schuyler, is using his break from touring with indie rockers Modest Mouse to record a 19-track solo album. Today, he focuses on “The Last Saturday of the Year,” a song about broken relationships.
MONKEY MAN
It’s business as usual at the Monkeyclaus recording studio in Roseland. The mood is relaxed, the air ripe with creative energy.
Founded in 1998, Monkeyclaus is a recording studio and Web music company. Toss in the essential ingredients — imagination, community and love of music — and you’ve got the Monkeyclaus experience, or as co-founder Peter Agelasto puts it “a magical boat ride from dreamers.”
Agelasto, 33, has dusty brown hair and scraggly goatee. A musician himself, Agelasto is a major creative force behind the studio. Whether he’s talking about Monkeyclaus, the future of the music industry or the physics of sound, Agelasto is a torrent of energy and ideas, quoting Albert Einstein and Ray Charles like it’s second nature.
Monkeyclaus seeks to create a lasting niche in the music business through its evolving online presence, Agelasto says. The studio’s most recent endeavor is a digital download store,
http://www.monkeyclaus.org, was scheduled to go live on Wednesday.
The store features independent artists from Central Virginia and beyond, including David Sickmen, Trees on Fire, Casa de Chihuahuas, to name just a few. Ten cents of every dollar is donated to a charity of the artist’s choice.
Agelasto hopes that Monkeyclaus’ online portal will put the studio at the forefront of the “chaotic music industry” by bringing musicians and fans together. The secret formula: DIY (do it yourself) + DIY + DIY = DIT (do it together).
“It’s not about mega stars, superstars,” he says. “This is about music.”
Over the past decade, hundreds of musicians have passed through the studio. Agelasto estimates that 60 percent of the music Monkeyclaus records comes from local artists. Others are based as far away as Brooklyn, Portland and China.
According to Agelasto, Virginia’s music scene is “one of the finest in the country.” With the recent revival of old time mountain music, Virginia soil is especially ripe, he says. To expand the Monkeyclaus family, a member of the Monkey clan recently moved to Brooklyn, a hotbed for the hip and avant-garde.
SOUND AND VISION
Peloso plays in the live room, head bowed. Guitars and basses are propped on stands behind him. Nine in all. A silent chorus of black, brown, silver, candy apple red.
He wears a black conductor’s cap, faded jeans and brown boots. A layer of stubble covers his cheeks and jowl.
The past three months have been the longest stretch at home for Peloso in three years. His break from Modest Mouse has given him time to record the songs that have been accumulating in his black and white composition notebook.
Peloso may be going solo, but he’s far from alone.
“For me, it’s the opposite of a solo album,” Peloso says. “It’s an endeavor with people that I love and friends that I haven’t gotten to play music with in a while.”
Recording sessions are typically a collaborative endeavor by musicians, sound engineers and friends.
Today’s sound engineers, Abel Okugawa and Raphael Wintersberger, are long-time friends. Peloso’s known them since his days playing with the Hackensaw Boys, a funked-out bluegrass band from Charlottesville that has shared the stage with acts like the Flaming Lips and De La Soul.
Today, Peloso is working on a guitar part to go with the bass and piano backing he recorded earlier for his song. No rules. No pressure.
The backing sinks into the live room through speakers mounted to the ceiling. The translucent plastic walls let in the soft February light.
Agelasto walks in and flashes the OK sign. “I like that tone,” he says.
Peloso agrees. “It sounds killer.”
LITTLE GREEN
The drive to Monkeyclaus is a canvas of sky, mountains, cows and countryside. A small wooden sign marks its entrance: “Monkeyclaus. Appointments Only.”
Monkeyclaus looks more like a barn than a recording studio, which is not surprising given the origins. In its infancy, Monkeyclaus was little more than a shed for band rehearsals.
The studio was built from the ground up by more than 100 artists, who gave their time and labor.
“It was a barn raising in the most true sense,” Agelasto says.
Twenty-five percent of the studio is made from recycled materials. Some examples: the stairs leading from the control room to the live room are made from an old fence; The foam and rugs are from the Kennedy Center and bought on e-Bay; Leftover scraps of hand-carved wood form a mosaic that lines the passage from the stairway to the upstairs loft.
Monkeyclaus is looking into solar power and other ways to save energy. Their goal is to get completely off the grid.
Right now, windmills in Texas power the servers that run their Web sites. As Agelasto puts it, when you download a song from Monkeyclaus, it’s a “green download.”
THE ELECTRIC VERSION
Like most digital download stores, customers can log in, write album reviews and explore artists’ pages.
Monkeyclaus doesn’t aspire to be the Joe Shmoe of music stores. For one, everyday users can copy an artist’s store from the Monkeyclaus Web site and paste it on their personal Web site or blog,
making it easy for their friends to find more obscure artists’ music.
They also have plans in motion to add behind-the-scenes footage from recording sessions — videos, B-sides, blogs. Fans will have access to the creative process, down and dirty outtakes, and information about recording techniques.
“It’s about making it really authentic,” Agelasto says.
The footage will be accessible through Monkeyville, a social networking community on monkeyclaus.org. The dream is to bring the recording process from the live room to living rooms around the world.
GOOD VIBRATIONS
After about an hour’s worth of recording, Peloso retires to the control room to review his tracks with Okugawa and Wintersberger.
The control room is like mission control, the music hub where it all converges. It’s home to vintage Russian pre-amps, a mixing board the size of a kitchen table and two Mac computers.
Okugawa pulls up the tracks on a Mac and plays them back, drumming his fingers to the beat.
“See that sparseness right there, I like that,” Peloso says.
The three listen again to Peloso’s guitar work.
“I just like the sparseness of this, man,” Peloso says. “It’s not really too sad, just kinda melancholy.”
Peloso recorded five takes for just a few moments of musical bliss, but he’s not daunted.
“That’s what the recording process is about,” he says. “Capturing those moments.”
For the digital download story, visit http://www.monkeyclaus.org. To contact Monkeyclaus, visit their Web site or email
. Tom Peloso doesn’t have a release date for his solo album, but he goes back on tour this spring with Modest Mouse, who will play with REM and The National.
COMMENTS
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Monkeyclaus Rocks !
Peace
ABEL OKUGAWA
http://www.abelokugawa.com