Interview: Beige Monk

"pan is in the cities, pan is in the streets / pan is in the internet of the Anthropocene"

Beige Monk (they/them) is a rather peculiar musical act. While their material sticks to a somewhat straight-forward pop or folk formula, a general psychedelic atmosphere hovers inside their songs. Their latest album, titled 'A Recapturing of a Dream in Which I Was Thrown into the Void Where I Stayed for an Eternity Before Emerging in My Ultimate Form to Play Those Who Put Me There in the Game of 200​,​000 Rules', is doused in a light and heartwarming experimental haze that can be really hypnotizing and lovely to experience. Among these songs, however, is very cryptic and spiritual lyricism the likes of which even the most astute of Genius annotators couldn't possibly decode. To get more insight on topics addressed in the album, and more so look at Beige Monk for what they are, I caught up with them through a Discord interview. Here's our conversation.

 

Melissa: Who is Beige Monk?

Beige Monk: Beige Monk is a thing that happens when feelings and ideas turn into sounds. 

M: Would you like to elaborate on that?

BM: I do my best to let my stuff as Beige Monk fall out naturally from me. I think this works best when there isn't a kind of identity or fixed sense of who Beige Monk is or can be.

M: How did you come up with the name 'Beige Monk'?

BM: It came moments after waking up once when I was 15. I think it might have been a dream right before, but I don't remember what happened in it if that's true.

M: Dreams seem to come up a lot in your music, especially your most recent three albums. Do these dreams hold any particular significance to you beyond their existence?

BM: The dreams those albums are named after are definitely significant to me, and I have ideas about what they mean. I've always been interested in dreams, the unconscious, and the natural creativity hidden in humans. I think the world is like a dream.

M: So in that sense, these dreams are different worlds for you to travel to, and these albums are a recounting of your travels? 

BM: I like that. 

M: In the descriptions for the three most recent albums of yours, you point out that they were created in collaboration with 'the new cult of hermaphroditus salmacis'. Who are they, and how have they helped you create this trilogy?

BM: I think androgyny is a a living symbol of divine unity. There's a long history of people who, in our time, might lean towards being transgender or something similar, making up a spiritual class in their cultures. To me, uniting the male and female parts of oneself should be equal with uniting spirit & matter and uniting the conscious and unconscious. 'The new cult' is something I hoped to make real, at least in the imagination world, by tying my music to it, as if it's its source of electricity or something. It could maybe refer to all LGBTs of our time, and the general trend of gender liberation that i think needs to correspond with a total liberation of the human spirit. I also associate it with the astrological age of Aquarius that we are entering. Aquarius is often depicted as androgynous.

M: So the cult itself is more an abstract spiritual concept relating to gender identity than a concrete concept and practice that one could point to as a 'cult', and that invoking its name is in and of itself doing the cult's work?

BM: Yeah, haha, maybe I'll start a real cult someday. First as fiction, then as reality.

M: What was the process behind writing and producing your most recent album, 'A Recapturing of a Dream', like? Did you pull from any influences?

BM: Mostly I'd write all the songs on acoustic guitar, and then experiment with synths and samples and stuff when I recorded and let them morph the music if it felt right. I don't know if there was anyone I took from intentionally. Maybe Animal Collective, The Microphones, David Bowie. I half-stole the starting melody of '0 the fool' from 'Don't Get Lost in Heaven' by Gorillaz. Everything I listen to kinda goes into the porridge. 

M: What have you been listening to as of late? Has it been mostly these artists, or some others?

BM: Those, The Dismemberment Plan, Devi McCallion, Rook, Katie Dey, for a bit I was really really into 100 Gecs.

 

The album cover for Beige Monk's album, 'A Recounting of a Dream in Which I Was Laura Palmer Investigating My Own Murder and Using the Great Golden Womb in the Sky as a Shortcut Between Crime Scene'. 

 

 

 

 

M: There's a lot going on in the outside world as I'm sure you're unbearably aware of. BIPOC fighting for their lives and rights, LGBT folk (especially trans people) fighting for their lives and rights, coronavirus, all of that. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on these current events?

BM: I think that things were already really tense before the virus, so it seems like something that needed to happen, to force confrontation. America definitely seems to be slipping into fascism more rapidly every day. Think it would be good if many more autonomous zones or similar things popped up all over. I'm not very good at this stuff though. All cops are bastards.

M: Hell yeah. To wrap this up, what's next for the Beige Monk project, or for you in general? 

BM: There's at least one music project in its infancy that I can't say much about yet. I also did a comic and more to come at beigemonk.neocities.org.

 

Stream and buy A Recapturing of a Dream in Which I Was Thrown into the Void Where I Stayed for an Eternity Before Emerging in My Ultimate Form to Play Those Who Put Me There in the Game of 200​,​000 Rules here, here, and here. You can also view Beige Monk's webpage here.