Biography
Male is always Jonathan Krohn (key) and Benjamin Mjolsness (guitar). Male is often those two with any number/combination of the following: Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), Nick Butcher (tapes/loops/key), Josh Berman (cornet), Colin DeKuiper (bass), Steven Hess (percussion),
Todd Mattei (guitar), and Mike Reed (percussion).
Krohn and Mjolsness started informally back in 2000 or 2001 when they studied together at DePaul University in Chicago; weekends used to be spent messing around with tones and sounds in Krohn’s bedroom that didn’t have a door. After playing as a duo for about 3 years (under the name ‘Male Models’), the duo got tired of underwhelming themselves, and called it a day.
Someone asked them to play some event a couple years later, and they can’t really remember what it was or what sort of process ensued. They decided to drop the second word in the name, mostly because they knew they could back up that they were ‘male,’ but couldn’t really get comfortable saying ‘models.’
Male, still a duo, decided to make a record to document their collaboration, and thought it’d be fitting to ask some of their more talented friends to come in and improvise over what they’d recorded, keeping the entire process fresh and open to interpretation. The record became a very different beast than anyone involved imagined, marrying soft tones with scrappy ‘free’ playing, jazz inflections (many of the players are active in Chicago’s jazz/improv scene), fingerstyle guitar, and found sounds, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t really match up with anything that’s happening.
Male’s ‘All Are Welcome’ is a bizarrely beautiful child born out of an open process that gave a bunch of extremely talented males the room to breathe and contribute/communicate their respective experiences/tastes/perspectives.
The contributing musicians are also involved in the following projects: Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey), Pan-American (Kranky), Loose Assembly (482 Music), Joan of Arc (Polyvinyl), and a lot more.
The album All Are Welcome by Male comes with a limited amount of explanatory material, but alongside the names of the participants are one simple request and two declarative sentences.
(please listen to as loud as possible)
“I’ll Be Standing Soon” opens with moody tones before layering in industrial noises and a sequence of beautiful horn playing that nods to Miles Davis, Jon Hassell, Ben Neill and Nils Petter Molvær, but that is more willfully stunted and austere than anything those gentlemen have recorded.
…the joyous cacophony of “Wrangler for Higher,” an oceanic noise that Glenn Branca or Michael Gordon might have dreamed up.
—disquiet.com 06/02/2008
“Wrangler For Higher” is the complement to “I’ll Be Standing Soon,” consisting of a sprawl of rattling percussion, rickety guitar noise and dense overtones of sound. The second half of the song is an extended comedown, as the layers peel away one by one, revealing more of the same gliding guitar ambience that characterized the first track. It’s a nice dramatic shift in dynamics which serves the other tracks well in position.—underthelense.liverjournal.com 02/08/2008
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