Mr. Bungle Press Release
Vlad Drac -- vocals
Scummy -- guitars
Heifetz -- drums
Trevor Roy Dunn -- bass
Bär -- tenor sax
Theobald Brooks Lengyel -- alto & bäri intonation
Post metal, post modern, post logical, the sound of Mr. Bungle has been setting off sonic shock waves from the group's Northern California homebase since 1985. Now the seismic activity is spreading nationwide with the release of the group's debut Warner Bros. Records release, Mr. Bungle. Featuring such apocalyptic anthems as "Slowly Growing Deaf," "Love Is A Fist," "The Girls Of Porn" and the terrifyingly original "Quote Unquote," Mr. Bungle by Mr. Bungle makes hamburger out of every cherished cow within rifle range...and cooks up something compelling, totally committed music in the process.
Spawned in the bovine and redwood hinterlands of Eureka and Arcata, Mr. Bungle was distilled from a cluster of stragglers, rejects and misfits thrown out of local death metal groups in the mid-Eighties. Taking its name from an arcane grade school hygiene film, the original quartet, which included vocalist Vlad Drac, guitarist Scummy and bassist Trevor Roy Dunn, built on their grindcore roots with a stylistic spread that included everything from white noise to raw jazz, recruiting various co-conspirators along the way, most notably drummer Heifetz.
In the spring of '86, Mr. Bungle made their first of four home-brewed demos, a collection of original tracks that quickly became a hot item on the region's bustling underground tape trading circuit. The group's musical reach, meanwhile, continued to grasp new styles of endlessly incongruity, necessitating the enlistment of horn players Bär and Theobald Brooks Lengyel. By '88, Mr. Bungle's line up had jelled, even as their galvanizing live show spread the word south to the Bay Area and beyond. A final independent demo captured the band's increasingly, and aggressively, original musical impulses and attracted the attention of several major labels.
By late 1990, Mr. Bungle had selected Warner Bros. as their label-of-choice and, by January of this year, they were in the studio recording their debut outing. At the production helm: John Zorn, whose skills as a composer and sax player for the avant jazz ensemble Naked City, helped enhance and expand the group's already formidable musical vernacular.
The result is Mr. Bungle, an album that splinters sound into a thousand chards before putting it all back together again into a whole, and wholly original, new kind of music.
0791