Event

Monks of Doom, Jonathan Segel

From their humble beginnings as a surrealist spin-off "Imaginary Band", through their hard working days as veteran DIY road warriors, on to their arrested state of suspended animation and later re-birth, MONKS OF DOOM remain one of the classiest, heaviest and most strangely unclassifiable bands to emerge from the late 1980s independent music scene. When the band put themselves on ice in 1993, they left behind five virtuosic, rocking albums that somehow fused post-punk sensibilities with prog rock decadence and folk tradition and elegance. Monks of Doom were formed in 1986 by four members of the ever-popular college/indie rock band Camper Van Beethoven: bassist extraordinaire Victor Krummenacher, guitarists Greg Lisher and Chris Molla and drummer Chris Pedersen. Molla soon left, and was replaced by radical musician David Immerglück (then of Bay Area favorites The Ophelias, soon to join the ranks of Camper Van Beethoven as well, and now a member of Counting Crows).

The Monks represented a casual opportunity to go beyond Camper's brand of folk-rock and Sixties pop and into the type of diverse experimental music played by kindred spirits Henry Cow, Snakefinger, King Crimson, Richard Thompson, Fred Frith and a host of other iconoclasts; artists who commanded as fierce and loyal a cult following as the Monks later would. "We were interested in doing slightly more outside music," Krummenacher said in a phone interview, "music that had heavier and more progressive tendencies. It was an outside expansion, a chance to go wherever our imagination took us."