Monkey Power Trio

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There is no pre-planning. There is no practice. Everything you will hear is created from scratch, inspired by the surroundings and energy each member brings to the session.

Rarely will you hear more than two or three takes of any one “song” before the members of the band, always with one eye on the clock, feel the creative pull to move on and explore new ideas. Flaws, imperfections, and missed opportunities will abound. And there will likely be a little profanity.

Critic Jim DeRogatis has described the Monkey Power process as “shambolic,” as it can be chaotic, disorganized, and mismanaged. And it is. (They only play together 24 hours each year, after all.) At the same time, though, it’s also beautiful in its own way. It’s imperfect, to be sure. But there’s something inspiring, and very human, about a group of people who never gave up their desire to create, and constructed a system to ensure that they never can, no matter how desperately they may want to.

The members of The Monkey Power Trio are Matt Krizowsky, Mark Maynard, Dan Richardson, Mike Bell, and David Miller.

“I wouldn’t call us musicians. We write songs, but I don’t think it was ever really about the music. It’s about the act of making something within these very specific constraints that we’ve set for ourselves, and doing so at this cadence of once a year until death.

Every day we convene, another year has passed. It’s like we walk out of the room for a minute, and, when we walk back in, we’re all just a little bit different. It’s surreal. We’re essentially making an audio ‘flip book’ of our lives.

We each live a year, and we come together to collectively distill it. Then we disappear again, until we walk back through the door a moment later, as older people, with another year’s worth of anguish, pain, love and joy bottled up inside of us, ready to be released.”

-Mark Maynard