Monkeyclaus | TapeOp

One has to wonder whether musicians and engineers really understand how to interact with technology as a larger social force — that is, beyond coveting the newest nerd- trinkets. Running a recording session effectively certainly demands a phenomenal amount of technical expertise, which in turn requires years of specialized training. But for the past decade there has been a looming specter which music, art and human creative endeavors have yet to effectively address: the personal computer changed everything about everything. iPods are destroying record labels. Mboxes kill studios. The fact that music written to physical surfaces is still the standard borders on ridiculous in an age of T3 data lines. How long until music — or even art as a whole — is computer generated? No, really. Think about that for a second.

If this all sounds a little too Terminator 2 for you, perhaps you should be looking to Peter Agelasto. The perpetually smiling, 32-year-old archaeologist-cum- recording-engineer has spent those same ten years hunkered down in rural Virginia building a studio compound and a vision, not as a stronghold against an artistic holocaust, but rather as a temple through which the music world can be reborn. Right around the turn of the millennium, Agelasto and the fellow musicians who had been congregating in his barn since the late 1990s began to organize their activities and soon found themselves at the helm of the first ever rock and roll cultural exchange program between the United States and China. The tour they orchestrated for the Cavesluts marked the first time in history that a Chinese band had released an album and toured in the U.S., and when the time came for Americans to reciprocate, Agelasto realized that they were really on to something: their efforts had attracted the interest of one of the most influential Western political and musical voices from the preceding century.

"Bob Dylan liked the idea enough to pursue it with us through his London management. We were working with affiliates with Chinese television and the Ministry of Culture," he says. "We were going to sign contracts with Dylan — five shows — it was unbelievable, we were this barn out in the middle of Virginia! And then SARS broke out. I was like, 'Oh my god, this can't be happening. We worked for a year on this.'"

But even the most widely feared pandemic this side of smallpox couldn't dampen the momentum that the barn-dwellers had amassed. Two months later, they started building — even though they didn't quite know what they were working on.

"There was an outpouring of volunteer effort, and nearly everything was donated," Agelasto recalls. "This whole place had been populated by people showing up from everywhere, and it had this whole reverse Bermuda Triangle draw. It was almost like a sandcastle at the beach that everyone wants to come work on." Current estimates land them at between ten and fifteen thousand hours of labor from 130 volunteers and raw materials that were 27% post consumer industrial waste.

Ray Snably is now the house video guru, but he was a carpenter in a past life and looks back fondly on the construction process. "It was a blast, just feeling a piece of wood and seeing how it wanted to be shaped," he says. Here and there, occasional details of the studio still bear signs of his work: the doors to the isolation booths, for example, are jig sawed together from dozens of tiny pieces of scrap wood.

Agelasto concurs. "It was so creative, you'd think you were living in the 1500s," he says, "We were getting a lot of scrap oak and scrap poplar and used 2x4s. It really inspired everyone. It was such an energy. Everyone was really trying to build something."

What they built turned out to be a recording studio, but starting with recycled materials ignited a unique spark of ecological awareness that continues to inform Monkeyclaus to this day — the next big leap in the infrastructure will probably be the installation of wind generators and solar panels. On one side, the tracking room is separated from the mountain wilderness by only a single-paned sliding glass door, and outside is a field filled with fireflies and the occasional deer. In the far corner of the field, Monkeyclaus staff member Matthew Clark has built a small teepee in which he sleeps at night, and a few hundred yards away, poking up through the weeds and grass like a lost Narnian streetlight, is the desk at which staff writer Chris Hlad supposedly does his best work.

But it's back inside where the connection with their surroundings really starts to get interesting. "Half of the walls are plastic and they let light come in from outside — totally untraditional design, but fuck it," says Agelasto. "The sun sets over the Appalachian Trail right there and it gets copper, and it totally affects the dynamic of the music. You can't just have the river of creativity come into a room with no lights and close the door. I find that difficult. It's like having the world's best producer in house," he adds, "because nothing makes things move like a sunset."

And wherever light can go, so goes sound as well.

"Because our walls are plastic, maybe on 15% of the surface, loud sounds like a drum set or an Ampeg with 10" speakers on the cabinet bleed through, and you can kind of hear it outside — real low mids and bass," says Agelasto. "Those waves aren't bouncing back into the studio, they're escaping. It's so ingenious. We're letting so much sound out of our studio that it's not bouncing back into the live room and creating all of these nasty standing waves that everyone researches and tries to destroy." Obviously, this technique wouldn't work as well in a densely populated environment, but perhaps the Monkey movement needs to ripen in an isolated backwoods area before attempting to infiltrate industrialized urban society.

Bathing everything in copper is only the first step in the continuous spectacle of light and sound. "At night we have these LED kinetic lights. If you want to play in total pink and then that's not working for you, we can change them to green. Or if you want to make them blink to your beat, that'd be cool."

You can have whatever color you want, as long as it's green. "They're really energy efficient — they flush the live room with color for less than 300 watts," says Agelasto, coming again with the environmental concerns. "We want to earn so much money, we've said that we want to buy the rainforest and open source it. It's so cheap. If it was made a priority, it would be so easy. Warner Brothers could do that. So could Sony, so could EMI. Ben and Jerry's started out that way," he continues, "We want to show businesses a new green way of seeing themselves."

They try to maintain the same relationship with their people — whether client, staff, or random supporter — as they do with Mother Earth. "These are the brothers and sisters of the movement," says Agelasto of Hlad, Clark, Snably and the fourteen-year-old girl from New York who serves as philosophical consultant. "If we want to call them employees, those are the corporate structures that the government wants us to use."

It should come as no surprise, then, that it was only grudgingly that they agreed to incorporate in 2002. "The decision to become a business evolved because a) I stopped going to work and b) we wanted to do this all the time," Agelasto laughs. "We've definitely wrestled with this. We were a movement of people. We were like an anthropology experiment. The thing that convinced us was that you could totally infiltrate and redefine what you could do with a business opportunity. We didn't understand it at all," he continues, "I mean, taxes? Schedule K-1s and S-24 forms? Being a business is made so complicated by this government. It's not like the old market. When I studied Anthropology, it was like, 'Okay, I've got the wheat, now I'm going to go sell it.' It's this insane complication, and it costs so much, and everyone knows it."

Studio prices are chosen more for the aesthetic symmetry of the digits than for actual relevance to operating costs. Bi-weekly "Monkey Sessions" see the staff members inviting their favorite independent artists to free recording sessions as a way to get them to partake in the Monkeyclaus energy. "I don't want to tout getting someone's money," says Agelasto, "This is a movement of artists. I want to say, 'Let's go do something!'"

But perhaps most astonishing of all — especially in an industry in the throes of a significant economic downturn — is their acceptance of alternative forms of payment. "We definitely do more trade and creative partnerships than any studio I know about," says chief engineer Abel Okugawa. They've traded studio time for professional photography, television commercial production, musical equipment or even a big box of silk- screened Monkeyclaus t-shirts. In one case — which Okugawa likens to "grants and scholarships, but like a record deal, not like the nonprofit type" — Monkeyclaus even fronted recording time to an established artist for free in exchange for exclusive distribution rights and a sizable portion of the proceeds after the album's release.

"I'd like to have this place be a spot where regardless of people's financial situations, they could be fully creative and go out to the world," dreams Snably.

But don't start milling your wheat just yet; as a result of all this, Monkeyclaus is still barely treading water financially — forgivable, perhaps, since they're still only in their third year of operation, but it's also encouraging considering the fact that profits are not really the point. All they want, both environmentally and financially, is sustainability. "You can't just throw gas on the fire, it just lights up and goes down. We want to build a 500- year company. You can model your system to be sustainable."

Agelasto funded the enterprise with his own pocketbook for as long as he was able. "My dad did the coolest thing," he says. "When I was young and his dad died, he gave me his dad's money. He said, 'Go to college, live your life, whatever.' I was so unbelievably moved by that. That's something you can't bullshit about. And then in ten years it became something. We're really to the end of it, and we've made something that really is going to make a difference."

But he's confident that even if the business front goes under, the project will stay alive — if only because of his willingness to retreat from capitalist society entirely and rely on the brothers and sisters to keep it alive. "If we run out of cash, we'll just jump off the cash grid," he says. Nobody keeps creativity in a bank account. "I'm either going to make this thing really work as a business, or it's going to be the most unbelievable departure from business," he says. That's when you can show up with the wheat.

Agelasto places so much stock in fraternity because it's the key to success with the monkey's other arm — distribution and promotion. The free Monkey Sessions are podcasted around the globe upon completion, for example, and the Monkeyclaus Web Tools system will allow sale of content from a modular conglomeration of online store, homepage and social network, all wrapped up in a slick drag-and-drop user interface that has you actually grabbing CD covers for the songs you want off a digital shelf. "I think the success of MySpace should really be credited to the zeitgeist. People really want to access each other," he says. "The rise of social networking is proof that word of mouth is the next stage in marketing, and it scares some of the big guys."

To hear Agelasto tell it, the fact that Monkeyclaus laid low through the respective explosions of blogging and podcasting has done wonders for them. "We took a ninja development approach; we could spy on everybody and develop really fast. We were able to innovate on some pretty innovative ideas that all these people around us were coming out with." Nevertheless, how in the world can Monkeyclaus possibly hope to topple industry behemoths like MySpace and the iTunes Music Store, which chew up and spit out even well-funded competitors like Orkut and Rhapsody with nary a groan? The answer is simple: they don't.

"It's a step in the right direction," says Agelasto of iTunes, "but it hasn't broken the paradigm. The web is decentralized and diverse, but iTunes isn't diverse. We compete on being decentralized. iTunes has everything. That can be overwhelming. There's power in smallness, and if you have multiple installations of smallness grouped together, you can really achieve a large impact." With the Monkeyclaus distribution tools, everything is modular and flexible, and the idea is to integrate rather than compete. File types can be tailored toward iTunes, Windows Media Player or both. Podcasts are optional. Networks can be forged with other closely or remotely related artists, or not.

And Agelasto took with chilling seriousness the recent cries of musicians calling for congressional oversight of the music download market, skeptical of accepting sales statistics that could be so easily manipulated from an industry that has historically been unkind to them financially. His solution is simple: he's going to let participants view critical system logs from his servers in order to verify their own sales figures. "A real way to transparency is education, explaining to people that computers are going to track everything, and bridging the path from these logs to the users," he says.

He sees the pairing of Monkeyclaus with the MySpaces and Pitchforks and CDBabys of the world as the first step in the process of redefining music through computers; "Bands are really psyched, because they're alive at the right time for distribution. We're the leading edge of the second generation of digital distribution," he says. He also predicts that sooner or later, its governing principles will ripple out through the rest of society. "These concepts that MySpace has proven are going to start affecting government and education. Wouldn't it be cool if all the professors in the Anthropology department could really interact with each other and share that with their students? As I see it, the future is totally wireless; huge networks of people, people running those networks, those networks running everything — life, government, truth."

For now, it's up to the bedroom producers and podcasters to find each other on MySpace and really turn everything inside out. "For the past ten years, there has been such a DIY aesthetic," says Agelasto. "Now it's time to DIT — do it together."

Matthew Clark extends that concept one step further, allowing for the possibility that Monkeyclaus is not the end of the story with regard to the computerized reformation of the music world. "We're a piece of the puzzle. I don't think that we're the entirety of it," he says. "I don't know if we're going to be the one; in the end, I think it'll be a hundred," agrees Agelasto.

The studio's bizarre name comes not from a bad acid trip, but rather from an amalgamation of the most selfless demigods from the East and the West: Saint Nick, obviously as a personification of giving, and Hanuman, the heroic monkey symbolizing service and devotion in Hindu legendry. Most telling of all, though, is the Hundredth Monkey Theory, a layman's variant on biologist Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, which is now the sole inhabitant of the monkeyclaus.org "About Us" page. "Are you the hundredth monkey?" it asks. The story goes that scientists observing Japanese Snow Monkeys in the 1950s began delivering sweet potatoes to them during the course of their study. A juvenile monkey quickly discovered that washing the sand from the spuds in a nearby stream before eating made them taste better, and soon taught the trick to her peers. Gradually, the new feeding behavior began to ripple its way across the population. Interesting? Sure, but hardly unprecedented — that is, until isolated groups of Snow Monkeys on adjacent islands spontaneously began to do the same thing. When the number of epicurean chimps hit a critical mass — whether it was actually the magic number 100 or not is not terribly important — the change instantiated itself en masse. Nature, Sheldrake says, is probabilistic, and each little cluster of organisms shares in a collective unconsciousness that speaks less to what we know and more to what we are. Wide-eyed idealists like Agelasto and his cohorts believe that if monkeys can learn new ways to scrub taters, then surely humans can find new ways to make music.

And driving down the old country road winding its way through the mountains of Virginia, it quickly becomes apparent that something unusual is afoot in the decrepit old barn housing Monkeyclaus. Nontraditional acoustics notwithstanding, it's more than just sound that's emanating outward: as the lighting system in the tracking room flashes red, green, orange, equal parts auditory bliss and epileptic fit and visible from a half mile away, the studio is literally glowing.

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