Alex Monk

Some reviews:

About Exchanging Chairs & Kit Mikaya:

Two years’ worth of pent-up material finds its way out of the world on these simultaneously released dual debut albums. Alex Monk is a London based musician/producer who uses laptop trickery and a concatenation of effects pedals to balance swathes of gaseous ambience against chiming, layered guitars. Hardly a revolutionary approach, you might think, but his music succeeds in making a genuine emotional impact. The high-built clouds of Exchanging Chairs and the psychedelic stasis of What Thou Lovest Well achieve a lofty grandeur, while the electronically-enhanced fingerpicking of Neutrino and Death Without Tears opens up a connection to the visionary beauty of guitarist James Blackshaw. A frail vocal rises like a broken reed through the frozen mist of Winter Meccanica; it’s a glacial, incantatory conclusion. The CD’s are packaged in attractively screenprinted 7″ sleeves — but it might be difficult to get hold of them as they’re being made available in a limited edition of just 60 copies each.

Chris Sharp, The Wire, December issue 2008

A review for Excanging Chairs from Losing Today:

This colossal 6 track 41 minute set from London based musician Alex Monk should by rights appeal to fans of not only Brian Eno, Pimmon, Stockhausen and EAR (especially on the mind melting Soyuz 1) but Moondog, Roy Montgomery and other fringe psychedelicists operating in outer realms of concrete ambience. Some time member of Arch slider (who we now feel restless to seek out and sample) Monk crafts monolithic drone scapes by way of sound manipulations extricated via guitars, laptop and found sounds. The set opens with the 11.12 in duration Exchanging Chairs, a humungous sloth like slab of glacial ambience reminiscent of Sadar Bazaar and Windy and Carl and yet swept through with a maligned void less elegance more associated with Yellow 6. This impenetrable slice of bleakly cathedral like stateliness is pierced through by ominous swathes of regal swells that exact an unsettling edge to the proceedings yet strangely sound if truth be known like a despondent half cousin of Laurie Anderson’s Oh Superman. Neutrino with its flurry of chime charming softly strummed chords could easily assume a place on Montgomery and Heaphy’s True set without a so much as a batting of the eye lid though on this occasion sounding as though both Roy Budd in collaboration with Gnac had wrestled with the recording giving it a curious rain swept noire-ish appeal. The abstract sounding The Advocate on the other hand is something that Ochre records would have welcomed with arms wide a few years back given their love of all things inspired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop while the daintily frail lunar-esque suite MG brings the set to a lulling close — think early career ISAN meets Raymond Scott, a shyly beguiling slice of chilled out spectral galactic pop or rather more a binary coded lovelorn epitaph to a fading memory. However all said and done the sets crowning glory is the heavenly apparition like Przykrosc. A beautifully realised symphonic score that’s filtered through with layer upon layer of reverential swathes of unworldly celestial grace, shimmers and twinkles achingly with a sense of monastic majesty brought to heel by the appearance of Madam Butterfly like operatics which all at once evoke polar mood swings that veer between tearful tragedy and euphoric ecstasy. Quite perfect if you ask me.

www.myspace.com/alexmonk

Alex Monk “The Safety Machine” 2xLP

Drenched in a frozen, hypnotic melancholy, The Safety Machine is a double-LP tour de force by London-based musician and producer Alex Monk. Incorporating seventies kraut-synth psychedelic, cosmic ambient drones and haunting melodies into an ambitious framework of multi-layered sonic bleakness with hints of early Eno, Klaus Schultze, Robert Wyatt and Moondog, Monk creates a haunting world that's filled with loss, loneliness and ethereal beauty — staring into the abyss while the icecaps are hugging your skull…