mangabros: A Dice Band
 

The mangabros are something of an enigma: a literate band from a town without a decent bookshop (Doncaster, England); a group who use cut-up techniques to create their lyrics and music; and make their decisions through the roll of a dice. And that’s even before we come to the songs themselves.

To pigeonhole them is unfair because they transcend mere labels, but here are gushes of a truly warped, sinuous fusion of beats n bass, (bad) acid and post-rock/electronica/sampladelia; the bones of Burroughs and Rhinehard ground up and snorted; these are songs, but not as we know them. Here we have twisted tales of inherently evil guitars, cognitive unborn foetuses with the ability to dream and the lonesome death of Johnny Weissmuller.

Since their emergence in Late 98, mangabros have played a string of rare gigs and festivals around Europe to puzzled but enthusiastic crowds and acres of coverage in the music press. Their approach to performance verges on theatre, playing in absolute darkness or by uv/firelight (twin burning Technics 1200s) or against the backdrop of their controversy-courting dice and pornography video installations. And their act treats us to such indulgences as the ritual burning of Cliff Richard effigies, dwarves on spacehoppers, shop dummy dismemberment and dancing PVC-clad gimps. You have been warned.

Hailed by Bill Nelson as ‘brave and uncompromising’, the mangabros have cropped up on various media sources, BBCi, Bizarre magazine, Eerie Power e-Zine (‘real innovation…Magnificent…dark and mesmeric…music beamed from the bowels of Mars…’), Melody Maker, NME, DJ (‘one of (UK’s) finest exponents of poly-rhythmic dissection’), contributing to a Channel 4 documentary about the Dicelife (described by the producers as ‘deliciously deranged’) and have had a BBC Radio programme entirely dedicated to their generative koanmusic.

On the eve of the New Millennium the dice dictated two things: the release of two companion albums (one physical, slowburnblue; the other virtual, the free downloadable deepfleshred) but, more significantly, the enforced disintegration of the band unit.

The mangabros have recently been resurrected (according to strict dice guidelines) on the Deeper Darker Headstate website @ http://www.mangabros.com.

Weighed down with ideas that are both big and clever, the mangabros rewire the brain like a musical virus.