The Mon (mem. Ufomammut) Premieres “Demon Box” Video
Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 26th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
All around horizons, sunrises and sunsets, suns and moons, northern lights and the equator in the middle of the sky like a shooting star, and the man and a monkey, dinosaurs and paper boats, all day and all night, and the rocks above the sea floating above the sky and I saw aeroplanes moving those buried in green fields of silence while I, in the middle of all this, believed, thought, dreamt of being alive. — The Mon, “Demon Box”
The Mon is a new solo-project from Ufomammut bassist, vocalist and synth master Urlo. Born Giovanni Rossi and based in Tortona, Urlo is also a member of the graphic arts collective Malleus and has overseen releases through Ufomammut‘s label wing, Supernatural Cat. With The Mon, he pushes further, into atmospheric improvisation, video expression and series, and narrative storytelling. “Demon Box,” the new single from The Mon premiering in the video below, was born out of a story written by Urlo — very much a man-meets-demon kind of affair — and posted to his website (urlothemon.com) that he wound up backing with improvised guitar and a synth track while he recited the tale.
That original improv version of “Demon Box,” with Urlo reading as he plays in what I’ll guess is a home studio, can be seen below. It’s an impressive feat — one thinks of playing guitar and singing in corresponding rhythm and melody as difficult enough, let alone reading a full sentence rather than the lines of a verse while still strumming — but he pulls it off, and though the official video with the creeping bugs and so on brings a more refined mix of the song (such as it is), it continues to hold the exploratory spirit from whence it was made while also showing Urlo as a songwriter one way or the other in the builds and cascades of his sentences. The full clip runs a little under nine minutes, and flows easily in atmosphere and ambience as Urlo seems to be setting up paths leading through what seem like disparate influences through folk, cinematic scoring and short-story writing.
But as ever — and this was always something that made Ufomammut special too — these lines aren’t really there. If you read that sentence in the last paragraph (first, thanks) and maybe imagined a road forking in three different directions, the reality of The Mon is different in that it’s not about one or the other, it’s about encompassing all of it into a multi-dimensional work. “Demon Box,” as a vehicle for this impulse, brings various sides together instead of splitting them apart by category, and that’s something of which other manifestations can be heard in The Mon‘s other recorded work in the 2020 two-songer “The Manure of Our Remains” b/w “Blut (Acoustic Version)” or The Mon‘s previous full-length collection, 2018’s Doppelleben, which purposefully centers around the idea of leading a double-life, who you are and who you become.
I won’t try to predict where Urlo might steer The Mon from this point — what fun would that be? — but at a time when many are being forced to or feeling an impulse to follow new avenues of creativity, “Demon Box” is s consistent in purpose as it is divergent in form.
Please enjoy:
The Mon, “Demon Box” official video premiere
The Mon is the solo project of Urlo, bass player, singer and synth master of Ufomammut.
This song is based on a story written by Urlo a few years ago and titled “Demon Box”.
The story is about a man, staring at an open box seeing a lot of mystical and crazy things happening in his mind.
He sees the history of the world happen, as an alchemical transformation of everything into gold, the search for knowledge and the infinite smallness of the human being compared to Nature.
The man closes the box and goes away.
It is the cruel story of life, as the video represents.
An ant nest, a centipede and a spider cross their paths of life and death without apparent contact, but linked by the surrounding environment.
The song was originally born as an improvisation and then I decided to record it and make it an official release, being a new musical path I never did before.
The song is a sort of “reading” in music.
You can read Demon Box and other stories on The Mon website (https://www.urlothemon.com/site/stories/) and also check the Youtube channel here: http://bit.ly/2O1EDBb
You can buy the song here: https://themon.bandcamp.com/track/demon-box
