Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$5USD or more
Limited Edition Cassette
Cassette + Digital Album
Home-dubbed, laser-printed cassette. Only 20 copies.
Includes unlimited streaming of Beyond the Iguana: A Retrospective 2011-2016
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
For six years, Tony Lien (who now releases music as Dere Moans) and Clinton Smith (who now releases music as Triangle Man) led a music collective called Mildred Bonk in Lincoln, Nebraska. Based around the idea of free improvisation and community inclusiveness, the massive amount of recorded material (which stretches far beyond 24 hours in length) that exists contains countless incantations - each vastly different than the last. Though a large percentage of those recordings feature an enormous cast of talented artists who worked with Lien and Smith in various creative capacities, there is still a considerable portion that can be attributed solely to the two founding members. These sonic explorations - recorded in apartments, basements, storage lockers and attics - represent the bare bones of Bonk. And beneath that, they represent an eternal creative friendship.
Reviews:
"How do you go beyond an iguana? Do you just walk past it? Or is it a more philosophical exercise? This music is bound to get you there either way with it’s churning, energy-laden gait. If the album opener Spastic Nexus is any clue - this is going to be a wild ride!
After nearly a year of hiatus, Bad Cake Records returns to release a chaotic collection of mind-altered parallel universe freak jazz from the now defunct, and perhaps always defunct, Mildred Bonk - which is described here as a music collective made up of Bad Cake label head Tony Lien (who has now become Dere Moans, and Lincoln, Nebraska experimental musician Clinton Smith, (who has now become Triangle Man.) Together these two music heads create a catastrophic collision of careening sounds, freeform, stream of consciousness lyrics and other high-quality nonsense.
Beyond the Iguana represents a wide range of recordings produced between 2011 and 2016 - and during that time, Lien and Smith were able to cultivate a recognizable style of claptrap MIDI hallucinations built from wild, driving beats, irreverent vocals, and piles of electrobabble tumbling through effects walls. Highlight tracks include Space Fruit, which pits an ever looping of wild utterances against a furious live drum set, The Voices that Reach Valhalla, which is a driving distorted beat accentuated by echoey vocals and punched in occasionally with crunchy guitar solos and bumpy bass lines, and Sans Rot, which closes out the album with a spacey slice of dissolved synth washing over itself in turning waves of cascading sound.
Over all the release is a perfect weirdo return for Bad Cake that explores the musical history of the label while providing the listener with a new wonk rock experience for their stereo pieces. Beyond the Iguana is available on limited edition cassette and digital."
-Gray Lee (Houdini Mansions)
credits
released April 17, 2020
Mildred Bonk is: Clinton Smith (guitars, keyboards, electric kazoo, MIDI instruments) and Tony Lien (guitars, drums, keyboards, samples, MIDI instruments).
Except:
Percussion on "I Left My Heart In A Chum Bucket": Kyle Bargmann
Recorded in Lincoln, Nebraska 2011- 2016.
Mixed and Mastered by: Tony Lien
supported by 14 fans who also own “Beyond the Iguana: A Retrospective 2011-2016”
A very weird album that juggles with a lot of themes. Video games, old broadcasts... food, for some reason ? Although it successfully pulls all of these off.
A moment for hygiene is funny draconium
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supported by 13 fans who also own “Beyond the Iguana: A Retrospective 2011-2016”
these songs are really good and it's a very interesting album. Not quite like anything else. I still feel pleased when one of these songs comes up in my MP3 shuffle and I'm proud to own the tape melton