Earthmonkey

PEAT BOG-EARTHMONKEY, A BRIEF HISTORY. Peat Bog's formative years were largely spent casting about the English countryside with The Convoy; a conflagration of acid crazed, medieval brigands (see also "hippies"), who traveled en masse via an armada of beaten old trucks & buses, making their homes in teepees and living as freely as possible. While tuning in and dropping out with this loose collective, Bog began to ingest not only psychedelic drugs, but also psychedelic music. From The Mothers Of Invention to Chrome, Bog was a head for it all.

Peat Bog's formative years were largely spent casting about the English countryside with The Convoy; a conflagration of acid crazed, medieval brigands (see also "hippies"), who traveled en masse via an armada of beaten old trucks & buses, making their homes in teepees and living as freely as possible. While tuning in and dropping out with this loose collective, Bog began to ingest not only psychedelic drugs, but also psychedelic music. From The Mothers Of Invention to Chrome, Bog was a head for it all. It wasn't long before he began to bake the minds of others with his own brand of trance inducing (and induced) music. It was with this burgeoning sense of a musical universe that Peat Bog moved to Ireland in 1989. Eventually settling in County Claire in 1992, Bog found kindred spirits in Ruby Wallis and in the family Stapleton. The Stapletons' pseudo-nomadic lifestyle, traveling by horses and wagons, appealed to Bog, and so he found himself as something of an auxiliary family member. In 1993 Steve Stapleton asked Bog if he would like to sit in on recording sessions for a Nurse With Wound track slated for the compilation album "50 Years Of Sunshine" (a musical tribute to the 50 years since Albert Hoffmann first stumbled upon LSD 25). As it happened, Bog had just the right experience in both music and Sunshine usage. Thus was born another Nurse With Wound adjutant who would later appear on such NWW albums as "Who Can I Turn To Stereo," "An Awkward Pause," "Alice The Goon," "Funeral Music For Perez Prado" and "Rock And Roll Station," as well as other projects. Concurrently, Peatbog performed with a band called The Big Bag Of Stix. This group was known for playing grueling three hour sets of tweaked out, Irish punk/traditional. Quoth a member of the band: "Bog would go mental on percussion and didgeridoo." 1995 saw the birth of Peat Bog and Ruby Wallace's child Freddy. It was at this time that Bog started to work with the band The Inflatable Sideshow. With Darragh Greally and some assistance from Stapleton, the "Bonefrequency" track was completed in 1996 and appeared on the "Foxtrot" compilation LP. The Inflatable Sideshow then spent quite some time touring Ireland and the European continent. In the late 90's, some friends asked if they could use a selection of Bog's home recordings for their Burning Man documentary, "Dust Devils." This suggestion dovetailed nicely with the new musical notions percolating in Bog's mind. Inspired by memories of similar festivals in the UK, Bog elicited the help of Andile Meeshec, Molly Gowen and Ian Cahill, and a series of pieces were created for the film under the new project name; Earthmonkey. The music finally used in the film appears as tracks 6 & 7 on Earthmonkey's "Autosapien" album, released by Beta-Lactam Ring records in 2003. More Earthmonkey releases are to come in 2004, including a collaboration featuring Steve Stapleton and, appropriately completing a circle, Jimmy Carl Black from The Mothers Of Invention.