Mimi + Boyd :: Angular Island (Phthalo)

Mimi+Boyd is Mark (Vapourspace) Gage and Michelle (Punisher) Herrmann, teamed up for an intense minimal Detroit-style techno work out. This is the 38th release one of LA’s most respected electronic/experimental labels, Phthalo Records. This time around Phthalo proves they can shake your ass as well as fry your brain. “It was about 6:00 am, or maybe a bit earlier, and the place was still happening” Mark Gage recalls. “With the typical minimal Detroit lighting, I could see very little, save for the one rotating multi-colored light beam cutting through the smoke, helping me catch little glimpses of faces here and there. Off in the background, I could see Michelle, flying through the one small door which acted as the entrance and exit all night, and she was frantically headed straight for me. ‘Get your stuff now, we gotta get out of here’ and she proceeded to pick up one of my flight cases of live gear, which weighed exactly 70 pounds (two of which I am allotted to carry on US domestic flights.) Odd thing is, she couldn’t have weighed much beyond 100 pounds herself, so I knew something was up. Without questions, I snagged my second case of 70 pounds, and followed. ‘A whole line of cop cars was behind me when I pulled into the parking lot just a minute ago,’ she said on her return from dropping off a live act and dj back at the hotel. (I kindly bowed out of the first ride back due to lack of space for 2 live acts, their gear, a dj and his records in her Detroit made auto, and the others had finished long before me).

As we flew towards the only door, other doors I didn’t know existed flew open and the morning light burned through the smoke with about 30 cops in its wake. A mad clump of sweaty kids crammed towards the only door we knew all night, Michelle and I with our 70 pound companions buried dead center. It was truly the funnel effect as one by one everyone plopped out the skinny end, us kinda getting stuck because of our add-on appliances…I would have enjoyed the scene from over-head. Literally seconds after we were out the door with the cases, the door was closed and everyone left inside was hauled off, paddy wagon style and booked at the police station; ravers, dj’s, sound and lighting people included. ‘We definitely got to do a project together now’ was pretty much echoed for the next several hours back at the hotel, after our great escape, in between calls with the promoters’ lawyer and the police to try to bail out some of the arrested”…this was the initial bonding of MIMI+BOYD, a collaboration between Mark Gage (Vapourspace) and Michelle ‘Punisher’ Herrmann of Detroit’s Seismic Records.

Within 10 weeks of that event, Gage and Herrmann were buried in Gage’s overheated cavernous studio back in Rochester, New York for about two weeks of work, which definitely pissed off some of the neighbors. “I think Michelle’s car got keyed by one of them.”
“Plans had been laid since that previously mentioned party in June ’98, and when Michelle arrived in New York, we bought about $100 of groceries, three pounds of French roast and espresso coffee beans, 10 loaves of gourmet bread, an ounce of dank stanky green, a Vornado fan for the heat, and locked ourselves in… Within 12 days, the entire CD (and two additional tracks we didn’t use) were finished. Then I spent about three years uploading, and eventually finishing/mastering it when I could.

Such are the origins of MIMI+BOYD, and the upcoming Phthalo release of Angular Island…a 9 song full length CD, and 4 track remix EP (with mixes by Venetian Snares, Scud, Hellfish and Vapourspace.) “The CD is techno pop with the emphasis on machinery…we wanted it to have somewhat of a hard edge to it with a pop chewy center, and kinda grooved on the whole ‘metallic’ feel to the percussion. The obtuse blasts of synths and samples kinda remind me of bad Japanese sci-fi/Godzilla movies, which led to initially calling the album Monster Island, but the sharp angular lonely feel of the metallic percussion gave way to Angular Island, which makes more sense.”

“Michelle’s one of the most incredible drum programmer’s I’ve met, and she’d have patterns written by the time I uploaded just-finished audio takes to the hard disk…so, we’d slam out another track. I remember finishing three tracks on one very productive day of the 12 (I think we put in a 16 hour day that day too!) Her versatility with the Roland R8mkII drum machine overshadowed everything else that was happening, so it took center stage, and we crafted around it. All the takes were recorded live with us jumping

from mixer buttons to synth faders, switching drum patterns, stopping this, starting that… She tweaked whatever fader I couldn’t for the moment as we worked out each piece, and spontaneously recorded. We pulled out of storage every keyboard, tone generator and drum machine I had until by the end of the two weeks you couldn’t even walk through the studio… It was so cluttered with gear and cables, you had to tippy-toe about.”

The full length CD is segued, traditional Mark Gage style, and is a triptych of clanging metals, 4/4 kicks and a manifesto of techno pop and the machinery of machines. Los Angeles based Phthalo Records will release Angular Island on October 22, 2002.

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