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Monkey Records is a genre-defying independent record label, founded mid-2000, dedicated to releasing and promoting innovative New Zealand music both at home and internationally.
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The Polkapocalypse is nigh!
In April 2008, The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band officially released their first ep, Danse Macabre. Since then they have been busy whipping audiences around NZ into frenzies with their crazed gypsy/east European sounds performing at Prana, Jambalaya, Parihaka, AK09, Cross St Carnival, Fleetwaters and Splore as well as undertaking three highly successful national tours which saw them playing to packed houses all over the country. During this time, the Benkas have also supported many popular NZ acts including The Hot Grits, The Mamaku Project, An Emerald City and The Jews Brothers and in March 2008 they had the honour of supporting international act Beirut in Auckland. Danse Macabre stayed in the IMNZ top 40 for several months and the video for the single, The Dance of Death, has been in the top five most watched videos on Amplifier for the better part of a year.
On May 11th, 2009 they released their highly anticipated album ‘Polkapocalypse’ followed by one final sold out show in Auckland before the band took flight for Berlin where they will be based for the next six months. Upon their return they will be touring NZ again over summer 2009-10 and playing several major festivals.
The new album fully captures the unique and thrilling experience that is a Benka performance and contains 3 originals, 5 traditional songs and two covers (The Crack of Doom by the Tiger Lillles and Too Drunk To F**k by The Dead Kennedys). Seven of the songs were recorded at Balckbridge Studios by Jamie Newman during a hot, steamy weekend in March and three are sizzling live recordings made by Andre Upston for Radio New Zealand at the Monkey Magic launch at Glatos in May last year. A music video for ‘Too Drunk to F**k’ will be released late May.
Review
With a sound based around accordion, clarinet, electric guitar, and lashings of laughs (they do a beautifully inebriated cover of the Dead Kennedy’s Too Drunk To F***), Polkapocalypse is theatrical, rebellious and fun party music.
NZ Herald
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to-run.mp4
Sixteen year-old Colin Lepper from Canada created and directed this clay animation music video for Renee-Louise Carafice’s third single “To Run” during his school holidays.
It took him 3100 still shots and two months to put together the beautiful end product.
“To Run” is the third single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album “Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight” released on Monkey Records.
Written when Carafice was nineteen years old and having just read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time, this song was an attempt to express the discomfort she felt becoming a young woman and feeling trapped into a certain mould.
Although it fits so powerfully alongside Carafice’s songs of institutionalization, this is a song written long before those experiences, and it speaks of a more universal battle being played out: the battle between what you pretend to be and what you inherently are.
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Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album has been awarded the Alternatui Album of the Year by the NZ Music blog Counting the Beat.
“It may make for disturbing listening but Renee-Louise Carafice’s album Tells You To Fight is a stunning and unique album. By now, surely everyone knows that the songs on the album were her reaction to a period of hospitalisation for depression. On the basis of the early demos she went on to win a major cash prize and then produced this album in the USA. Carafice avoids the trap of producing a bunch of overwrought solo recordings that the subject matter may have suggested. The arrangements and production and Carafice’s unique voice result in songs that are dramatic in their content and delivery. This stands out as a great NZ album.”
Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You To Fight was also recently named in the top ten albums of 2008 by Nick Bollinger in the New Zealand Listener.
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