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[THIS IS A FAN-MADE PROFILE]
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Patrick Miller moved to San Francisco in 1979, where he immediately began to experiment with music and film. Minimal Man began as a vehicle to produce soundtracks for these films, with the realization that anyone could do so given access to the tools. Miller also began to collaborate with a wide variety of punk, new wave and industrial musicians, including Tuxedomoon, and by October Minimal Man were performing at the legendary Deaf Club venue, and elsewhere.
Minimal Man became one of a select handful of influential groups from this era to bridge punk and industrial music with aggressive blasts of noise and electronic effects. As the core of Minimal Man, Miller sang (and screamed), played keyboards and manipulated tapes to create their dissonant, unsettling, experimental sound. One critic described the result simply as 'antimusic.'
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REVIEW >> MINIMAL MAN, "The Shroud Of"
Written by Jonathan Dean
(www.brainwashed.com)
Minimal Man was founded in 1979, in San Francisco by avant-garde painter and filmmaker Patrick Miller, and the band included a revolving cast of musicians from fellow SF art punks Tuxedomoon and future members of Factrix. Minimal Man have been historically marginalized in a fertile underground music scene that included many other influential artists (including Z'ev, Flipper and Nervous Gender), and they are no doubt unfavorably compared to stylistically similar artists such as Suicide, Chrome or even NON.
Patrick Miller's intensity and willfully anti-musical aesthetic provide a fascinating footnote to the history of post-punk and industrial music. The debut album, The Shroud Of was released on Subterranean Records in 1981, and is presented here in its entirety along with some early singles and compilation tracks.
The Minimal Man sound is relentlessly dark and aggressive, with cheap synthesizers and drum machines, jagged guitar and occasional shrieks of saxophone all purposely pushed into the red, creating a dissonant blanket of treble-heavy distortion. Patrick Miller's vocals are unmodulated and flat, his lyrics nihilistic, each line echoplexed, doubled or otherwise mutated into a synthetic oblivion. Chugging sequencers spit out fuzzy non-melodies as Miller cultivates his Kafkaesque persona, full of anxiety, angst and existential dread.
With lyrics that indicate a fascination with Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, Miller creates a cinematic ambience of high-contrast black and white, like a German expressionist filmmaker let loose in a recording studio. Just listen to the hypnotic, wirling maelstrom of noise and dark, grainy atmospherics on "Blue Step."
Perhaps because of its relative obscurity, Minimal Man's debut album has weathered the sands of time gracefully, and with legendary acts Suicide and Tuxedomoon currently attempting to destroy their legacies with mediocre reunion albums, The Shroud Of sounds positively refreshing in comparison. LTM's Boutique label has done an excellent job on this reissue, including hard-to-find tracks from two early 7" singles and an impressive eight-minute track called "Shower Sequence" from a Subterranean cassette compilation. The booklet reproduces some of Miller's excellent paintings and contains a detailed biography of Minimal Man. I'm guessing that this disc is the first in a projected series of Minimal Man reissues, and I'm looking forward to
getting my hands on the rest of the discography.
Buy from: LTM
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