MonoNeon has released a new album called Jelly Belly Dirty Somebody that digs back into his microtonal approach. The bassist composed, performed, and recorded the entire album on his own. In addition to his insanely funky and sometimes avant-garde bass work, he performed all of the guitar, keyboards, vocals, and drum programming for the record.
Check out the Parliament-Funkadelic inflected "Surfing In My Brain":
MonoNeon's microtonal approach appears on the album on the tracks "Three Bears (microtonal)" and "Microtonal Shorty," which see him playing on his 48-fret bass that allows for playing quarter-tones.
"My fascination with microtonality is 'casual,' similar to my fascination with Dadaism, Color Field, and other visual art stuff," he told us in 2014 for a Bass of the Week article. "I was introduced to microtonal music by David Fiuczynski. I met him during my brief stay at Berklee. Ever since then I've been kind of a 'micro-dilettante' and really been trying to embrace my desire to inhabit another pitch space that is not only 12 sounds. Hopefully, more people will begin playing microtonal music, not only in the avant-garde classical stuff but combining the sounds of Julian Carrillo and Albert King, Ivan Wyschnegradsky and The Bar-Kays, or Easley Blackwood and Rev. Milton Brunson... just ideas I think about."
Hear his microtonal approach with "Three Bears (microtonal)":
