Songs from the Speaker

Mondo performed inside  Juan Angel Chavez’s Speaker Project  for three hours on Thursday, October 23, 2008 as one of the invited musical guests to play within its strange acoustical confines while it on display at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Visitors could listen to the music as it bounced about the vast Bakalar Gallery, seated in one of a few odd listening station structures,  by putting their ears to the many cone-like shapes on the main box, or, if they were feeling brave, from inside the structure with the performers.

While not a true speaker at all, the box was a still magical place to play.

Here are a few songs recorded that night.

Mondo’s House of Wax

The story: Long underrated and ignored by the music biz, aging glam rock star Mick Mondo’s cult status explodes into mainstream mega-stardom when he is rediscovered, reissued and repackaged. This autumnal recognition arrives too late. Scarred from a life in the rock’n roll trenches, Mondo abruptly breaks up the band and withdraws into his newly-purchased mansion, crammed with the dusty mannequins from an old wax museum that had been slated for demolition. One evening, (after a few whiskeys) Mondo, surrounded by these historical legends, saints and sinners, strikes up a conversation – and they respond. This dialectic forms the basis of the Wax work, with Mondo engaging in musical discourse with superstars of history, whose perspective and experience teach valuable lessons.

These recordings were made in 1995. Mondo’s House of Wax remains unfinished to this day.