THE MONKS ­ THE TRANSATLANTIC FEEDBACK

Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios Documentary Video 98:00 2006 Germany World Premiere

The monks were 5 American GI¹s in cold war Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing

to basically invent industrial, punk and techno music.

The genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural historic contexts, but also reveals the monks project as the first marriage between art and popular

music months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

The five protagonists of the film came to cold war Germany in 1961 as soldiers and left the country in 1967 as avant-garde monks. For more than thirty years they were not able to talk about their strange experience.

In the film they recount for the first time their adventure.

“A banjo with a microphone in it to make it electric, a fuzz bass en “66, and an amazing singer, not to mention the drummer and organist, both

out of this galaxy with what they were doing.

Their melodies were pop destructive and must be played to your younger
brother.”- The White Stripes

“To this day, there is nothing in art, rock, punk rock or nut rock that comes close to the conceptual rigor of the monks’ image and the crude, avant-biergarten sound of the group’s sole LP, Black Monk Time.” –

David Fricke, Rolling Stone Magazine

“This was about saying NO, a new freedom, a positive NO. Musically it was like a new beginning; everything was based on one beat, archaic rhythm and feedback. It was for the first time that a band seemed loose and free

and oriented towards the future.” – Jochen Irmler, Faust

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