This just makes us feel really happy - thank you. 

Hmmmm, wondering if this cannot be played in the states.  None of hte Niko Ne Zna tracks will play. :(

Soot the moon

Heimweh

Anticipation

Swamp Dervish

Waltz for Shanti

Mon chien noir

Original Vocal Expression / channeling / concept and guitar melody by Vegan Vocalist 

Privileged to have Good Mourning remixed/remade by the highly talented artist minimalbliss.

Thank you Sir for your beautiful energy, passion and creativity (breathtaking artwork also created by minimalbliss)

Uploaded to honour, as a loving memorium of my beloved best friend, our dear Boo (AKA Booby💗🐶🐾), whom graced us with her divine, loving, gentle presence for almost 15 glorious years and for the voice of all the animal kingdom.

The deepest gratitude to anyone that is part of the Warriors of Divine Love and whom have ever shown and continue to treat animals with compassion and respect 🗡️🛡️.

Adopt, Don't Shop!

Boo's Dog Tuck Shop: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565032696654

White Cow Communities: www.patreon.com/whitecowcommunities 

© All Rights Reserved

Good Mourning - Vegan Vocalist (Passing Moon Remix/Remake by minimalbliss)

Dracula the Drag Queen has a record player that can play his music backwards. However Dimitri the Stud thinks Love is in the Air and Rides a White Horse to the Star Wars Cantina to talk with Obama about the Black Magicians. Mr Ed has some issues with the Clash who are eating Goats Head Soup. Never mind all that because Russia has the Atomic Bomb!

The Book Of Sin

Obama joins the Zulu Nation as the Sugarhill Gang electro boogie with Holger, Michael, Irmin and Jaki. Buy your own damn fries!

Canned Fries

Meanwhile back in the jungle the Space Cadets are trying to Pick Up Girls easily but need some tips on How to Speak Hip first. They were born to be alive but just can't seem to make the beat connection. They better ask Mr Oizo and The Bassbin Twins who are notorious homosapiens.

Space Beat Cadet

On the Road to visit Oscar, the 3 Stooges cut a record with the Pointer Sisters.

Jack Can

Niko Ne Zna are New Zealand’s very own authentic Balkan Gypsy brass extravaganza. With a history that goes back 7 years, this 8 piece band has evolved into a true Gypsy juggernaut stunning audiences everywhere they go with their thrillingly energetic and dynamic performances. Now, finally their long anticipated debut album Renegade Brass Bandits is here. 

After a few lineup changes over the years and the introduction of additional brass the current lineup is undoubtedly the best yet and has been driving audiences wild for the past 2 years. There’s even some more authentic Eastern-European blood in the band with percussionist Vlatko Materic joining bandleader and founding member Frankie Curac. After years of being instrumental, the addition of vocalist Nikkie Rich a couple of years ago helped take it to a new level and here she sings in Serbo-Croatian, Roma Gypsy and Greek. The album consists of seven originals and three traditional songs that will take you across the Balkans with a kiwi flavor. 

Niko Ne Zna have played extensively around New Zealand having undertaken three national tours and performed for the Wellington City Council, The Wellington Fringe Festival, International Jazz Festival, Cuba Street Carnival, the Festival of Lights in New Plymouth, Prana Festival and Taranaki Arts Festival and have been a staple of the Wellington music scene with regular performances all over the city.


Only One I Need is the fourth single to be released from Chris Hurn's debut album Too Busy Dreamin'.

Chris Hurn is a twenty-two year old folk-pop singer/songwriter from Lower Hutt, New Zealand. After playing in various local bands, including Play it Strange 2007 national competition winners The Lunch Box Boys, a 60’s style indie-pop band, he discovered a love for folk music and decided to go solo in late 2009.

Inspired by the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen he began to write a collection of songs that would soon become his first album. Although heavily influenced by his folk heroes, he draws upon a wide range of genres and styles of music. As well as having a soft spot for modern pop and rock, Chris has spent a considerable amount of time soaking up 60′s pop groups, notably The Mamas and the Papas, The Beatles and the Kinks.

Coming from a multi-instrumental background, Chris commenced his musical endeavours at a young age with the piano and a cheap plastic recorder. His first album is heavily based around the acoustic guitar but whistles, clicks, claps, harmonica and harmonies also play a big part in the sound. Astonishingly, Chris plays all the instruments on his debut as well as mixing and producing it himself. His lyric-writing reveals a world-wise maturity beyond his years and coupled with his knack for writing highly catchy melodies, he seems sure to secure himself a place amongst a rising new generation of young singer/songwriters.

Too Busy Dreamin’ was recorded in 2010 in his Lower Hutt home studio, and mastered by Dave Cooley (Serge Gainsbourg, Polyphonic Spree) in LA.

When not playing folk music, Chris works as a composer writing orchestral based scores for video games and films.


REVIEW

While owing a clear debt to Paul Simon, the young Dylan, early Donovan and others in the acoustic singer-songwriter category, this young guy from Lower Hutt just north of Wellington, New Zealand brings a pop sensibility to his writing (the openers here Whatcha Got and Only One I Need hook you immediately) and often a deliberately light touch (whistles, handclaps). Maybe that is in part due to his background: He played in a pop-rock band The Lunch Box Boys which won the Play It Strange award in 2007 (which means he must have been about 17 at the time). Since then he discovered folk and that lineage of singer-songwriters and has struck out on his own. What is attractive about Hurn is that rather than indulging in melancholy miserablism which the idiom so often invites from a young and emotionally anxious performer, he has a sharp ear for a melodic hook and that he keeps each song distinctive. He also has an inviting, warm and believable voice which is persuasive when he get reflective (All I Really Want) or urgent (An Honest Man) as much as taking you along for a ride when the musical mood gets more breezy (Love and Silly Little Things with ukulele, whistling and la-la-la backing vocals). The closer is an ambitious, eight minute-plus Thank You and Goodnight which might also be his built-in encore... you will be hearing more of him, that's for sure. - Graham Reid, Elsewhere


Buy album on Bandcamp

Only One I Need

Australian-born Polish singer Nadya Golski spent time as a teenager in Papua New Guinea, living with the Gamuga Roglombo tribesmen. Her first release on Monkey is in a Papua New Guinean language with a balkan feel being remixed by Paris-based DJ Click.

Golski divides her time between Australia and Europe and Nadya and she and her musicians have performed at many festivals worldwide including Montreux Jazz Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Sziget Festival, WomAdelaide and Woodford Folk Festival.

She has several albums to her name, some of which will be re-released on Monkey in the coming months. 

Woipa Woipa originally featured on her album Mezza Luna but is also included on the recently released compilation Gypsy Fever which celebrates the Eastern European music scene in Australia and New Zealand.


Woipa Woipa (DJ Click remix)

Distant Dreams and Morning Stars is from Inkadies, the latest solo album by dream-pop folk artist John White. As a follow up to Balloon Adventure (2000) and Mogwash (2003), The Inkadies might be described as the third instalment of tales from a delicate otherland where little creatures called Inkadies come to save the day.

The album was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin by friend and fellow singer/songwriter, Tom Hanson. Gathering guest musician’s from Madison’s lush music scene, the album boasts chiming harmonies and dripping Synth accompaniments underneath John’s dreamily relaxed vocals and gently strummed acoustic guitar

John White is also the frontman for seminal Dunedin fuzz-pop band Mëstar and shoegazing, distorted pop band The Blueness.

REVIEW

“The Inkadies” is the soundtrack to that glorious half-asleep period that we get before sleep - full of strange imaginations and warmth. Beautiful stuff, and an oh-so-welcome return from the talented Mr White."
- Cheese on Toast

Listen to album

Distant Dreams and Morning Stars

Paris is a lilting ode to that great city inspired by Bond Street Bridge's visit there in 2010.

Bond Street Bridge is the solo project of Auckland-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sam Prebble. Since the release of first album The Mapamaker’s Art, Prebble has been busy, touring extensively in New Zealand, Australia and Europe and playing shows everywhere from dive bars to art galleries and festival stages. As well as his solo work as Bond Street Bridge, Prebble plays violin, mandolin and guitar for Reb Fountain and the Bandits and the Hannah Curwood Band, and is a long-standing member of Auckland folk-pop group The Broken Heartbreakers. In 2010, he hit the road in Europe, touring first with Tim Guy and then as stand-in violinist for Berlin-based NZ psychedelic post-rock ensemble An Emerald City. Along the way he has played shows alongside North American psychedelic heavyweights Black Mountain and the Black Angels, New York art-pop duo The Books, and Californian alt-folksters The Mountain Goats.

Despite his involvement in this range of other projects, Prebble kept Spring Summer Awesome Winter a resolutely solo affair. He worked on the album in spare moments over a period of two years in between stints of touring and recording projects with other bands, capturing the whole thing with one microphone on an old laptop in the lounge or bedroom of a succession of tumbledown central Auckland villas. Crafting the record from the ground up, Prebble wrote the songs, played all the instruments, and engineered the recordings, involving other people only at the mixing and mastering stages. At that point Jamie Newman (Cinema 90) came on board as mixing engineer, and together they took the tracks to a studio in a barn north of Auckland, where Newman worked magic and made them sparkle.

The solo approach gave Prebble the freedom to experiment with sounds and arrangements, producing a collection of songs that is at once intimate and unique. Using a sonic palette consisting of fingerpicked acoustic guitars, lush strings, chiming mandolins and glockenspiels, warm vocal harmonies and analogue synthesisers, antique organs and pianos, and found-sound beats from staple-guns and key-rings washed out with rich reverbs and tape delays, he created intricate soundscapes to surround his trademark wry observational lyrics. These songs tell stories from the fantastical to the mundane: love and distance, storms at sea and the crying of the gulls, history, memory, loss and wasted youth, getting to bed on time so you won’t be tired in the morning, and the feeling that any minute now somebody’s going to realise you’re bluffing. As the title suggests, most of the songs on the album deal with the passing of time and the changing of seasons in various ways. 

Paris

Shoot the Moon is a personal and intimate song written in a state of digesting lost love and is the second single to be released from The Major Pins debut album Roundabout.

"Composing music can be a wonderful healthy and cleansing process," states The Major Pins' singer and songwriter Katharina Garden.

Put together by songwriter and film editor Jonas Dahl with whom she also performs in a duo this old footage from 1953 was taken from the film "Catwomen of the Moon" and shows a strong and feministic world relating very well to the content of the song. In the end love wins over sanity - almost always like in real life!

Check out the retro sci-fi music video here: http://youtu.be/aTc9wqXLxi4

Shoot the Moon

Monkey Records is a boutique independent record label founded in New Zealand in the year 2000 by Nigel Braddock but now based in Berlin. 

After working for twenty years with some amazing artists from all over the world, Monkey Records is no longer accepting any new artist submissions and Braddock is now focused on releasing his own music. Projects include his solo piano compositions under his own name, ambient electronica as Broad Oak and Choam Nomsky as well as collaborations such as The Mung Beings, The Tellurians and Cosmo and the Cosmonaut (with his own son).

Fez

Monkey Records

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