Singer, knob twiddler and bass player MNDR has had a great year, especially considering that she hasn’t even finished her first full-length solo recording yet. MNDR is best known in the pop world so far for her collaboration with Mark Ronson and Q-tip on
Bang Bang Bang, a song that plays with the french children’s song alouette with a double entendre squeezed out of the consonants in “plucking feathers.”
MNDR* has released her own songs such as
Fade to Black,
I Go Away,
C.L.U.B., and
Cut Me Out (with
a video shot with real time kinect-based effects).
She writes her own songs, and
is deeply nerdy regarding electronic gear and studio production to get the sounds she wants. This reputation as a gear head once landed her an
awkward interview with Duran Duran member Nick Rhodes who hardly lets her get a word in edgewise.
Amanda, who has professed a childhood love of Bjork and the Sugarcubes, has a “Sugarcubes” of her own in her past. The band
Triangle, which she formed with Brian Tester in St. Paul, Minnesota in the late 1990s before moving to Oakland, California, indexes how the boundaries between indie rock, electronic dance music and mainstream pop have shifted in the last decade. In Triangle’s songs, you can hear much of the experimentation with old and new electronics that still makes up her sound, but you can also find acoustic and electric guitars in the mix, and a somewhat lower-fi laptop pop aesthetic than she is now aiming for. Some songs worth checking out from around 2000-2002 include
The Results,
Two Claps, and
Wood. Triangle toured with the Shins, among other notable bands, and was even featured on the James Mercer-curated stage at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.
Two closing factoids: MNDR grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and she once recorded a duet with
Har Mar Superstar (although this video is a different HMS song without her).
*Amanda Warner with lots of letters sucked out
posted by Corduroy at 9:14 PM on August 16, 2011