Derek Monypeny's The Oppositional Imagination is a record that plays out like the horizontal slices of a very alien body put through an MRI machine. Disparate approaches to sound and stringed instruments stacked together in a neat package that seems to work as a whole, but you are not sure how. On any one track, you may be confronted with Bishiop-ian guitar smirks, whispered reversed scratches, a desert rock intro that suddenly freezes into an unmoving drone, or a sun-drenched guitar played so delicately if any lighter it would float away.
Derek Monypeny on the album:
"When I was first coming into musical consciousness, the records that had the strongest impact on me were the ones that felt like each track was its own self-contained universe. It was exhilarating to put these records on the first few times, hear the first track, and have NO idea or preparation for what might come next.
I'm not talking about "eclectic" genre-hopping. Human beings are multi-faceted, complicated, beautiful, sometimes ugly - so records made by human beings should be all those things too.
With "The Oppositional Imagination," I tried to make a record like this. The only thing these tracks have in common, besides instrumentation, is that I made them. And on this record, I'm making them all sit together, like kids squirming through their class picture. "
-Derek Monypeny, Yucca Valley, CA, January 2024
Derek Monypeny on the album:
"When I was first coming into musical consciousness, the records that had the strongest impact on me were the ones that felt like each track was its own self-contained universe. It was exhilarating to put these records on the first few times, hear the first track, and have NO idea or preparation for what might come next.
I'm not talking about "eclectic" genre-hopping. Human beings are multi-faceted, complicated, beautiful, sometimes ugly - so records made by human beings should be all those things too.
With "The Oppositional Imagination," I tried to make a record like this. The only thing these tracks have in common, besides instrumentation, is that I made them. And on this record, I'm making them all sit together, like kids squirming through their class picture. "
-Derek Monypeny, Yucca Valley, CA, January 2024