Stanley Keith Bowsza

When I was working on R. Stevie Moore for last month's Musick that Needed Work - R, I came across my musikal stash of Minóy. Happily (to me) much of his work has been re-issued since 2014 on his original tape label Minóy Cassetteworks or on Phil Klinger's other label, PBKsound. 

 

Cassetteworks was the label run by Minóy himself from his home address at 923 W. 232 Street in Torrance, California from the 1980s through the early 1990s. Cassettes produced on this label were dubbed by Minóy with a copyright followed by a year & his signature or collaboration project name along the right edge of the spine of the tape. Only a few of the tapes he releases were actually branded "Minóy Cassetteworks".

Sound of Pig, out of Great Neck, New York under the management of Al Margolis was another outlet for Minóy releases enabling them to reach a larger(?) audience. Al Margolis earned the title "Cassette Godfather" with his Sound of Pig cassette label by releasing obscure tapes, distributing them through a growing DIY music underground. 

 

Minoy - The Art of Egyptian Bathing, Minóy Cassetteworks C60 cassette, 1986.
all decryption codes in comments

Side A -
The Art of Egyptian Bathing
Side B -
Secret Ceremony
Time Step

 

 

 

 

Minóy – Pretty Young Negro Man, Minóy Cassetteworks C60 cassette, 1986.

Side A -
Pretty Young Negro Man
Side B -
Outback

This particular one was recorded live January 27, 1988 in San Bernardino, California...

 

 

Minóy – Devil Music - Minoy Live!, Nihilistic Recordings C60 cassette, 1988.

Side A -
The Flavor of Acid on Ice (A Dance in the Manner of Japanese Butoh)
Me & My Shadow
Side B -
Phil Runs the Voodoo Down

 

 

 

Enjoy,
NØ

Ridin' the Slipstreams

Reuploadedby Request 01/02/2026

 

 

 

I am so gloriously high right now as I scratch out these silly little syllables. My mind has so many things to say, so many ways to go. It's hard to pick a direction. I've decide to shit-can the stuff I already hammered out & start again.  I want to touch on my travels but that wound is still too painful. I just want to play some musick. I took the tincture before deciding to add the RSO so the dosage is over the top. I'm flipping between dimensions as fast as Buckaroo Bonzai...

Heading East

I have traversed this continent many times in the past. Most often when I was younger. Driving, busing, flying, & hitchhiking. In fact the last time I hitched, I decided I had done the cross-country shuffle so often that I hitched up to Seattle, caught the Frazier River Canyon train as far as Banff, Alberta, hitched across Canada to Toronto, grabbed a Greyhound into Buffalo, then hitched southward to Hicksville, USA.

As I've aged I've became more & more sedentary, traveling less & less, mostly for family events or emergencies, birth or death. I guess I had lost touch with the whole process until we decided to displace ourselves & move back to my birthplace.

Fantastic Four - Alvin Stone (The Birth & Death of a Gangster), Westbound Records W-201, 1975.
all decryption codes in comments

Side 1 -
Alvin Stone (The Birth & Death of a Gangster)
Have a Little Mercy
Country Line

Side 2 -
Let This Moment Last Forever
Words
My Love Won't Stop at Nothing

I chose Interstate 80 as the most direct & expeditious route. I knew from past experience that it's not the most scenic of routes, but little did I know that it is now primarily a trucking highway. Private vehicles are outnumbered by 18 wheelers about 100 to 1. Our journey became mad dashes between vegan restaurants & modernized roadside rest stops.

 

 

The biggest surprise was finding the Sweet Melissa Restaurant, 213 S 1st Street, Laramie Wyoming. Not only was this a world-shaking surprise in cowboy hat/six-shooter wearing Wyoming, but also it is one of the best restaurants I've ever eaten at, & that's high praise from a Cali veg-head.

 

In honor of this superb find & special occasion, I'm posting up something relatively new, but the one piece of musick that helped me the very most on my journey, like Sweet Melissa Restaurant & Sweet Mary Jane.

Denise Sherwood - This Road, Evergreen Recordings EVER110CD, 2020.

Music Shall Live (featuring Lee 'Scratch' Perry)
Let Me In
Amnesia Moon
Sweet Mary Jane
Ghost Heart
Fairy Tales
Uncertain Times
Sunny Days
Won't Bow Down
Toughen Up
Sweet Love

 

The most fun we had aside from eating was playing a variety game we made up visiting the deluge of rest stops along I-80 (ya have to stay hydrated, but if ya do, then ya gotta stop a lot...it's a fine line).

 

Nebraska has rest areas.

 

Indiana I-80 is a toll-road. They don't want you to have to get off & on paying needless tolls, theirs are travel plazas with gas & food thrown in.

 

The most unbelievable were the Iowa art-walk rest stops. They have tiled bathrooms & art galore.

 

Here's art galore from On-U Sound founder, mix-master, & daddy...

Adrian Sherwood - Resistance Mix, On-U Sound 2012.

Two Semitones & a Raver – Adrian Sherwood
Swish – Pinch/Sherwood (featuring Andy Fairley)
Where's My Money – Caspa
Garrison Town – Mustakillah Sound, United Forces of Dub (featuring Ghetto Priest)
Revolution – Congo Natty
Greenleaves- Adrian Sherwood
Immigrants – Adrian Sherwood
Run Them Away – Pinch/Sherwood (featuring Bim Sherman)
Skies over Cairo – Django Django
God Smiled – Lee Perry
We Flick the Switch – Adrian Sherwood (featuring Lilli)
Mash-up 1 – MC Hippo (featuring Mikey Dread & Big Youth)
Mash-up 2 – featuring Brother Culture & Prince Far I
Take Heed – Prince Far I
Ghettolgy – Pinch/Sherwood (featuring Junior Delgado)
Microchip – Congo Natty
New Beginning – Congo Natty

 

Little did I know that time zones are time portals. I always thought that as I traveled east through the various zones I lost an hour each. I hadn't realized that I went backwards in years as well. I am now living at least twenty years in the west coast past. It is a very temporally disorienting adjustment, not all bad, mind you, but very, very strange. They are just coming into the twenty-first century in many ways. It's taken quite a bit of adjustment & a great deal of online ordering just to keep in vegan basics. It has caused us to begin making our own vegan cheez & plant-based meat substitutes (as well as breads, tortillas, pickled veggies, nut butters, & many more of our staples). So as I said, not all bad, just strange.

One of many On-U Sound releases that soothed the pains...

Charlie 'Eskimo' Fox - Nattorius-Alter Riddim, On-U Sound ON-U CD 0089, 2004.

Changes
Nuclear Zulu
This Man Pt 1
This Man Pt 2
Its Not so Easy
In a Vision
Wipe Your Tears
Natty Farmyard
Who Could it Be?
Sweet Memories
Down Hail

For me, as is my usual, musick was the one thing that kept me from completely losing it. I listened to music as I drove, before & while falling asleep, just about 24-7. Here is some of the things that lifted my spirits. Hope the do yours as well...

Watching the landscape (with serpents)...

Minóy – Landscape with Serpent, Minóy Cassetteworks, 1987

Side A -
Stalker

Side B -
Landscape with Serpent

 

Change of scenery...change of pace...

 

Delroy 'Bitty' McLean w/ Sly & Robbie - Love Restart, Taxi SRCD002, 2018.

Take My Heart (Love Restart)
I've Found Someone
Babylon Has Fallen
Open Eyes
Is That Your Reward?
Song of Songs
Broke My Heart
Every Word & Move
War is Over
My Call
Made to Fall in Love

 

Can’t pick up anything on the short-wave but Oldies...

 

The Pop Group - Live Stuff 1980, various venues.

a. Shake the Foundations (featuring Ari Up)

Alexandra Palace, London, England, June 16, 1980

b1. Feed the Hungry
b2. Hotter than 1000 Suns
b3. Liberty City
b4. Work Work Work

Tavastia, Helsinki, Finland, August 15, 1980

c. There are No Spectators

Koln, Germany, February 5, 1980

d1. Thief of Fire
d2. Forces of Oppression

Odissea 2001, Milan, Italy, April 25, 1980

 

"I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it." W. C. Fields 

Royal Treatment Plant - Hope is Not Enough, Universal RTP005, 2008.

Hope is Not Enough
Half as Much
Get Played
Undercurrent
Hearts & Minds
Crack Whore
You Don’t Need Me
Pricey

 

Almost deliverance...

 

Revolutionary Dub Warriors - State of Evolution, On-U Sound ON-U CD 83, 1996.

 

Irie Warrior
Iration
Direct Action
Creation
Oppressor
Rough Dub
Sorrow Go
No Reservation
War Zone
Antelopean
Chi

 

I also listened to hours upon hours of Hours of Slack. Here's an hour for you:

Church of the SubGenius - Subversion Special, 1986.

The Word of "Bob," via Philo Drummond, Ivan Stang, the late Dr. X (Lamont Duvoe), Puzzling Evidence, Buck Naked, G Gordon Gordon, Glassmadness, F. LeMur, Rev. Norel Pref, DK Jones

The Church of the SubGenius Radio Ministry seeks to brainwash you totally into abject lifelong subservience to The High Epopt and Living SlackMaster, J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, 

 

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Slack to all...

I've quoted the rest elsewhere elsewhen so here's today's lesson:

"How I wish, 

how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls 

swimming in a fish bowl year after year.
Running over the same old ground, 

what have we found?
The same old fears - - -"

Wish you were here,
NØ

Gibbering Ghosts Burning in Jelly

Back in the century passed, way back in the old days of the 80s before the birth of musick blogs, I was so into ‘zines. First Mike Gunderloy & then later Seth Friedman were god. Factsheet Five was the bible. We had our ‘zine (Long Live EAT POOP!).  It was all an extension of the Punk DIY ethos that we espouse

EAT POOP! #9 - cover by POOPSTER, poet, & artiste Frank Bella

 What was one of the greatest perks was the free musick. Every local band (San JoHaze) gave us demos & 45s & tapes & cds. But because of the FS5 network, we were in touch with other ‘zines all over the world. They wanted ours & wanted us to have theirs. That’s the way it was.

This all tied in perfectly with the underground cassette culture that was going on at the same time. I still have a special box full of crazy cassettes that don’t fit anywhere on any shelf. Ones with rocks glued to the covers; ones with hand-made felt boxes; ones with cardboard & plastic sleeves; all with crazy & sometimes extremely impressive original artwork. Anybody who had access to any sort of copying equipment (such as reel-to-reel tape recorders that came back to the States with GIs from Vietnam era [Sony - Teac - Webcor] or the portable tape to tape cassette players that first became common in the late 70s / early 1980s) could release a tape, & then publicize it through this network of fanzines that existed around the cassette scene. To us, the cassette culture was totally natural, an ideal & very proletarian  method for making available music that would never likely be recipient of any mainstream backing or promotion. We found in the cassette culture music that was more original, imaginative, challenging, beautiful, & groundbreaking than most output released by commercial bands.

Most of you musickphiles out in muscick blogland are probably aware of the great pioneer of cassette culture & 'outsider' music in the United States, R. Stevie Moore. His 'R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club' has been releasing DIY, home-recorded music steadily since the 1970s. Moore lives in Nashville & continues to make many releases in the cassette-only format.

Not as well known to the general musick hound, but legendary to us who still revere the cassette culture, was Minóy (Stanley Keith Bowsza) of Torrance,CA. Not only was he one of the acknowledged “creators” of the 1980s “homemade” independent music scene, he was also one of its most-acclaimed & well-known artists. He collaborated extensively with dozens of other luminaries in the burgeoning scene. 

 Dave Prescott / Minóy collaboration

 But Minóy is best known for his solo compositions, which number well over 100. He was the master of controlled noise. He used every sound imaginable in the world around him for the basis of his audio manipulations. Although the term noise properly identifies, perhaps, his genre, it doesn’t really do his musickal creations justice.

Minóy was very obsessive about his creations. He would stay up for days & nights on end, recording sounds & vocals, going from one cassette deck to another over & over. As heavily overdubbed as some of his compositions seem, he never used a multi-track recorder. He used cheap DIY equipment to create his compositions: guitar; shortwave radio; Radio Shack mixer (crucial for the reverb mode switch which could make very strange analog echoes); & a Casio CZ-101.

Minóy was a name that everyone knew in the 80s post-industrial cassette network, but then he stopped recording around 1992. Then he disappeared after the 90s. He has become largely forgotten.

Keith died on 3/19/10 from a myocardial infarction & liver shutdown. He had been on progressively-increasing medications over his last decade due to a number of medical problems. His health had gotten worse & he was hospitalized around 3/1/10. His death was sudden & unexpected. One day in the hospital he was joking & laughing, the next day he had become brain-dead. On Friday he was taken off life-support. R.I.P.

Here, to take you on a splendid trip, is another excellent outing from 1980's deep underground mail-art & home-taping legend Minóy. 

 Minóy  - Nightslaves cassette, Minóy Cassetteworks, 1986.

decryption code in comments

Side A -
A. Nightslaves (31:38)

Side B -
B1. Insect Trust (13:50)
B2. Gibbering Ghosts Burning in Jelly (17:27)

Enjoy,

NØ