I Monster
Biography
I Monster emerged from the creative partnership of Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling in Sheffield, England, crafting a distinctive sound that would captivate listeners with their 2003 masterpiece "Neveroddoreven." This album stands as their crowning achievement, a palindromic title that perfectly encapsulates the duo's fascination with symmetry, wordplay, and sonic experimentation. The record showcased their ability to blend vintage sampling techniques with contemporary electronic production, creating an atmospheric journey through retrofuturistic soundscapes that felt both nostalgic and eerily prophetic.
"Neveroddoreven" featured their breakthrough single "Daydream in Blue," a hypnotic track built around a sample from Gunter Kallmann Choir's "Daydream," which became an unexpected hit across Europe and found particular success in advertising campaigns and film soundtracks. The song's dreamy, melancholic quality and vintage aesthetic helped define the emerging electronica revival of the early 2000s, influencing countless artists who sought to recreate that perfect balance between organic warmth and electronic precision.
The story of I Monster begins in the late 1990s when Honer and Gosling, both veterans of Sheffield's electronic music scene, decided to explore their shared passion for library music, vintage synthesizers, and obscure samples. Honer had previously worked with various electronic acts, while Gosling brought his experience as a graphic designer and visual artist to the partnership, creating the distinctive retro-futuristic aesthetic that would become synonymous with I Monster's brand. Their name, inspired by the 1971 horror film, reflected their love of B-movie culture and vintage entertainment.
Their musical style defies easy categorization, blending elements of downtempo, trip-hop, electronica, and what would later be termed "hauntology" – a genre characterized by its nostalgic sampling of forgotten cultural artifacts. I Monster's approach involved excavating obscure records from the 1960s and 1970s, particularly library music and television soundtracks, then reconstructing these fragments into new compositions that felt simultaneously familiar and alien. This archaeological approach to music-making positioned them alongside artists like Boards of Canada and The Advisory Circle in exploring the emotional resonance of cultural memory through sound.
Following the success of "Neveroddoreven," I Monster released "A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars" in 2009, an album that pushed their sound into more experimental territories while maintaining their signature atmospheric quality. This release demonstrated their evolution as artists, incorporating more original instrumentation alongside their trademark sampling techniques. The album's title track and songs like "The Blue Wrath" showcased a darker, more cinematic approach that suggested influences from horror film soundtracks and krautrock.
Throughout their career, I Monster has maintained a deliberately mysterious public profile, rarely giving interviews and allowing their music to speak for itself. This enigmatic approach has only enhanced their cult status among fans of underground electronic music. Their work has been featured in numerous television programs, films, and advertisements, with "Daydream in Blue" becoming particularly ubiquitous in media seeking to evoke a sense of nostalgic melancholy or retro-futuristic atmosphere.
The duo's influence extends beyond their recorded output through their involvement in Sheffield's Warp Records scene and their connections to other influential electronic acts. Their aesthetic approach, combining vintage visual design with carefully curated sonic archaeology, has inspired a generation of artists working in similar territories. The rise of genres like vaporwave and synthwave can partly be traced to pioneering work by artists like I Monster, who demonstrated how sampling vintage material could create entirely new emotional contexts.
While I Monster has remained relatively quiet in recent years, their legacy continues to grow through streaming platforms and vinyl reissues that have introduced their work to new audiences. "Neveroddoreven" has achieved classic status among electronic music enthusiasts, regularly appearing on "best of" lists and continuing to influence contemporary artists exploring the intersection of nostalgia and futurism.
Today, I Monster represents a unique moment in electronic music history when artists could still discover forgotten musical treasures and transform them into something entirely new. Their work stands as a testament to the power of creative sampling and the emotional resonance of cultural memory, ensuring their place in the pantheon of innovative electronic music pioneers.
