The Male

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Listen to The Male Radio, featuring artists like The Swingin' Lamp Liters, The Culls, The Magic Sounds, The Rubber Band and more…

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Male is always Jonathan Krohn (key) and Benjamin Mjolsness (guitar). Male is often those two with any number/combination of the following: Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), Nick Butcher (tapes/loops/key), Josh Berman (cornet), Colin DeKuiper (bass), Steven Hess (percussion),
Todd Mattei (guitar), and Mike Reed (percussion).

Krohn and Mjolsness started informally back in 2000 or 2001 when they studied together at DePaul University in Chicago; weekends used to be spent messing around with tones and sounds in Krohn’s bedroom that didn’t have a door. After playing as a duo for about 3 years (under the name ‘Male Models’), the duo got tired of underwhelming themselves, and called it a day.

Someone asked them to play some event a couple years later, and they can’t really remember what it was or what sort of process ensued. They decided to drop the second word in the name, mostly because they knew they could back up that they were ‘male,’ but couldn’t really get comfortable saying ‘models.’

Male, still a duo, decided to make a record to document their collaboration, and thought it’d be fitting to ask some of their more talented friends to come in and improvise over what they’d recorded, keeping the entire process fresh and open to interpretation. The record became a very different beast than anyone involved imagined, marrying soft tones with scrappy ‘free’ playing, jazz inflections (many of the players are active in Chicago’s jazz/improv scene), fingerstyle guitar, and found sounds, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t really match up with anything that’s happening.