World's End Girlfriend, Mono

Vinyl reissue of long out-of-print Mono and World’s End Girlfriend collaborative orchestral album. Just before recording their epic disasterpiece, You Are There, in late 2005, Mono began collaborating with fellow Tokyo native and modern electronic composer, World’s End Girlfriend.

The result was a five-part suite of neoclassical grace and luminescence that defies easy categorization. As dark as the bottom of the ocean, and nearly as otherworldly, Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain finds Mono inhabiting an illuminated world previously only hinted at in their most orchestral compositions.

Recorded in multiple studios in Japan last year, Palmless Prayer highlighted Mono’s increasing obsession with classical music with World’s End Girlfriend’s mastery of subtle dynamic shifts. Forgoing their tendency to erupt into hellish bursts of speaker-destroying noise, Mono instead exhibited remarkable restraint, stretching song lengths up to and beyond the 15-minute mark and turning barely-there crescendoes into earth-shaking events.