Bonnie Banks, ubiquitous and elusive, has expanded the auspices of visual and sonic art for over three decades. Determinedly detailed, Banks’s paintings and drawings range in size from a playing card to a theater-filling backdrop. Some are shocking in their copious, rainbow-bomb color; others in brutal, futuristic black-and-white. All capture the viewer in a scene just this side of placeable, where your eyes can likely find what they want to—a city built from recycled stereo components, an ancient vessel teetering over rapids, a schema for future machines, a glistening new species. Some of the two-dimensional works read almost as sculptures, given the electric fizz of Banks’s stylized black lines, while many of the sculptures are also sound machines, costumes, furniture, and sets—used in performances by collaborators like Rubber (() Cement, Commode Minstrels in Bullface, Spider Compass Good Crime Band, and Scummerai; and at Banks’s foundational Bay Area (and beyond) recurring series Organ Spectacular, Brutal Sound Effects, Electronic Puppenhorten, and Godwaffle Noise Pancakes, which provide essential platforms for the experimental noise, sound-art community. Hundreds of music releases feature Banks’s art, most notably those from Sun City Girls, Astromero, Friends Forever, Liver Cancer, Bran(...)Pos, Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet, Blutfart, Necrotic Socks, Slusser, Cryptic Weevil, T. Mikawa x V. Shen, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Hogwind, Head Boggle, and Aaron Dilloway. Banks continues to work in new forms, creating videos, digital art, and fonts; re-creating book and VHS covers; illustrating the online game Underversal Abyss and board games including the Cave Evil series.
-Maureen P. Klier M.P. Klier is a writer and musician who has performed at several of Bonnie Banks music series.
NOTE: This is just the book, for the book with 7" please visit HERE
More from Random Man HERE
More from Fenrick Books HERE
Bonnie Banks DVD HERE
BrutalSFX Videos HERE
104 pages 8 x 8" Perfect-bound Edition of 200
Just Book, no 7"
Paint-smeared covers with printed obi
Afterword by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls)
Co-published with Fenrick Books, July 2024