Minóy


Minóy was the pseudonym of the electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza. He was a major figure in the DIY noise music and homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s. He released over 100 compositions.

Life and work

Stanley Keith Bowsza chose his pseudonym Minóy based upon how someone he met mispronounced the name of one of his favorite artists, the Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró. He is recognized as a master of controlled noise. He lived and worked in Torrance, California.
Minóy produced some of the most remarkably engrossing, beautiful and imaginative work-of-art albums released on cassette in the 1980s, often with hand made covers. Minóy was an agoraphobic but prolific noise artist intensely active in the music underground between the years 1986 and 1992. During that period he created many unique audio works in collaboration with other sound artists and mail artists. Minóy was an avid mail collaborator, collaborating with noted experimental American composers such as PBK , If, Bwana, Damian Bisciglia a/k/a Agog, Zan Hoffman, Dave Prescott, Not 1/2, and many others.
But he is best known for his solo palimpsest-like multi-tracked soundscape compositions, production that follows the incorporation of electric sound into compositional practice similar at times to that of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and John Cage's Williams Mix. A good example is his widely circulated dark ambient composition Tango that was released in 1988 on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine’s Issue 20 entitled Media Myth.
His music is a form of labyrinthian droning collage electronics that produced an otherworldly effect. It is a form of highly textured, manipulated and layer noise that often creates a sonic painting-like effect. Many of his tape releases had only one or two compositions on them, thus allowing him the time to develop a theme and hypnotically immerse the listener in what were usually very powerful works of art.
His challenging, irritating at times, ambient musique concrète recordings were often created by echoing and multi-tracking sounds into deep noisy ambient music. Sometimes he used a constant murmuring voice along with the found sounds or shrieks or staccato guitar bursts or the twitter of a toy mouth organ. His tapes were more often than not delicate yet powerfully embellished soundscapes.
Minóy’s audio agglomeration and sound manipulation was celebrated in 1991 when his image appeared on the cover of the July 1991 issue of Electronic Cottage magazine. He was profiled in the issue as well.
He stopped releasing his recordings in 1992.

Posthumous publications

In 2013, fellow composer and former collaborator PBK worked out an agreement with Minoy's partner, Stuart Hass, to obtain Minoy's archive of recorded work. In he discovered that among Minoy's master tapes were recordings made in the years after Minoy had stopped distributing his cassettes. Many of the unreleased works were released by various labels starting in 2013.
In 2014 Punctum Books released some of the best posthumous recorded material on CD and cassette, entitled simply Minóy. These nine audio recordings were accompanied by a Punctum book on Minóy that was edited by Joseph Nechvatal. The book, also entitled Minóy, contains written essays by Nechvatal and Maya Eidolon, and sixty black and white portrait images from the Minóy as Haint as King Lear series that photographer Maya Eidolon created before Minóy's death in collaboration with Minóy and Stuart Hass.

Post-Minóy activity

Prior to Minóy's death in 2010, the photographer Maya Eidolon, in collaboration with Minóy and Stuart Hass, created a series of photographs of Minóy posing as King Lear.
Minóy as My Life as a Haint also created a large series of digital art abstractions before his death and Maya Eidolon has created a montage animation of them called Infinity Arcade on vimeo.

Partial list of recordings