I Monster

The British production duo I Monster gained primary recognition through their loungy trip-hop single "Daydream in Blue," a 2001 hit whose own backstory unfolds at considerable length and with notable complexity, and they concentrate on psychedelic pop constructions touched by electronic textures that frequently incorporate samples drawn from easy listening records together with other improbable sources. Jarrod Gosling and Dean Honer first encountered each other during the early '90s inside the record section of the Sheffield City Library, at a moment when that city, already linked to major electronica advances amid the 1980s synth-pop peak, was experiencing another musical surge through the rise of so-called "bleep music" fostered by the IDM innovators at Warp Records. Motivated by the expanding local environment plus their mutual financial constraints and plentiful leisure, the pair began generating abstract electronic textures under the name the Anderson Shelter. After five years of partnership, having grown weary of what they termed "bleep fatigue," they changed direction in 1997 by adopting a fresh moniker borrowed from the 1971 British horror film I, Monster and embracing a sample-driven, song-focused method of composition. Their initial output under this approach, the self-released 1999 album These Are Our Children, was distributed at no cost in an idealistic gesture. During the same period Honer, who occasionally collaborated with Add N to (X), joined the similarly oriented electronic trio the All Seeing I, which achieved mainstream chart placement with its rendition of Sonny & Cher's "The Beat Goes On" and received an invitation to supply production for Britney Spears' version of the same track.

I Monster entered a partial hiatus lasting several years, during which Gosling accumulated progressive rock LPs while employed at a record shop, yet they returned in 2001 with a revised 7" edition of "Daydream in Blue," a track that had first surfaced on Children. The song draws extensively from the Gunter Kallmann Chorus's 1970 cover of the Wallace Collection's 1968 recording "Daydream," itself derived from a melody in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, while overlaying vocodered vocals rendered nearly unintelligible and a bassline taken from Portishead's "Glory Box"; it was subsequently reissued on London's Instant Karma label and eventually climbed into the Top 20. The Beta Band happened to employ the identical sample for its own 2001 composition "Squares." Thereafter the track featured in numerous soundtracks and advertisements and resurfaced as the foundation for Lupe Fiasco's "Daydreamin'" on his 2006 debut. I Monster capitalized on this breakthrough by issuing the singles "Who Is She?" and "Hey Mrs." alongside the album Neveroddoreven, which likewise appeared in multiple editions, among them a 2004 Atlantic release. Following another extended absence from public attention, I Monster surfaced once more in early 2009, supplying free online downloads of their long-unavailable debut and releasing the soul-inflected single "Sucker for Your Sound" ahead of the album A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars, which arrived that March.