"Once upon a time four or five wizards got together and started banging pots and pans with wooden spoons and broomsticks until the entire room they were in began resonating harmoniously with the music travelling through the air and the instruments that created the raucous counterpoint started glowing. A friend of the wizards' ear perked up (s(he) was in the neighborhood at the time investigating surging levels of electromagnetic radiation) and politely asked the wizards if it would be alright to set up a microphone plugged into a tape-recorder in the middle of their cacophonous yet mystifyingly melliflous music. The wizards replied that yes, it would be alright, but only if the friend promised not to record any sound. The friend promised, but when the wizards resumed their musical ritual, s(he) hit 'record' anyway. Some of those recordings can be heard here for the first time."

Mangoose has been around in one form or another since 1999. A group of young musicians and writers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and, simultaneously, in Mexico City began collaborating and trading/circulating home recordings, essays, and short stories. Jay Brockman, another founding member and also the liaison between the Puerto Rican and Mexican chapters, dubbed this group "The Mangoose Society." The origins of the name are a mystery to all except Jay, and he's not telling. (It is rumored that "mangoose erectus" is the scientific name given to a phantom species not yet discovered by western scientists - the so called 'missing-link' between man and bird.) Different members would get together over the months and years to record albums, dub them to tapes or burn them to CD-Rs, design home made cover art and mail them to everybody else.

Eventually some of the members stopped contributing, a few of us earned degrees, most of us got jobs, and we all moved to different corners of the continent. But we kept making music every chance we had, and talked about starting something...perhaps a recording studio? an artistic collective? a commune/cult in rural Montana that somehow combines both of these aspirations? After weeks of debate we settled on starting a "record label". TaDa. Well, it's more of a website. Kind of like a big portal into the unknown or something. So Mangoose now exists to facilitate and organize a symbiotic relationship with all the artists on its roster. We set up a website, encoded hours of our old and new music (over 150 tracks) into MP3's and made them available for download, free of charge. There are some real gems to be found within the website if one is feeling adventurous.


NOTE: We don't sign artists to contracts or "deals." All the music contained within this site is independently created and funded by the artists themselves. Mangoose Records exists soley to provide a central place for people to come listen to music created by the collective. If you would like to have your music featured here, and be a part of what is Mangoose, by all means send us an email at contact "at" mangooserecords.com with your myspace page or whatever. We listen to everything that gets sent our way. If we like it, we'll let you know!