About Mangoose
"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. It would be a truly independent label that
does away with the tired (and rapidly obsolescing) record making
process by giving a tremendous amount of control over the creation,
marketing, and promotion of records to the artists. 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.