The California noise label Jonathan Borges built around his own Pedestrian Deposit project, a cassette-led imprint that has documented the American underground for two decades.
Monorail Trespassing is the California noise label the Bureau files at Tier III as a long-running, respected imprint and a connector through its founder. Established in 1999 and active from 2001, it was set up by Jonathan Borges, of Pedestrian Deposit, first as a home for his own work and then as an outlet for a growing circle of American noise. The catalogue is mostly cassette, the label's own remit calling for exemplary, high-quality and unique documents of harsh noise, ambient, drone and experimental sound collage, with occasional moves into CD and vinyl.
Borges's own project remains the centre of gravity, but the label's reach extends past that. Across two decades it has steadily issued work by mainstays of the American underground, Aaron Dilloway, Werewolf Jerusalem and Shredded Nerve among them, and the longevity is itself part of the story: Pedestrian Deposit's The Architector arrived in 2015 as the label's hundredth release.
Monorail sits in a particular network. Pedestrian Deposit released elsewhere too, on Hospital Productions and Hanson Records, and the label moves in that same early-2000s circle, the generation of American noise imprints downstream of RRRecords. It is filed here as a connector node as much as a catalogue.
The Bureau's reading. Monorail Trespassing is filed at Tier III as a respected, long-running California noise label, built around Jonathan Borges's Pedestrian Deposit and notable for the steadiness of its cassette-led documentation of the American underground.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene