Why Special O.P.S.
Special O.P.S. is a trio of improvising musicians from Seattle’s Monktail Creative Music Concern. Mark Ostrowski is the drummer, Stephen Parris is the electric guitarist, and John Seman is the contrabassist. Their title Special O.P.S., besides being their initials, is their mission. O.P.S. is the mercenary guerrilla unit of Monktail, the small, skilled force used to infiltrate hostile or unknown territory, to search and rescue, or seek and destroy. The analogies go on.
Special O.P.S. was formed September 12, 2001. Their regularly scheduled Wednesday practice with the rest of the Monktail collective that day was poorly attended. People had things on their mind. So Ostrowski, Parris, and Seman played anyway, and recorded, and played some more for several hours. They had only one goal that night, to be really, really loud. The recording begins with Ostrowski’s count off: one-two-loud. Sure, the rehearsal space was directly above the stage for Graceland (currently El Corazon, formerly the Off-Ramp), so you had to play loud, but it was also purging, a response, a reaction, an aural understanding, a sonic sympathy, a requiem.
Requiem for NYC is the recording they made that night. The recording is the birth of Special O.P.S., an urgent, flawed, emotive assault and decay of arguments and debates, poems and stories, fears and fragments. This was not three musicians making a statement; this was three friends exploring their feelings in the most intimate and amplified way they could, like much of the world that day. They paired the music with Ostrowski’s visual art, packaged it up and gave it to people.
Ten years later that recording serves as a treaty, an agreement to make current, honest, propulsive music outside any idiom, format, genre or trend as if the world would end and your life depended on it. Because it does.
Peace,
MCMC
9/9/11
Seattle, WA
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