"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

--W. B. Yeats

Kicking your ass from coast to coast, and freaking your mind like a psychedelic ghost. What ruff beast is this? Why, it's Emperor Penguin, America's premier electro jam squadron. Hailing from the moribund megalopolis of Chicago (a city whose JAM quotient is assured, having produced luminaries like Curtis Mayfield, The Pharoahs and Mafia 3000), Emperor Penguin came together as a beer-fueled lark of two of that city's premier groove architects: Lazlo Minimart (formerly of Renaissance Rancher) and Melvoin Stanke (formerly of Tragic Eyewear). The duo met at the farewell performance of Chicago's legendary Doob Toob at the now-defunct Mung Room and, in the course of conversation, discovered they shared a fondness for Germany's TrakSuit, Tombstone frozen pizza, and the music that had come out of England's SneakerBeat scene.

Shortly thereafter Stanke and Minimart met one Saturday afternoon to goof around with Minimart's recording equipment and Stanke's antique synthesizers. The duo discovered that their cultural gestalt translated seamlessly onto magnetic tape, and began cranking out the jams that have made them notorious in drawing rooms from Berwyn to Brooklyn to Bremen. Drawing on a combined musical sensibility embracing easy funk , Kraftwerk, sixties jazz, Brian Eno and a love of bizarre noises, Emperor Penguin commenced to pumping out 'Headphone Noize' to the delight of their devoted army of fans. Their special mixture of "found" sounds, samples, beats, loops and synth is grafted onto a operating system which is driven by sounds but committed to SONGS. Emperor Penguin delivers the bleeps and bloops complete with malfunctioning Moog-age, but always in service of an uncommon tunefulness and songcraft savvy.
For a band that started life as a series of bizarre experiments involving primitive sampling techniques and frozen pizza, It's astounding how quickly the tympanic duo has rapidly evolved into a full-service jam factory, cranking out hit after hit after hit. The time of Emperor Penguin is now.

Expect victory!