Elementary school days inspire musician’s latest

At the dawn of the MP3 era, an adolescent Zoon Monkman didn’t have the money for an iPod or a Microsoft Zune, the short-lived competitor to Apple’s revolutionary personal-listening device.

What the recording artist from Brokenhead Ojibway Nation did have in his backpack was the catalogue for the Scholastic Book Club, where only one product demanded attention: an AM-FM radio pen that scoured the airwaves for connection with every click.

For Monkman — a Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician who records as Zoon and pioneered the “moccasingaze” genre, which blends the dreamy textures of shoegaze with the rhythms and energies of Indigenous song — his mother’s gift of the ballpoint pen was a means of both self-discovery and the development of his musical taste.

During lonely days as an elementary student at East Selkirk’s Happy Thought School, the device was also a recess-hour tether to distant worlds, where artists such as Feist, Avril Lavigne and Broken Social Scene were introduced by the enthusiastic voice of a man who called himself Ace Burpee.

“The only way I could really get a signal was to wander to the very, very back, the far edge of the school, climbing trees to get to higher ground,” says Monkman, 34, who also plays in the alt-rock act Ombiigizi.

“My sister and brother were twins, so they had each other. But at school in Selkirk I was kind of alone, having to deal with the stress of school, so this radio pen was kind of like my lifeline. It kind of felt like I was in that world for as long as the lunch hour lasted, and then it was back to having to deal with the school.”

Monkman’s musical and personal education, and his family’s scholastic experiences, are the most explicit influences on the artist’s most recent record, Happy Thought School, released in June through Toronto’s Paper Bag Records.

Following 2020’s Bleached Wavves and 2023’s Bekka Ma’iingan, two records which were defined by ethereality and contemplative distance, Happy Thought School is Zoon’s most conversational work to date. The title track begins with propulsive chamber pop and bird calls that lead to sampled interviews with his mother and his aunt Dorothy about their experiences with racism in Manitoba’s school system.

Decades before Monkman climbed trees to find Nirvana, the musician’s matriarchs were told by a school principal they weren’t welcome inside.

“We literally had to stay on the bus,” Dorothy says.

For Monkman, who has collaborated with artists such as Broken Social Scene, Laraaji and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth (the pair played an improvisational set with Ranaldo’s wife, Winnipeg-raised multimedia artist Leah Singer, at the Art City Ball in May), the record was inspired by encouragement to explore pop sensibilities.

That led Monkman to work with Chris Chu of American indie-rock band Pop Etc., but also to reflect on how he first encountered pop music: with cheap headphones, at low frequencies, and through spotty signals from schoolyard treetops.

Underneath that thematic canopy, each track — especially You Can’t See Me (This Low) — feels like a transmission between past and future selves, reminders that where we arrive is always defined by where we’ve been and where we’ve been told to go.

The poppy sounds, energetic beats and optimistic title belie experiences of solitude and perseverance shared by Indigenous people around the world, the artist says.

“My mom and my aunt were able to share these stories about their experiences, and to have those recordings meant so much to me,” Monkman says, discussing the title track. “If you look up the life expectancy of Indigenous people, it isn’t that long. For them to pass down this knowledge is very meaningful, and I wanted to share that in an album. I think I was able to convey it in a beautiful way.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca

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