Album Notes

Pancake Circus is an electronic garage band that concocts it's music from junk sounds found,created,cut,chopped,and reconstructed.Vocalists/knob-twiddling noise specialists Shaggy Manatee Esquire and Cellout spent hard time serving eggs and other breakfast-style foods to throngs of weekend consumers before realizing,in the dark fall months of 1997,sonic apocalypse was their key to salvation.They accidentally formed Pancake Circus and recorded the lp "Nacho Twain".

Shaggy's Phunsighz bandmate thumbtack smoothie soon brought drums/vision and the novelty of virtuoso musical abilities to the band. As they began to play live shows in San Francisco they developed frequencies that defy current music's dull predictable genres.Group members: Shaggy Manatee Esquire(assault coordinator,vox smootherizist) thumbtack smoothie(rhythm decimator,sine wave architect)Cellout(linguistic mutilator,analog mage)Instruments:bass drum, snare drum,hi-hat,sampler triggered by sticks via roland spd-11 pad. Akai sampers,korg mutilators, sk-5, Dr.stupid, misc noises, mouth, undefined objects.Pancake Circus - "3 Whistling Moon Travellers With Report"

(Quaketrap Recordings 2000, 1006)
"Pancake Circus will be one of the strangest things you've ever paid $5 for,but you must go see them. You will alternately smile, scratch your head, andpogo like a man possessed."

--Greg Heller, BAM





"San Francisco's Pancake Circus add more than a touch of drum 'n' bass' braininess to ther hip hop mix. They flaunt beats that are decidedly not locked into rap's staunch 4/4 time rule; the lyrics match the scattered beats with
smoothly delivered stream-of-consciousness musings."

--Summer Burkes, Bay Guardian




"Twisted collage of experimental beats and samples injected with alternate rap lyrics. A digital atmosphere of swamp noises over minimal hip-hop beats for a truly open minded audience."

--Melissa P., listen.com


From Aural Innovations #15 (April 2001)

Pancake Circus is a San Francisco based trio that play what I can only describe as freaky electronic space rap. The band consists of
Cellout (linguistic manipulator, analog mage), Thumbtack Smoothie (rhythm decimator, sine-wave architect), and Shaggy Manatee
Esquire (assault coordinator, voice box technician). This is their second release.

I can't say I'm much of a rap fan. However, whereas the rap rant and it's message is typically that music's focal point, Pancake Circus
seem to simply use it as their vocal style and the wild space electronic music is what makes everything enjoyably interesting and strange.
Among the standout tracks is "527" in which the electronics and rhythms are grinding all over the place yet coherent. It's pretty heavy
stuff really, incorporating both metal and hip hop influences. "Yeah All Right Now" and "Giant Squid" include deep thudding Bill
Laswell styled basslines, with "Yeah All Right Now" utilizing percussion, turntable scratching, and spacey electronics.

One of the purer spacey tracks is "Beautiful Balloon" with it's rapping over a jazzy trumpet sound and wild wavey electro swirls.
"Gemini Rainsuit" has cool freaky jungle sounds like birds and other mysterious creatures, along with spacey burps and gurgles and a
generally dark eerie atmosphere. I dig the little Sun Ra styled synth freakout near the end. "Ominous" is similar, but much darker and
more purely space electronic with growling efx'd voicings rather than rapping. And the closing track, Last Night Shift", really threw me
for a loop being a trippy psychedelic electro tune with floating acoustic guitar and acidic wailing sounds, and a... folk-rap kind of thing...
it's hard to describe. Give these guys a big thumbs up for being different.