By Staff Contributor • SpinFork
Somewhere between a post-industrial scrapyard and a noise complaint, Bönk Throttle discovered music.
Armed with a kick drum on his back, a tambourine on each shin, a kazoo lodged permanently between two molars, and a salvaged MIDI clarinet surgically fused to his left shoulder, the 42-year-old former substitute teacher has become a walking symphony of chaos. His latest self-released, self-produced, self-mixed, and self-resented album, Kick Me Harder, I Am the Band, dropped last Friday exclusively via QR codes he duct-taped to traffic cones.
“The world abandoned melody,” he tells us through a mouth-harmonica. “So I built a snare-based theology.”
Bönk’s live shows—if you can call what happens under a crumbling highway overpass at 3AM a “show”—are the stuff of myth. Each set opens with a 17-minute overture titled I Have No Roadies and I Must Scream, followed by a half-improvised jam called Cymbalphrenia (A Mental Break in 3/4 Time). The performance ends when Bönk either collapses or is asked to leave.
Bönk’s music has been described as “an existential drum circle held at gunpoint” and “if Tom Waits fell down a spiral staircase with a loop pedal.” Critics remain divided, mostly because no two audience members have ever heard the same combination of instruments at once. His pedals are unreliable. His cowbell is legally haunted. His kick-drum harness is a repurposed orthodontic headgear.
“I don’t write songs,” he insists. “I survive them.”
And yet, there’s a purity in his chaos. At a time when every band is just a content farm with merch, Bönk Throttle reminds us of the joy of playing four instruments at once while actively bleeding from at least one of them.
He doesn’t chase fame. Fame flees him.
