In the Summer of 1996, Val Holler had just returned to New York City from the west coast of the United States, playing solo shows in Los Angeles and Seattle. In August of 1996 he recorded 7 songs live to a 2-track DAT in a studio near Union Square that belonged to multi-media visual artist Peter Ungerleider (1947-1997).

These recordings were previously unreleased, and are an example of the solo shows that Holler was doing mostly around lower Manhattan at clubs like The Cottonwood Cafe on Bleecker Street, Hotel Galvez on Avenue B, The Living Room on Allen Street and Sin-é on St. Mark's before his band formed in the East Village of New York City in 1997.


Some testimonials from Val Holler collaborators during that time:

“The Cottonwood Cafe (where Val Holler performed regularly on Bleecker Street, NYC) was a typical West Village space, narrow, brick walls, which allowed a good musician to fill up the space. I remember watching you play one song in particular that made it clear your future was going to be in music.. I was working for an installation/projections artist at the time and he let me use his studio space for outside projects on occasion. His name was Peter Ungerleider, whose breadth and depth of knowledge, gear, and how to use it never ceased to astound me. He didn't have a recording studio, but his projection space had great acoustics and he had a DAT machine and good mics so it seemed like a natural place to record some songs. I was familiar with film and video but you pretty much set up the recordings -- I think I just had to press "play" on the DAT machine. 



The gentrification of the East Village was just getting started, the squatters were being either kicked out, or in a few cases -- given the proper keys to their buildings. There was still a do it yourself punk ethic in the air, you could still live an artist's life and get by on an artist's budget back then. I remember visiting you at a more proper recording studio with some new songs less than a year later. I was dating Annie Britton (who took the cover photograph) at the time. She moved to Washington State in 1998 and never returned to NYC. She took a nice of photo! That was fantastic time in a lot of ways, with many worlds colliding. Happy that ours did.”

- Josh Carter, recording engineer, longtime Rachel Ray producer.

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“The NYC music scene in the mid to late 90's was doing quite well as compared to the kinda war torn 1970's and 80's (when I grew up in Brooklyn), when getting on a train after 8pm meant running the risk of literally getting murdered.  The mayor at the time was Rudy Giuliani and he vowed to clean up NYC starting with the squeegee men and hobos shipping them off who knows where. As part of his campaign to bring NYC back he cut sweetheart deals with movie studios to film on the streets along with various businesses, which included the literal birth of the 1st Dot Com wave. NYC was flush with cash so the live music scene was also doing quite well. There were tons of places to play! (as opposed to now).



The music business was also doing very well with record companies highly profitable from the repackaging of old catalogue super hits onto the still newish CDs (with their amazing sound quality! ha ha ha). Also grunge hadn't died yet (although it was on it's way out) and hip hop with Notorious BIG and Tupac were doing quite well (although they were dead too, but hip hop was here to stay).



Monkey Boy Studios on 47 Murray st. was an interesting building. Located in lower Tribeca it was only 3 blocks north of the World Trade Center. It was a 5 floor loft style building built in the late 1860's in the same style that were quite popular in Soho. Every floor had a music studio. On the 2nd floor was "The off Wall Street Jam" which was like a club for Wall street employees who would come after work and jam on cover songs with other like-minded musicians (one of my favorite bands was "The Rolling Bones”).  Monkey Boy Studios was on the 3rd floor. The Iconic noise band Sonic Youth was on the 4th floor. Sonic Youth guested on almost every record I recorded on 47 Murray (I'm sure they made an appearance on your record) they were LOUD!!!!!  And on the 5th floor was a music studio and management company called Velour music.



I remember you were one of my 1st few clients. I was in a very "experimental" stage in my life and I remember trying all kinds of crazy shit.  i recall on one occasion that i had you sing into a vacuum hose (“Solitude for Two” on Versicle, 1998). We recorded your record on 1" analog tape which was standard at the time. Digital recording was till in its infancy so analog was still king. That would end by the early 2000's although I still kept my tape deck for years preferring the punchy tone of tape, then bouncing it into Pro Tools. A practice that is still done to this day….”



- Brad Albetta, producer of 1998's Versicle album