With a memorable voice that often harmonizes with different artists among varied genres, Stan Fran Cisco became a well-known name (back then as Stanley Mongaras) as a one-time member of Cure for Paranoia and as a regular vocalist for the Collab music coalition. His sought-after vocals entice crowds and fuel other performers on stage, as he raises and lowers octaves synchronizing beautifully with whatever music he or others are playing.
“Music is a medicinal thing for me, I use it as meditation,” he says.
You see it in the way he moves, beginning soundtracks with every organic sound, tapping on tables, making popping or humming noises with his mouth, adding a stomp, finding melody in everyday noises — even the sound of his dog, Okami, has a cameo howling in “Neighborhood Narnia” — then he loops them, layer by layer into a beat, adding vocals along the way.
“I’ll start with loops I’ve created when no one’s around and use it to create a head space, heart space, where it’s just me," he says. "That’s how I meditate, pray, it’s a part of it for me. It’s a sacred thing, and to fuse it into an entertainment form is tricky surgery.”
After a period of self-imposed isolation following his recent split from Cure for Paranoia, Stan Fran Cisco’s been working on an entire new catalog of music. Now, he’s finally reemerging as an independent artist with a list of tracks that are completely and wholly Stan Fran Cisco originals.
“I shut myself off from everybody all at once, fell off the face of the earth,” he says. “As much as I love the group, it’s something I had to figure out, how to emit the 100% pure channel that I’m hearing into reality, instead of a collaboration with a piece of something. I needed to completely spill that. If you act like a victim through a transition, you won’t grow, and they taught me a lot, love those guys, but I got to feeling like there’s literally a sound in my chest, in my soul, I have to make or I feel like I’m not doing my purpose here.”
The talented singer and composer didn’t decide to be a musician until he was a young adult. Before that, he’d always planned to be a fine artist, and he went to school for graphic design. He remembers the first time he realized he had a voice as a kid, but even then, he didn’t plan to make music.
“One of my first music-related memories was my brother blasting Sublime in his room next to mine. I was singing along, ‘I don’t practice Santeria …’’’ Stan Fran Cisco says, harmonizing while he speaks, “and he kicked the door open like, ‘Do it again!’ He swung me around like, ‘This is amazing bro!’
“Music was never something I really acknowledged … like breathing. I left it alone and completely ignored it, went to the [Dallas] Art Institute for graphic design and it came back and got me again. I was singing to myself with my headphones in and this kid, Johnny Townsend, who was a senior in the audio programming department was like, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a new singer and I like the way you’re humming. Can you come by the studio after this class?’”
With a voice many would call anointed, random acts of reverence are not uncommon in Stan Fran Cisco's career. He’s had ongoing encounters with renowned artists, catching their ear and attention, and oftentimes leaving with more knowledge and/or equipment than he arrived with or planned to take away. One famous DJ, Maceo Plex, took him under his wing and gifted Stan Fran Cisco with a set of what he believes to be magical musical equipment. He tells the story of another instance that changed his trajectory, a conversation with Erykah Badu after she received a Dallas Observer Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cure for Writer's Block
“We’re talking for a bit and people kind of gather around, cause she’s Badu, and she stops the whole conversation and says to me, ‘Negate and neglect every voice in your head, telling you no, you can’t or you’re not good enough,’" he says. "Then she just kind of walked off and left me in a puddle to reevaluate my entire life. I don’t know how she picked up on whatever in a short conversation, but she told me something that completely changed my life. I went kind of AWOL, fell off the face of the earth and completely dove into this new piece of equipment, and I had years of catching up to do.”With such a wide variety of musical genres he’s tapped into, organizing a catalog that made sense became a challenge. It all came to him in a vision, though, while suffering from what he (half-jokingly) believes to have been a mild heat stroke while jogging in 115-degree Dallas heat.
What he saw was the image of a dartboard full of his unfinished, unreleased songs, all of which are characterized by extreme diversity. On the dartboard, they were balanced across the scale of the board.
“The thing I’ve created from the dartboard series that most surprised me was the accidental opening of the floodgates of an ‘anything goes’ kind of creative process within genre that balances itself out with each new soundscape created,” he says. “If you want to make a sound that almost sounds dark, sounds spooky, sounds kind of in this energy that’s heavy, right? And then you add this vocal that is light, that has the brightness to it to make the balance. That’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do with most of the songs, but there’s so many different genres coming out of this thing. It’s really kept me guessing and excited for what’s to come.”
The dartboard project he’s working on includes 40 songs of various genres, all of which he plans to release one by one, but the dartboard, of course, keeps growing. One song, “NVRKNW,” with Rakim Al-Jabbaar, falls in line with what he calls “melodic hip-hop;” a Chilldren of Indigo feature called “Neighborhood Narnia” is in a similar sonic space but with more electronic influence; another called “ALLINONEDAY ft. Nyge Zephyr" is spooky, electronic dark instrumentation with pretty, light vocals and percussive cadences and lyrics that balance the beat.
“I have sounds in my production, in my creation, when I’m alone, that are hip-hop, sometimes electronic, sometimes experimental, alternative,” he says. “I don’t know, I’m just making music, and to put every song I enjoy the most in one place and just throw a dart, hit the song and only do that song until it’s done … it’s getting myself so far out of my own way. It’s showing me what genres people appreciate and showing me a lot about myself too, creating opportunities to
meet people like my mixing/mastering engineer Nathan Doutt over at Barron Studios in Houston.
"I didn’t necessarily know that there were this many branches of what to identify myself as in a genre. I truly believe there’s magic in every one of these songs, a message important enough to document that is beyond myself.”
