Riq Chiznik’s Sea-Monkey food factory was raided by a bunch of cinnamon pirates. They came, they saw, they scratched the paint off his bathroom stall walls, and flipped him off all at once. Then they took all of his pajamas. So the Sea-Monkey food manufacturing career was in the garbage. Anyway, he was walking home from an owl pellet hockey game one night, when a cosmic voyager suddenly detained him in an alley and imparted musical profundities to him that had been lost for millennia. He told Riq that if he didn’t record music from now on, he would beat him with a toilet brush.
Riq’s mommy was a giant shamrock and his daddy was a slightly bigger red bird. They both liked flowers a lot. As a child, Riq ate many tasty canned goods. He attended twelve years of Martian Chipmunk school. During his seventh year of school, he discovered ancient devices known as cassettes with strange names and words on them. He found them buried in the ruins of FEMA Region 5, right next to Droopy Valley, on an interplanetary field trip. He came back on several more field trips and acquired many other devices known as compact discs. Hundreds. In between trips, he taught himself guitar. He spent his allowance on machines that played this music media. He also bought packs of notebook paper, scratch and sniff stickers that smelled like lunch meat, various varieties of Japanese tea, a real live leprechaun that practised cardiology (escaped after two months, even though Riq treated him with the utmost respect), and a large quantity of frozen Salisbury steak dinners that usually included small helpings of mashed potatoes and corn.
As school went on, he was intimidated into learning about lottery frequencies and deodorant dynamics, but his favourite subject was always English. Then one day during his twelfth year of education, a motley gang of marshmallow demons forced him at accusation point to choose a college or be resigned to a career as a cardboard slapper. He had only minutes to make up his mind, so under spiritual duress he chose the one place that offered him a scholarship: The Illinois Automotive Beehive Institute of Ticker Tape. He spent seven years there continuing his education while singing karaoke in his spare time.
After he graduated, Riq spent five years behind a desk, mostly designing tablecloths and writing credit card advertisements. Then after that, he quit, and started a sea monkey food factory. That business lasted for about two years, until the Cinnamon Pirate Incident. Shortly thereafter he was detained by a musical cosmic voyager in an alley, and immediately began making music.
Riq’s biggest musical influences are Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Brian Eno, and Wesley Willis.
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Riq’s song, A Motorized Shopping Cart, was included in Mitt Paté #38 for Radio On Berlin.
