Rich La Bonté
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Rich La Bonté (1946) is an American musician, writer, editor. La Bonté has five published novels: Susan and The Wolf (1989), Useful Humans (1990), Simple Deities (2002), The Greater Future (2003), Many Teeth (2005) and the short story collection Yellowflower (2005).
La Bonté worked as a musician from his early teens and played bass and sang in the 1970s original New York and Los Angeles cast productions of the almost mythical musical Godspell. La Bonté created fLAtDiSk SoftWorks as a freeware company in the late 20th Century. At that time fLAtDiSk was the home of fLAtDiSk Fanzine (a Xeroxed music rag from 1976-1983), and fLAtDiSk Records (a vinyl independent subsidiary of the now tragically defunct Moxie Record Company.)
fLAtDiSk Records had several obscure 20th Century releases, the most notable being "Kim Fowley: Son of Frankenstein" for Moxie Records, which Rich co-wrote and co-produced with Mr. Fowley. The record spawned the frequently rediscovered college radio hit "Invasion of the Polaroid People" and was later re-released on CD as Kim Fowley's Bad News From The Underworld (Bomp! Records).
La Bonté co-released the classic R. Stevie Moore red vinyl single "New Wave" for Mr. Moore on a Moxie offshoot (CMI Records with then-partner Shari Famous.) La Bonté and Stevie met again on the Internet decades later and the two have since collaborated on several album covers for discs in Mr. Moore's extensive online catalog. La Bonté also contributed musically to the 2004 R. Stevie Moore CD Conscientious Objector.
In the early 90s, La Bonté experimented with virtual reality for the PC, creating fLAtDiSk VR Dreams - a series of virtual reality worlds for IBM PC compatibles. All of the fLAtDiSk VR Dreams were later published in "Virtual Reality Madness and More!", a Book/CD software package from SAMS Publishing. fLAtDiSk SoftWorks offers free downloads of the VR series at the VRContinuum web site.
La Bonté continues to compose and release free music to the web. fLAtDiSk SoftWorks has released thousands of free digital music files since 1994 as mods and MP3s.
