Monkey's Depressed from Other Things by Ariel My Friend

👁 👁 . . . ︶︶

Your friend stood too close to the firework holding a candle on her head. You watched her from the 7th floor, dancing in the courtyard garden, bursting into flames. The other friends around her didn't notice. You tried to shout but they couldn't hear. By the time you arrived at the scene she has already transformed into a 3-meter tall Big Boy fiberglass figure, kneeling down with a big fiberglass hammer in its hand. As you came closer, its eyes rolled slowly towards you; a villain; looking to destroy you and your friends.

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

You came back home with your mother and brother from a two-week vacation. Your brother opened the door to one of the rooms and was shocked at the sight inside. He called you and your mother to come and have a look. Inside the room were a handful of dead piglets, maybe 6, with skeletons for bodies and only their heads remaining. On the back side of the room there was a bed, and underneath it, right on the edge of the shadow, was another piglet. It was alive, and eating quite frantically at a piece of piglet meat. These piglets had belonged to your mother when she was a child but had been forgotten in this room and turned to cannibalism to survive. You burst into tears at the thought that this little piglet had to do such horrible things to stay alive and urged your mother and brother to keep it and take good care of it. The surviving piglet had a nice life from then on, lying on its side under a sunbeam in the living room, in 2 different locations, with eyes closed and a content look on its face.

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Six o'clock news; an amateur film director, who also portrays the superhero in his independent superhero film, went alone with his camera to a bridge above a highway. He set the camera in place, tied his feet to a rope and his hands to his body before throwing himself off, hanging upside down, just high enough from the road for cars to smash into him, as the final scene for his film where the superhero dies. A passing car knocks him off immediately and continues to drive. A dangling body full of blood, whose movements are only decided by the wind, is shown for way too long on the TV screen. The children start to cry, they're traumatized, I should've changed the channel.

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed

Baby is stressed, monkey's depressed
Baby is stressed, monkey's in bed
credits
from Other Things, released May 29, 2024
The chorus for this song came to my head probably around December 2019, I don't remember how. It came together with the notion of having multiple voices singing it in unison, and it somehow connected to me to the style of Frank Ocean, although I don't even know if it's really his style of singing - I don't remember if and what I've listened to by him - but it somehow always connected with him in my head. Probably I've sung it differently than I had imagined anyway.
Then I had to come up with verses. I came up with the chords which somehow continue the surprise modulation in the choruses, and if you don't understand this line then don't worry about it, it's mostly for myself and you can ask me about it if you're curious. Then I needed to find some lyrics, right? I started writing all kinds of absurd things down, gathering options/ideas, and then I also started writing down some weird/intersting/disturbing dreams I had - and eventually I was left with those 3 stories, all of which were dreams of mine. Dream #2 (“piglets”) was dreamt on 23rd July 2022, dream #3 (“amateur film director”) was dreamt on 1st December 2021, and I don't know when exactly dream #1 (“Big Boy fiberglass figure”) was dreamt, but it was the first one I dreamt out of the three.
Sarah narrates the dreams. She's a text-to-speech voice from the website Narakeet -
www.narakeet.com/app/text-to-audio/
So, at some point it occurred to me that I want this song to be filled with electronic noises on top of it. This is something I can do digitally but in quite a limited way, as I can't turn multiple knobs at once as I'd be able to do with a physical synthesizer. On 18th May 2023 my friend Darko forwarded me an info message, about an introduction to modular sound synthesis workshop, led by Gregor Pfeffer, that's gonna take place the next Sunday, on 21st May, and proposed that we go there together. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity for me to get accustomed with some physical synthesizers, so I accepted Darko's proposal. Eventually though, Darko couldn't make it, so I attended the workshop by myself. It took place at the Aquarium (Riebeckstraße 21, Leipzig), from 14:00 to 18:00. In the workshop I met a few people who owned a modular synthesizer, one of which was Christian Ossen (“Morog Far”) - who I contacted later (on 3rd June 2023), asking if I could possibly come by with my gear and record some improvisations with his equipment. Christian kindly agreed, and so the recording session took place at his place on 6th June, at 16:00. Christian set up a pretty simple setup (to my request) and explained the basic function of each of the available knobs, and so I ended up doing 6 takes, going through the song and improvising a different tweaking of knobs each time. I ended up using 5 of those takes in the song, all played on top of each other simultaneously.

I have epilepsy. On 23rd May 2023 I attended a routine EEG test, in which you have to keep your eyes closed most of the time, but open them whenever the tester tells you to. So as the test went on, and my tester telling me to open my eyes (“Öffne mal deine Augen”) and close them again (“...und wieder schließen”), I realized that I really liked the sound of this situation, in any aspect - the way my tester was saying these commands was just so ordinary, and very official, exactly as if it was a boring test she'd done a thousand times, and the acoustic of the room was so cold - it all sounded like a very authentic piece of life which I could implement in Monkey's Depressed (which indeed I happened to work on at that time - it was just 2 days after the modular sound synthesis workshop!), and I felt a huge regret for not letting my phone record the entire test. But I wasn't ready to give up yet. The idea that came up to my mind was to conspire with my friend Bili Rubin (who happens to have epilepsy too, but this is not even that relevant), and have him schedule an appointment for an EEG at the exact same practice, and at the exact same timeframe and day of the week (early afternoon on a Tuesday - to maximize the chances of him having the same tester), to which he'd show up equipped with 2 cellular phones to record the entire thing from 2 different angles (his pocket and his jacket on the other side of the room). Bili was down for the scheme, but making the call for scheduling the appointment kept being delayed as he was very busy at that time, until I finally called the practice on 18th September and made an appointment for myself, telling them that I just had a minor epileptic episode. This... was not true. But there was no other way for me to schedule an appointment for myself so soon after my previous one, and I really had to have this recording in my song. The appointment was scheduled for the next day, 19th September. I really didn't expect to be able to attend the test so soon. Luckily, the next day was a Tuesday, and we scheduled the test for 13:00 - and whether that mattered or not, I ended up getting the same tester. So indeed, this time I showed up equipped with 2 cell phones and recorded the entire process. The commands for opening and closing the eyes during the test can be heard in the beginning of the song, at 0:09 and 0:19, respectively.

As for the recording of the piano parts, my pal Maurice Trentzsch helped me with that. It took place at his old studio at Torgauer Str. 78, Leipzig, on 10th and 24th June 2023, right before he moved out of there. On the initial session, on the 10th, the recording of the piano parts for the verses and choruses was made in the “usual” way of playing piano - playing the entire chords one after the other - while the opening was recorded in a different way: each note was recorded separately, so to speak - and in multiple different octaves - to get a fuller and more impactful sound. Later at home, upon listening to the recordings, I figured that the chorus piano ought to be recorded in the same way. This is why Maurice and I eventually met again, on the 24th, to re-record the chorus piano in that special way of playing the notes separately and in multiple octaves.

Phone drafts:
amfsphonedrafts.bandcamp.com/album/monkeys-depressed

Tracklist

13.	Monkey's Depressed	5:00

Credits

from Other Things, released December 8, 2024

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