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Don't, Don't

by Monarcadia

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1.
I allay all. Hey, I'm hate. I'm, when I go through wherever you are. Can you see the revels swarming inside? I've been forming bowed, my Layla. My Layla....
2.
Electric spirits in the night. Intensities glitter in sight. Romance is colorless and it smells like mold: it's trying to be a good friend. I want my solitude again. Origami gyre will I watch unfold. The joy of toys when you're not killing yourself anymore. I'm not the same as I used to be. Why do you want me? Relinquish my authority. Romantic sympathy, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and me-- but loneliness produces where company won't. Sometimes you need to rely on yourself and say your goodbyes-- cliché, I know, but it has truth that holds. The joy of toys when you're not killing yourself anymore. I'm not the same as I used to be. I'm not the sane that I used to be. Why do you want me? Relinquish my authority. Why don't you leave me? Why "I"?
3.
Penelope 04:14
Waiting tonight. Anxiety's high. Awaiting "The Life". Past sunrise. Trying to write. Wish I could fly to you. Everyone's suspicious of the words "true love" --afraid to say, "I love you,"-- but I don't need the OED to define "love". Ovid was right: Apollo, I chide, for being too desperate. Suitors vie. Penelope, hide until I can fly to you. Bricolage of amorous thoughts. I need my art to love you. Will I write another line or be another desperate tool? Everyone's suspicious of the words "true love" --afraid to say, "I love you,"-- but I don't need the OED to define "love". I'd break the chrysalis and fill my wings with blood --"SWAG" in nacreous glamour-- but culture says that nature's had it wrong before. Ovid was right: Apollo, I chide, for being too desperate. Suitors vie. Penelope, hide until I can fly to you. Awaiting life. Will I resign or do something desperate? You and I deserve a life. Sincerely, I love you.
4.
Glam Bam Baby your social graces are a clever, insecure disguise. Like Dorian Gray you won't show; you're faceless. Maybe that's why I'm hypnotized. You're painted so carefree that you're taunting, too abstract expressionistic. Modern Art stop looking at me that way and tell me what follows death of beauty. Will I portray any way, anyway? Will I awaken one day engaged, engaged? I'm in love but I'm afraid, so afraid. Anyway, paint this love and get it framed. Run away, run away, run away or I'll never be the same. You don't know craft from loving me, somehow: in love art becomes the last atom bomb. Don't fake it; Ezra would make it all new right now. Are you a symbol or a sign? Anyway...anyway... Anyway, will I awaken one day engaged, engaged? I'm in love but I'm afraid, so afraid. Anyway, paint this love and get it framed. Run away, run away, run away or I'll never be the same. Did he or she intend what was an accident? Your art is bleeding artifice. Because you and I are a caduceus. I've tried to love the way you want me to.
5.
You're 03:46
6.
Every time we say goodbye a curtain drops: eclipse. The world in shade. And I stand with her burning sphere of light in hand, want to hurl it to the heavens, set the sable drapes ablaze. Why cave and love her just because she's beautiful? Who gave a lover authority? Candle wax melting toward my hands as soon as syzygy arrives. It's not a flare or dynamite 'cause I'm not trying to survive. Why cave and love her just because she's beautiful? Who gave a lover authority? You'd take a lover out of insecurity. Don't sing, Siren, don't say you love me. Indecisive days will be the lonely ones. Yesterday I knew you're the only one. Gonna find a way to reignite the sun, but I won't stay 'cause I don't believe in The One. I won't stay to reignite the sun, gonna find a way to know you're the only one. Yesterday was a lonely one. In decisive days I won't believe in The One. Indecisive days won't reignite the sun; gonna find a way 'cause I don't believe in The One. But I won't stay to be the lonely one. Since yesterday, I know you're the only one. (Why?)
7.
Maybe I don't do all the talking, maybe 'cause I'm far away. My extraplanetary origins make me scary make me make you want to run away, but I can't know what you want: I don't know your consciousness. I want to be gone. Maybe I'll pretend to love another who I'd really love another day, or maybe I'll quit saying "maybe" and decide to quit the hazy, "Eliminate. No, let it stay." I know you don't want me, but people aren't disposable even if they plead. If I die, will it save me, or will I stay anticipating?
8.
Telemachus 06:02
Said she and he were supposed to be a caduceus, not a crucifix. Identity is so lonely. Will I live with it or abandon it? I know I'll leave my home. I know I'm on my own. (Leave alone.) Maybe someday I will find you. Will you never come home? Did he or she pretend everything, or was it an accident? Now they're back again. Did he ever intend to undo what she mended? How long, how long must we go on? We can, we can't go on anymore. (Leave alone.) Maybe someday I will find you. Will you never come home? Won't you ever come home? Never never come home. A lover is Narcissus, necessarily. That's why to love is to be-- I mean, to be lonely. Oh how I hate to be a vanity enabling a love of one with her reflection. My love, I must go. Love, I must go I must go I must go on. (Leave alone.) Maybe someday I will find you. Will you never come home? Never never come home. Will you never come home? Come home alone. Home.
9.
Gold wings tremble: cocoons in my throat. Art meta- morphosing inside of me. I'm in pain. I'm inane. Get out of me. A butterfly's a released idea. Can love be just another medium? Why the shame? Tie the skein. Fly away. Get out of me. Trying to wait. I don't want to go outside; I'm not ready. You don't belong in metaphor. I don't want to go outside; I'm not ok. I don't want to be premature. I don't want to go outside 'til I'm ready. I don't want our love insecure. When I want to go outside finally, I'll set my sail-like wings and fly away. I feel them grow inside of my throat. I hear them utter syllables to fly away, incubate. To fly away, incubate.

about

LINKS TO LYRICS BESIDE EACH TRACK.

BEST HEARD IN HEADPHONES. [PRODUCTION/LINER NOTES BELOW]

Don't, Don't is a semi-autobiographical multimedia (text and music) epic poem and concept album about Romanticism (thinking specifically of the English poets), love, and narcissism in the age of smartphones, social media, and the Internet in general. Homer's The Odyssey was used as an extended literary metaphor for exploring these themes.

[2018 NOTE: I was also very deeply and impossibly in love with someone ("B") at this time of my life, and we were both in relationships already. Making this music was really the only way I could work through everything that I was feeling.]

The title "Don't, Don't" came from a poem called "Ars Poetica (cocoons)" by Dana Levin. This poem also provided the conceptual foundation for my moniker Monarcadia. Link here: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16866
Some things I got from Levin's poem: 1. the butterfly is a symbol for the creative idea; 2. the voice that says "don't, don't" is an important voice because it prevents premature expulsion of an idea (and the comma is important because it suggests even further patience/hesitation); 3. we must be patient with our ideas and let them mature so they can release themselves from our bodies on their own. At least this idea of patience as a creative process, and allowing ideas to incubate, is something that was important to me when making this album.


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Don't, Don't (Pt. I)

When I feel a lump in my throat, I say, "don't, don't." I want to gag and throw up, still I don't, don't. Their wings trembling, you were pulling, still I thought I would wait it out. Is love an idea worth pursuing? Should I just fade out?

I remember that night when you finally unlocked--and later I lay lost at sea and longing--but that night I was floored, literally, chancing my hand up to you blinking restlessly, a beacon on the sofa. Not my hand--I felt your urge to grab my flailing fingers, felt it pulse through the silence like a wild memory fleeing capture by a quick draw mental telephoto lens: a runaway EKG, maybe. But who could ever really know? Maybe love is letting go. Although love could never be forgetting. So still my eyes are on a long shutter speed catching every flair of what light you've spilled on the floor, and trying to hold more than kisses or perfume--the things that make pillows out of people and melt them into puddles. I'm trying to know you through a Polaroid or Pentax snap, and even if my shot comes out blurred I assure you it'll happen. But when am I overexposed? Is love really letting go?

I tell them, "Leave me alone," but they don't, don't. Can you imagine a want that wishes won't? Consuming fear kills ideas, over-incubates them. Release your feelings in a tear or you'll always hate them.

And when it seemed as though I had no more questions, though my stuff-to-say gushed white matter from my nose and ears from restraining it like champagne fizz that practically ejaculates in celebration; but it wasn't sex, instead you simply held me and I held you and we both breathed deeply, the pressure of it all that surrounded us and lately conformed us, shaped us--that pressure felt in our heads and hashtag-scarred backs--yet how our hearts felt for that squeeze of time where your satiny cherry-cola tresses must have been spiked (for I was drunk in milliseconds, like Byron trying to write with his bottle, too soaked and rambling to ever be an adventurer) and your skin was soft with experience like a lost piece of my baby blanket that I would keep to my face until it withered, your steady breath against the trembling crook of my neck, where my pulse beat like freshly formed wings in a chrysalis, fluttering with thoughts of total nudity (that most honest of forms), of escape from the coming-of-age, and fear--oh, I've sat in wheelchairs but never with such quadriplegia.

Get me anesthesia, ipecac, milk of magnesia, anything in a chalice, something for the paralysis that that fear caused in my throat, that made me want to go and wrench open my jaw with jaws of life to liberate those lepidopteran ideas of love in a full swarm butterfly bloom.

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TRACK NOTES ON PRODUCTION AND CONTENT:

Drum loops throughout the album (tracks 2, 3, 6, & 7) were created by live-playing patterns by hand on my keyboard, looping on a loop pedal, then tracked individually into small sections in GarageBand, to allow convenient repetition and arrangement. Drums on tracks 4 and 9 were made with a drum sequencer, and drums on "Telemachus" were played by hand on keyboard, tracked live without looping.

Most of the sounds on this album came from either a Casio WK-500 and Casio XW-P1, with the exception of my voice and any guitar you hear.

I don't have the patience to write my songs in notation, so I use recording as a mode of writing. These songs were not created and then recorded; they were created ("written") and edited as they were being recorded. In many cases a song would start with a musical phrase that I would record, and the song would just develop on its own, bit by bit.


Intro (My Layla)

I borrowed the name Layla from the Derek & the Dominos Song, out of a belief that this song's fame transformed a fictional name (which Eric Clapton used in reference to Pattie Boyd) into a signifier for an artist's muse/lover, commonly called the "object of someone's desire/affections". I was obviously entering this tradition by writing music for and about someone who I was in love with; I hoped to use this album lyrically as a way of exploring that idea and perhaps complicating it. The entire album is largely an extended meditation on the relationship between romantic love and the self, so labeling my speaker's muse/subject as "my Layla" seemed fitting, especially since this intro appeals to the muse like Homer does in his introductions. Sonically the vowel sounds and alveolar "L" also worked really well with the vocal.


m-u-s-i-c-[space]

I was typing out a facebook post that just read "music music music music music" etc. and the rhythm of the typing led me to simply move my fingers over to the WK-500 and live-loop a drum beat into my loop pedal from that pattern, then tracking the loop for several minutes in GarageBand. The sped-up sections at the end were achieved with track trimming in Garageband. I thought of this song as a kind of anti-Romantic manifesto that seeks to claim and struggles with the individualistic singular authority of the Romantic poet-prophet figure. This track is one of my personal favorites on this album.


Penelope

Penelope is a song about B, inspired by classical mythology. I thought of the dynamic between Odysseus and Penelope in Homer's The Odyssey as a perfect analog for long-distance romantic longing in the digital age. I was deeply immersed in such a relationship when I wrote this song, and it seemed very dramatic and impossible. The Roman poet Ovid is also mentioned in here, referring to the myth of Apollo and Daphne in Metamorphoses, where Daphne gets transformed into a tree by her father in order to escape the desperate and lecherous Apollo. The speaker of this song is obviously mythologizing his own personal romance. Some drum loops were trimmed down in GarageBand to create the rapid clacks/claps.


d'Fission Sea

The drum loops in this song were made differently than on any other songs. I used a drum sequencer here, setting up several different patterns and then live-tracking them by triggering in the proper order, playing the triggers like an instrument. The psychedelic sounds at the beginning were made with found water sounds (I had used the Voice Memo function on my iPhone 4 to record a typical rainy day in Eugene, OR) effected with a Boss ME-50, the knobs and pedals of which I, again, played like an instrument. The mention of "Ezra" refers to Ezra Pound, who invented the slogan "Make It New!" I think of this song and "Telemachus" as a pair in the same meditation.


You're

The interlude! Most of the sounds in this (except the white noise in the background, the WK-500 in the first few seconds, and the vocal "oohs" in various pitches) were made with my Cordoba CWE-S acoustic-electric guitar, treated with various effects on the ME-50. The percussive sounds were my fingers tapping on the body of the guitar. Track panning was done in GarageBand. Throughout the song many things may sound like synth, but believe it or not, they're either individual guitar notes or guitar chords heavily effected and colliding with other sounds in the mix! The white noise was provided by my sister Addy, who gave me a recording that she'd captured with her phone's Voice Memo function. I routed her recording through my ME-50 and played the pedal like an instrument; it really filled out the song well, and was exactly what the song was, at that time, missing. Everything was live-tracked in short segments and then arranged in GarageBand, except the lead guitar (CWE-S through pitch shifter on the ME-50) in the latter half, which was one improvised live take. It was really fun experimenting with track trimming and arrangement in GarageBand to create this composition. I never get sick of listening to this song. I think it's my single absolute favorite on this album, and probably impossible to recreate live. Hilariously ironic, considering all of the effort I put into this album's lyrical content.


For Shade (My Lady)

This came from a poem I wrote, which had to be rewritten to work as lyrics. "For Shade" was an inside joke between B and me. I think it was a riff on the phrase "for sure". I wanted "My Lady" to recall "My Layla" in a way, resuming after the interlude.
The synth part was played by hand and tracked live. One day I'd like to issue a new mix to amplify the synth part, because I think the synth really got buried here.
Stylistically, I was inspired by Donna Summer, Grimes, and Blue Hawaii with this song, especially with the vocal layers and vocal samples toward the end of the song. I also recorded vocal samples and played them live on my sampler, panning in GarageBand later.
Lyrically here I was inspired by the poet Tyehimba Jess. I saw Jess read live at the University of Oregon in late 2010 or early 2011 and he presented a poem that he referred to structurally as a "piano roll," which was written in lines that could be read in a number of different sequences. I wanted to create a similar type of lyric that involved re-arrangeable phrases to produce new meanings. I'm always doing this sort of thing in my lyrics, playing with spellings and homophones, homographs, and heteronyms. That's part of the poet in me; my poetry has also always been very sonic/musical. Since I'm forever interested in language as a sonic and visual (written) phenomenon, in many of my songs the written lyrics add meaning to the song beyond the sonic layer. I consider text and sound as different approaches to the same subject. Since I'm a poet and a musician, with this album I also was really into the idea of making something I thought could qualify as "literary music." Whether I achieved that is really not up to me.


Neither Here KnorDob

If you look on YouTube, there's a music video of this song made by Julian Scalia (a.k.a. Juju Saturn). It features an early (unofficial) version of my Monarcadia logo. Julian and I met after a show I played in Albuquerque, NM and he graciously made the video totally for free. We shot the video at the same time as the video for the song "Drugs" by my friend Sidney (Midas Bison). Thank you Julian! The last word of "Neither Here KnorDob" is spelled in a way that highlights its origins as a spoonerism. It was an inside joke between B and me. This was, incidentally, the first song I completed, ever, under the moniker Monarcadia, and was made well before I conceived of a concept album exploring love as a subject. This song has much more to do with the self--and is more blatantly autobiographical--than any other song here, and in ordering the album, I realized retrospectively that it had still been made in the same spirit as the other songs, so it had to be included. I think it fits nicely. The WK-500 was used to create the drum sounds here. I honestly cannot remember how I made the warbly-static-buzzing sounds at the end of the song--probably why I've never been able to recreate those sounds since.


Telemachus

Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, and in the first book of the Odyssey, longs for his father's long-overdue return from the Trojan War; Athena galvanizes Telemachus into sailing with a crew to search for news of Odysseus. The opening lines refer back to "d'Fission Sea", and I see this song as a kind of follow-up to that song. I guess I thought of this song as mostly interior monologue from Telemachus (the son of a man and woman whose love is tortured and challenged by distance), containing his shifting attitudes about love, his father, and his own affections. This song is very personal to me and an emotional rollercoaster to sing and perform. The seagull and bubbly seafoam sounds were made by tapping on my Stratocaster routed through delay. The reggaeton beat that I made for the second half of the verse was one of those things that just came to me suddenly somewhere in the momentum of the writing process, and I just had to include it. Another favorite of mine for sure.


Don't, Don't, Pt. II

Since Part I is the prose poem that precedes these notes, here is Part II. The cracks in the second half of the song were made by thwacking a large stalk of bamboo that I chopped from outside of my apartment in Eugene, OR, and brought back to Las Vegas, NV with me. This song emerged randomly after recording "d'Fission Sea" by a happy accident where I triggered an arpeggiator on my then-new XW-P1 (you'll notice that the synth patch used at the end of "d'Fission Sea" is the same as that in this song). The whole song was written and recorded in under a half hour since I was just that inspired to have that intense of momentum and didn't want to lose the fire. Lyrically this song borrows the most heavily from Levin's poem, and reflects my hermetic state at the time of recording. It's also totally a ripoff of Panda Bear, stylistically.

Thanks for listening and appreciating!
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credits

released September 17, 2013

Dana Levin, you may never read this, but without "Ars Poetica (cocoons)", Monarcadia would not even exist. Thank you.


Personnel:

Alaric López: all vocals, guitars, keyboards, sampler, pedals, and self-captured found sounds.

Addy López: white noise on "You're".


All songs (music & lyrics) written/recorded and mixed by Alaric López in his bedroom studios in Eugene, OR (March to September 2012) and later, Las Vegas, NV (September 2012-July 2013).


Mastering by Sidney Johnson (Midas Bison) in Madison, WI.


Thanks to YOU for listening, enormous thanks for appreciating and thinking.

Thanks to B for painting the cover art; this album is for you.

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Monarcadia

Monarcadia is musician, intermedia artist, and poet Alaric López.

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