Penelope - EP by Monarcadia

Preview for the upcoming album "Don't, Don't".

Straight from the bedroom studio.


Some notes on lyrical content and sound production:


Penelope

Penelope is a song 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.

Drum loops created by live looping keyboard tones, then tracking them individually into GarageBand, to allow convenient repetition and arrangement. Some loops were trimmed down in Garageband to create the rapid clacks/claps.


Neither Here KnorDob

If you look on YouTube, there's a music video of this song made by Julian Scalia (Juju Saturn). It features an early (unofficial) version of my Monarcadia logo. Julian and I met after I 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 the person who Penelope was written about and me. This was, incidentally, the first song I completed under the moniker Monarcadia.

The drum and synth sounds were made on the same keyboard and separately live tracked. I honestly cannot remember how I made the warbly-static-buzzing sounds at the end of the song--exactly why I could never recreate those sounds live.


Spelling Out

This song was made in less than an hour, and was an experiment in lightning-fast song creation. I simply said "yes" to every impulse I had in the moment. The loops are some combination of my guitar and some stuff played on keyboard. The drums, again, were played live from the Casio into a loop pedal, and then tracked into GarageBand. This is a studio-exclusive song that would be impossible for me to exactly replicate live. This song is also about my name, and the frustration of having been born with a name that I have to introduce people to and educate people about because it's so rare, and because people always ask me "what is the origin of that name?" or some variant. The monologue at the end is a series of responses to extremely common questions I receive when I introduce myself to someone. I thought it would be funny to include.

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

}:¥:{

Since 2012