Imagine thinking multiple people are playing the role of your friend....
Or that you house has duplicated itself and another you has moved into the other house next door?
This concept album's titles refer to actual conditions that people experience. Some might happen to anyone during a migraine or bad fall, or when exposed to incredible art. Others might arise from halving a brain, temporarily from mysterious causes during adolescence, from having a persuasive partner with a delusion, from watching too much TV, from noticing being surveilled in a world that isn't as it's presented to be ... and so much more.
Each story song has a different protagonist POV singing (me) a dramatic depiction of his or her dreamlike world. Their stream of consciousness fugues are supported by lush rhythmic, electronically produced music taking advantage of modern technology, riffing off sounds like future-synth and adventuring into wilder sonic territories and consciousness vignettes. Elements of industrial, post-romantic, avant-garde soundtrack...
These are portrayals of fictional characters, and some of them are more accomplished singers than others. They're just expressing their subconscious ponderings as they work through their bewilderment.
As always, Sound Animal music is Experimental. There are elements of ambient and dark ambient, though there's no black and white line drawn here. Some characters wander lost and wistful, wondering, bewildered in a dreamy surreal landscape with quirky, vividly colorful surprises everywhere. One trudges through an emotional storm on a cumulatively reverberating circus merry-go round in Grass is Greener Syndrome. One listens to her other self in the house next door through the pipes in Reduplicative Paramnesia. But they all do their best to adopt gracefully to their unnerving cinematic situations. Respect.
I'm a fiction writer used to empathetically entering the minds of literary characters to dramatize their experiences. These little stories are all inspired by these fascinating psychological delusions, neurological malfunctions, amazing conditions, weird syndromes, little known behaviors, common obsessions. One of the syndromes is named after what an author dramatized: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. A lugubrious duet between someone's hands who are perpetually fighting references a syndrome named after the film Dr. Strangelove Syndrome.
Some delusions could happen to anyone under normal circumstances, like when a fervent captor begins to favor the captive, called the Lima Delusion. (Assuming holding someone hostage for political reasons is normal for you.) That character's voice, as he urged his captive to show her love for him before he killed her, was inspired by a video of David Bowie imitating various singers, including Tom Waits.
I've known many people with delusions on this list, and I had one as well. (I’m sure we all feel a large part of the world experience Folie a Beaucoup.) Cheers to individuals who suffer from these beautifully poetic beliefs and behaviors. The characters in the songs are meant to be specific fictional stylized individuals rather than representing the groups.
We hear people who believe they are turning into animals living in a forest, gently humming together, in Clinical Lycanthropy. And an absurd bouncy version riffing off the easily startled lumberjacks in “The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome,” aah! ahh! ahh!
A man rants to his future afterlife slaves in “Delusions of Immortality”. He could easily be in charge of some global decisions that affect us every day. He could be the one using propaganda and theater to fool the populace into a Folie a Beaucoup. He could be the one watching the "paranoid" man in “Truman Show Delusion.”