A short talk with Koko from Aero Gros M on dance records for shitty parties, anti-consumerism, and mental health.
Diogo: What attracts you to vocal morphing?
Koko: We're afraid of our voice so we change it. We used to alter our voice digitally, but we've been training it over the course of a few months for it to sound better. We were inspired by a Madlib interview where I think he mentioned something about how he pitch shifts his voice since he doesn't like how it sounds unaltered and we kept that in the back of our head for years. Fun fun very fun!! My larynx is becoming small.
Diogo: According to your Bandcamp page, you come from Santa Cruz, CA. Could you elaborate on the usage of Spanish expressions on both your most recent album's title, Tu Novio Es Una Telaraña ("Your Fiancé Is A Spiderweb"), and some of the tracks in the record?
Koko: [...] There's probably a lot I could say about each individual song but that'd be a waste of time. My memories regarding that album's creation are really foggy because I tried to kill myself around the time it was released. If I recall correctly, we were dealing with episodes of PTSD and the only way we could properly communicate at the time was in Spanish or with the accent we had when we were first learning English, but at the same time we wanted to make a fun dance record for shitty parties. I'd say we failed gloriously. Every part slowly melts down into a mental breakdown because of how difficult it was to keep up a cheery facade during every track. One of our members is a religious teacher who's developing her own faith and language. She helps write a lot of our songs in the language she's developed, so the rough translation to English gives our lyrics an unintentional sense of surrealism. She often brings up a term that means something along the lines of "manmade spiderwebs", which she uses as a metaphor for the bourgeoisie. I only wrote a few of the songs (1-3, 1-5, 1-8, 2-11, and 3-1) and most of them are aggressive tangents to my philosophical and political opinions.
Diogo: Would you be kind enough to elaborate on the "faith" and "language" that are being created by one of your fellow bandmates? Is this linguistic and mental revolution born out of dissatisfaction with the current alternatives?
Koko: Yes, definitely! I've been friends with her for years and I've followed closely with her spiritual endeavors ever since we met, but my decayed sense of time and reality makes it difficult to illustrate a clear picture of our history together. If I remember correctly, our mutual resentment for commercialism and imperialism inspired her to seek a purer faith, and her beaming optimism and passion for learning's been what's kept a lot of us alive. My personal understanding of her morals and philosophies is a lot vaguer than what Dede knows. I think they've gotten closer in recent months because they both experience an identical or similar phenomenon related to their sense of hearing, which is also related to the way they speak to each other. My most refined sense is my sight, so it's a lot harder for me to immediately relate to them, as well as my ever-persistent paranoia making it nigh impossible for me to sit down and listen properly. I'm too tense and impulsive, and even if both Dede and her have been really patient with me, I'm too much of a wreck to properly convey their ideas in this interview and I'm not going to attempt to because I'm afraid of publicly misrepresenting them and their beliefs. I don't even know if they're monotheistic or not.
Diogo: "Manmade spiderwebs" is an interesting metaphor. Could you reveal some other examples of surrealist expressions that exist in this language?
Koko: As for how the language works, you'd have to ask Dede about that, but I've noticed a few repeating phrases and themes written by that other member, like how she uses vasectomies and imagery related to infertility to allude to artists submitting to commercialism or creative bankruptcy. Other random examples of images she's written that she's explained to me are: "melting bishop", referring to someone with industry connections but no self-confidence or self-identity; the color pink, which, to her, symbolizes claustrophobia in an interchangeably physical or psychological sense, "cremation of angels" referring to con artists using faux-spirituality to push a product, the chemical element Indium referring to people who are easily impressionable and have superficial motives, and "pill bugs" as a metaphor for vulnerably wallowing in a state of depression.
Her shining moment, in my eyes, is probably the first few lines from that song we named after lovesliescrushing. It started off as a joke until she got involved and decided to do something with that stupid instrumental Dede made during a laughing fit. The verse describes a scenario in which some corporate executive finds a small impressionable artist's catalog like a megalodon shark smelling the blood from a finger pricked by a splinter, and then claims said artist has some futuristic divine gift. Entranced by this praise, the artist is lured into a community that, instead of being a center for creative opportunity, quickly reveals itself to be stone-hearted and depressing, and passes on these traits to their new member.
I've also noticed she uses icebergs as a metaphor for the enigmatic or obscure, seemingly as a direct reference to that trendy new alternative to making top 10 lists. The line "trapped inside a whale under an iceberg on a blue day" references this as well as the Book of Jonah because we were going through a spiritual crisis at the time and decided to reference Abrahamic religions a handful of times throughout both of our albums. It means basking in social isolation during a depressive episode and being kept from death by sheer will. The phrase "iceberg trip" is used later in the record and refers to the exploitation of sensationalists easily amused by anything marketed as enigmatic or experimental in order to make a profit. Making buck off of convincing some desperate journalists and YouTubers that your shamelessly self-indulgent exotica is boundary-pushing electronic music. An ex-member of ours accused us of being the same despite her being the one who tried to turn us into monotonous pop musicians and our two previous albums were protests against her selfish decision-making that led to our sound turning so stale. We've kicked her out of the group permanently but she still tries to stalk and harass. Oh well. I punched a tooth out of her mouth a few weeks ago after I realized she was still spying on me. That was fun. Oh well.
Diogo: You mention that you wanted to make a "fun dance record for shitty parties". What are the first songs that come to your mind when you think about this concept? What would you play at your own "shitty party"?
Koko: I can't think of any specific example of such artists or songs indulging in that formula and I'm afraid to give any out of some overly-emotional and paranoid impulse. I know Dede and one of our ex-members have been working frivolously together making tongue-in-cheek uptempo dance-pop collages during their spare time and I get confused whenever they show them to me. One of those mixes eventually turned into the skeleton of what would later become tu novio es una telaraña, so if we were to play in some neon pink house party in the hellscape that is middle-class California, we'd probably perform something like that.
Diogo: I really enjoy the pop-punk reinvention in the segment in "Tu Novio Es Una Telaraña" that starts around 04:30, so I've got two questions regarding this particular moment: 1) Where does the melody originate from?; 2) What is your opinion on the genre's reappraisal by online communities? Personally, I think it derivates from the fact that a big percentage of this generation's music journalists, as well as the artists themselves, grew up listening to pop-punk: not only on YouTube or the radio, but also on Cinema, Television, and even mundane situations.
Koko: I didn't write that song so I can't remember. I think one of us slowed down a Wet Nurse song and started jamming on the keyboards over it. I don't keep up with online music circles much, I didn't know there was a pop-punk revival or anything. Last time I checked, it was just being reinvented and reimagined into new sounds much like any other memorable and recognizable movement in music.
Diogo: The transitions between songs can be smooth or rough, but the record, as a whole, never fails to sound cohesive. Is there a logic behind the order of the tracks?
Koko: The whole record was made on three separate FLP files and the further into each part we'd get, the more unhinged we'd become because of our waning mental stability plaguing us during the entire writing process.
Diogo: What is that building behind the animated character in the cover of Tu Novio Es Una Telaraña? How would you describe your musical persona Aesthetics?
Koko: A Mayan temple in Palenque which is now Chiapas. We thought its inclusion would be cheesy and tacky which is how we try to approach a lot of our album art because some of us are a buncha sarcastic anti-consumerist chucklefucks (including me).
Diogo: This is something that we've been trying to develop during our latest set of interviews: please select a picture (anything, really) taken from the Internet and explain the reasons behind your choice.
Koko: Uduki's like 30 years old by now.
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