Help! by Ariel My Friend

• This album is entirely improvised, except for the first track for which I already had the idea of what to do.

• Every song is inspired purely by the track names on the correlating Beatles album, and was recorded immediately after checking the name of the song to be played.

• It was recorded recorded within 3.5 hours at night, and was edited and released the following day.

• The base improvised layer for every song is me with an acoustic guitar with some additional drum and cymbal hits.

• Any additional layer (drums, ukulele, toy glockenspiel, recorder, sitar, rototoms, shaker, etc.) was recorded without listening to the rest of them.

• No take was stopped midway or re-recorded - it's all 1st takes.


And now in more detail:

A recorded improvisation which took place on the night between 27th and 28th April 2024 between 00:57 and 04:31, at Chefetage, of an idea which came to my head a few days prior.

This is how it went down: after arriving back home from Gieszerfest which took place on April 27th I picked up my recording gear (my laptop, soundcard and new condenser mic) and my ukulele and headed to Chefetage. After setting everything up I picked up a black classical guitar which was lying around and which would help me record the base improvisational track. After detuning it a bit I started recording the tracks, starting from track #2 all the way to #14 and then finally I recorded track #1 - the reason I did it like that is because I already had an idea in mind for the 1st track, an idea which came together with the idea for the entire album, and the idea was to really scream "help!" over and over again, after which I might not have been able to properly record the rest of the album. In the end my voice was already quite ruined anyway when it was time to record track #1, but it is what it is. Beside the title track, I vaguely remembered some titles of some tracks on this album, but I intentionally didn't look further into it and didn't think of the titles and what song could be made out of them so it all comes out fresh on the spot.
Along the way it occurred to me that it would be nice to have some accompanying tracks with other instruments on top of the base tracks, so I used all kinds of different instruments which were lying in the room (plus my ukulele) on tracks which I thought could benefit from them. The instruments included a drumkit (consisting of a kick drum, a high tom, a floor tom, a crash, a hihat and a snare drum which was standing apart from the rest of the kit - each instrument played separately), a plastic recorder, Rototoms (played using my hands), a toy glockenspiel, some oriental looking string instrument (played using a plastic lighter), a wooden guiro, an orange shaped shaker and a sitar. I recorded these extra layers without hearing the base recording while doing so.

After recording everything I needed I took the photos of me posing like The Beatles on their album Help!.

The editing was very minimal (almost exclusively limited to setting the levels between the different instruments in every song and the levels between one song to the other), and it took place later that day (28th April), from around 13:00, until the album was finally released at around 19:00.

I've been transcribing the lyrics the following days (finishing the chore on 1st May at 00:21) - I knew I wanted to do that as soon as possible while the improvised ideas were fresh in my head, so I can decipher any possible ambiguous words based on my memory from the session - a decision which proved fruitful.

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Addition, 1st May 2024, 00:46 - Oh my god, I remember exactly what started my idea, which I'll tell you now - on 24th April (I checked now in my Internet browser history) I've watched a YouTube video essay on the James Maharaj channel, called "Ten Interesting Facts About The Beatles I Want You (She's So Heavy)", and at 08:28 John Lennon is quoted saying "...when it gets down to it, when you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me', you just scream" - which made me think of the Beatles song "Help!" and what it would be like if it was all just filled with screams for help, which in turn sparked the idea of going through the entire "Help!" album and using merely the titles of the tracks to create a totally different interpretation for each of them.

Hi, I'm Ariel, and I like to make music, videos and other things. My music is done independently, and so are my videos and album covers, with the occasional help from good friends.

Please head over to arielmyfriend.com to check out some stuff that was too revolutionary for Bandcamp to handle!

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