ACT I:
The Trees Are Bare (Prelude)
Hyena Love Pt. II
Born In Squirts
Brain Damage Dog
Fuck Up/Family Man
Epitomy Of A Woman

ACT II:
Crowded With Worms
Pooka Love
Daddy Does Fine
Jellyhole Motherfucker
Mean Things
Hyena in a ID zone
Recess Is Over (Finale)
Hyena Love Pt. 666 (Coda)

Monsters From The Id was a home-recording project by one Joel Sotelo, then resident of Citrus Heights, California. Although the j-card is undated, its appearance in the reviews section of Autoreview #2 suggests 1995-96.

These are hypnotic, narcotic, dream-state sounds, floating and dissolving at a slow, steady pace throughout, but this music is too alienated and disturbing to be considered ambient. David Lynch would like it. Comparisons to The Residents are inescapable, but that was a band; Lotero’s music is defined by loneliness.

Human voices drift in and out of Hyena Love, but they are merely found sounds, as distant from this reality as the rings of Saturn. Joel’s voice is at all times soaked and twisted with reverb, flanger, and fuzzbox, when it can be heard at all. The space-funk jam “Pooka Love” is an exception, revealing Sotelo’s soulful, drawling, Zappa-like baritone.

Zappa’s “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” was almost certainly an influence on Hyena Love, and not just because it’s a concept album about a smallish mammal. Sotelo’s solipsism, the intricacy of his sonically dense arrangements, his adventurous ideas, and the meticulous way he’s assembled this waking nightmare of a tape would make Frank smile. Or at least, smirk.