Masks and Monsters

Masks and Monsters is the pandemic record. Fourth in the early Scoobert run, after Dragon Ball $d, and the moment the project stops using cartoons only as escape mythology and starts using them as survival language for real-time collapse.

Finding $D is the one-day lab notebook. Swami’s is the lore dump. Dragon Ball $d is the narrative hip-hopera. Masks and Monsters is the pandemic self-portrait. Luke Francis Walton wrote, played, mixed, and mastered the whole thing in North Park, San Diego, while the world was very small. Babidi (Taylor James / J MESA) cowrote and sings on Quarantine and Chill and My Mind Is Slowly Slipping. Gokudaxij (Eric Radloff) cowrote and sings on Happy Birthday. Everything else is Luke. Cover art by Gentle Giant Illustrations.

Bandcamp Masks & Monsters (LP) dropped August 11, 2020 ($8 or more, 24-bit/88.2kHz). Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer all list 18 tracks, about fifty minutes, ℗ 2020 Beformer. The visual album calls it explicitly “my full pandemic record.” Not an album that happened to come out in 2020; the pandemic document.

The cartoon shell is still there: Shaggy, Mystery Machine, monster language, goofy title logic. The emotional center is much more direct: It Can Get Worse, Creature Comfort, When It’s Over, Pandemic Blues, A Good Life, My Mind Is Slowly Slipping, Corona. Masks work literally (COVID) and mythologically (Scoobert’s older costume-and-avatar world). The songs are still funny, but the joke no longer feels like decoration. It feels like a pressure valve. Last Day Deaf caught the Scooby Doo naming story; the Critical Meme Reader later treated the record as memetic production in practice.

The closer is Derrida Makes a Différance: cosmic nihilism, matter puns, family as grounding. That’s the philosophical thread the rest of the catalog keeps pulling on. What comes next is Little Hug: re-entry after the pandemic record.