“Why are you melting monkeys mate? And he said, “let me tell you why I’m melting monkeys mate. It’s like microdosing war, brother…”

With its first volume published (launched last month Deptford’s Matchstick Pie House), Ten Minute Tales – founded by writer and musician Sam Golding – offers an exercise in the potentiality of deliberate creative limitation. The rules for this ‘flash fiction’ project are thus: set a timer for ten minutes, write some prose or poetry, and when the clock stops, publish the results without retrospective editing. Closely linked with the underground London music scene, members of Squid, PVA, and Goat Girl have all submitted pieces to this endeavour.

As if presenting an advert for the glorious possibilities of this spontaneous form, Golding has committed one such tale to music, the hilariously violent absurdist monologue “I’m Melting Monkeys, Mate.”

Opening on a bubbling underbed of eerie guitars, when the lo-fi drum beat drops and the truth behind the monkey melting motives are so dramatically revealed, our narrator mutates into some surrealist Mike Skinner; The Streets as if strung out within the warped, pseudo-horror visions of a Mighty Boosh fever dream. It’s side-splittingly nuts.

Ten Minute Tales: Volume 1 is available to buy now.