Photo by Shawn Brackbill

Words by Andrew Parks

When Nicolas Jaar was still learning how to crawl, his father, world-renowned installation artist Alfredo Jaar, took a picture of the infant New Yorker in a barren area between East and West Berlin—a striking black and white image that looks as if it’s captured a baby who’s been left behind on the moon. This past year, the producer found himself revisiting this photo as he worked to complete the woozy dream world of his truly bizarre Space Is Only Noise LP.

“One of the album’s main ideas is that ‘space’ can mean so many things,” says Jaar, taking a break from studying a Gabriel García Márquez book at Brown University. (The 21-year-old is a comparative-literature major, fluent in Spanish, English and French.) “It can mean the space in music, or silence. It can mean the galaxy, or it can mean the spaces we live in. Noise also has a lot of different connotations, so as a whole, those two things—space and noise—become very loaded when they’re put together.”

Laid out like a seamless DJ set, Space Is Only Noise sees Jaar sifting through 70 tracks and “curating” his past to tell a story that’s both personal and open to interpretation. In the following exclusive track-by-track breakdown, the artist discusses “about one or two percent of what it’s actually about”…

Photo by Aaron Richter

Like most serious music fans, self-titled spends most days devouring records across hard drives, streaming services and our trusty office turntable. That’s why we’re devoting the next month to deconstructing LPs we loved from throughout the year. Here’s one of them, complete with the entire album streaming…

The Artist/Album: HTRK, Work (work, work) (Ghostly)

Why It’s Worth Hearing: Easily one of the year’s most misunderstood records, Work (work, work) has nothing to do with “witch house,” or any other obvious trends for that matter. Bleak but beautiful, it’s driven by sneaky synths and beats that go bump in the night, as if all of the blood was drained from the instrumentals on a coldwave record.

That doesn’t mean it’s bloodless, however. Or as Pitchfork put it earlier this year, “unappetizingly narcotized and drab.” The comfortably numb sound that Nigel Yang, Jonnine Standish and Sean Stewart—the bassist who took his own life in the middle of making this album—painstakingly maintain on all 10 tracks is the whole point here. You should feel like you’re slowly being submerged in a water torture chamber as each track unfolds in a way that feels overtly sexual yet strangely detached, an unflinching mix of disillusionment and detachment that ends with the telling line “It’s just business, baby.”

Through and through, this is what the xx would sound like in a world without hope, with bass lines rumbling off in the distance, exposed electrical lines snaking through your speakers and melodies slipping through the shadows like a lover who’s simply given up.

Check out what we mean in Standish and Yang’s exclusive track-by-track commentary below, or download a special mix featuring Stewart’s unfinished recordings here.

Available At: Amazon · Ghostly · Insound · iTunes · Spotify

As you’re about to hear, all of the above comes true on Keep Your Dreams, from its live wire loops and seamless sequencing to the helpful hands and hooks of special guests from Nite Jewel, Tame Impala and more. Make sense of it all alongside the duo’s exclusive track-by-track breakdown below…

1. Circadia
We like the idea of our music existing in some strange other world. “Circadia,” to us, evokes a feeling like you’re entering another realm. We always wanted to have something kind of atmospheric and swirling as the first piece of music on the album, so pretty soon after making this we figured it would probably go first.

2. Under a Blue Sky
We wrote this fairly late in the [recording process]. I think we felt like the album could use a bit more frantic energy, and also something with a bit of an odd arrangement. This is what we ended up with. We really enjoy exploring the possibilities that come from combining live instrumentation with programmed and sequenced sounds. We were hoping to achieve one of those listening experiences where you sort of get sucked in and have no idea where something is headed and then all of a sudden it’s over and you’re not really sure what happened. A bit like diving head first into one of those twisty tube water slide things.

3. My Rescue
This was one of those songs that came together pretty quickly and spontaneously. Neither of us were feeling very inspired and so we were just messing with some sounds in our studio. I sequenced a really repetitive synth line on our Sequential Circuits Pro-One and then ran it through this phase-shifter pedal and both of our ears pricked up because it started to sound pretty cool. We left it playing and jammed some chords over the top of it, Ryan got some drums happening and that’s pretty much how the song came about. We started writing the lyrics and when Nick Allbrook (Pond, Tame Impala) was in town for the day we managed to coax him up to BJB Studio—which sadly no longer exists—to record the vocal take. We finished writing the lyrics while the engineer was setting up the mic.

4. See Blind Through
We initially got in touch with Ramona Gonzalez (Nite Jewel) to sing on a totally different bit of music. She sent the vocal take back to us and although it was really good, it wasn’t quite working with the track. I think maybe we realized that what we were originally going for wasn’t actually going to work. We abandoned ship temporarily. A little while later we started working on the music that became “See Blind Through” because we’d wanted to write a really slow house tune for a while. We realized if we pitched Ramona’s vocals down they sounded pretty damn cool. I think initially we were only going to use snippets of the pitched down vocal but then all of it ended up sounding good and it actually tied the song together.

5. Sun And Moon
Nick Allbrook was up at our studio while he was in town and he was keen for us to to try write something new together, as opposed to us just having him sing on something Ryan and I had already written. We started jamming and he started singing the lyrics off the top of his head. The song actually ended up taking quite a while to finish but the bones of it were written really quickly. The vocal take that ended up on the album was initially just a quick demo that we recorded so Nick would remember what he was singing. We ended up keeping it; although there’s the odd bum note, it adds a charm to the song that would otherwise not be there if we re-recorded the vocal.

6. The Bridge
With this jam we really wanted to create that loose vibe that comes from recording long takes without creating loops, which often happens with more electronic based music. We tried to capture the looseness of some of the psychedelic music we enjoy but using really obvious electronic instruments. Ryan was messing with the 606 and I was playing the Polysix and we just recorded a long take of us jamming together, which we used as the foundation and then added a few bits and pieces over the top. The weird vocal sounds are a sample from the Bob Markley album A Group that we ran through a tremolo pedal.

7. Blue Snakes
We made this quite a while ago. It was originally released on Cosmo Vitelli’s fine label Im a Cliche, on 12″ and as part of the Moments of a Crisis compilation. Although we hadn’t started on our album yet we did think that maybe “Blue Snakes” would end up on there. But at the same time, we didn’t really know what our album was going to sound like and if the track would actually fit on there at all. We made a bunch of playlists while we were deciding on what songs would make the album and we pulled “Blue Snakes” into one of them and it just worked. Cosmo Vitelli was kind enough to license the track back to us so we could include it on the album.

8. Tonight
This song came about when we were both into the idea of getting something really simple, short and to the point on the album, probably because a lot of our songs end up being pretty long. Ryan was up at our studio by himself and messing around with a vocoder and some music and wrote this one really quickly. We sent the track to Kev and he re-sung the vocoder harmonies and the lead vocal. I played a little bit of Wurlitzer on there, we tweaked the arrangement a tiny bit and the song was done. We had to re-record a coupe of things when it came to mixing the tune because there was a lot of noise in the bass which normally we’d be fine with but it was hindering us from getting the sound we wanted.

9. When I See You Again
I think I came up with the piano chords for this while we were working on a remix for Tame Impala. We both decided that the chords were cool and we should use them for one of our own songs instead. I guess it’s kinda funny that Kevin and [Tame Impala guitarist/keyboardist] Dom [Simper] both ended up playing on the song it turned into. We developed the music pretty quickly for this song but then couldn’t work out who we wanted to sing on it so it sat around for a while. Originally Robert Smith was going to sing on it—we sent him the track and the lyrics and he was into it, but then didn’t end up getting time and we needed to keep moving so we had to think of someone else. Ryan had been listening to Sniff ‘n’ the Tears and thought we should try get in touch with their singer, Paul Roberts. We E-mailed him the music and he got back to us within a few hours. We sent him the lyrics which he made a few adjustments to, he recorded the vocals and the song was pretty much done.

10. And We Dance
This song has really been a lot of different songs. We had a completely different version which we thought was the final version of the song; to the point where we spent two days trying to mix it, couldn’t get it sounding right and realized the problem was in the music not the mix and that we actually needed to completely change it around. We tried a few different things but couldn’t really figure out what to do. What we wanted though was something that was repetitive and hypnotic, to complement the lyrics and what the song is about. I was experimenting with a couple of things and ran the 606 through our little Sansamp and got this cool overdriven sound. Then I started messing around with the bass and some organ and felt like the song was finally starting to feel right. We went into BJB studio and Ryan played a bunch live toms over the music. Then we got our go-to-guy for saxophone, Matt Keegan, to come in and play over the top. We explained what we wanted and he played all these crazy harmonies and then a solo that really rounded out the vibe we were going for.

11. Land In Between
This song was quite inspired by Brian Eno, and also David Bowie’s album Low. Initially it had a programmed Linndrum beat but as we developed the music and the vibe we realiszd that we needed to strip the drums right back. Ryan and I are both fans of the Embassy so we thought we’d get in touch with the singer Fredrik Lindson to see if he might want to sing on it. He was super cool to work with; we sent him the music and lyrics and he recorded it straight away. We asked him if he could change a couple of things and he sent us the revised vocal take the next day I think. We recorded the Hammond at our friend’s studio, and the trumpet was recorded quite a while ago in New York at Prince Language’s studio when we were out there for the DFA 12” [Fire Eyes]. We never ended up using it for the intended song so we pulled it into “Land in Between” and it fit really well.

While most sites are happy streaming a record and leaving it at that, we prefer sharing the stories behind the songs with our Free Association features. Up this week: Sahy Uhns, the Proximal Records founder who recently released his debut album, a collection of gritty, glitchy cuts inspired by coasting across Southern California’s desolate highways. It’s a must-listen for fans of Flying Lotus, Daedelus and other producers who like to tear the fabric of the space/time continuum in half; heady instrumental hip-hop that’s out to snap your neck and tickle your brain stem in tandem.

Have a listen and a look at Uhns’ thoughts below…

1. Montebello Postpartum
This track was written in dedication to my friend/housemate who I found out was having a baby. I originally wrote a track called “Montebello” that was this cutesy indie tune that I wrote for her future son, Ian—almost like a lullaby. “Montebello Postpartum” was then built from samples of that song. I reinterpreted it, this time reflecting more on my friend and what was in her future. I really just wanted to make a simple track to represent the situation. I felt like I couldn’t do anything to help or change what was happening in her life, but writing the track was something I could do.

2. My Very Own Mariana Trench
In this track, there’s a lot more tension than there is release, which maybe makes it less satisfying, but I kinda dig that about it. I like to mess with the length of sections to kind of play against what you expect and what is traditional in music. Sometimes when I’m performing it I really have to fight myself to keep holding out the tension and not drop the resolution too soon. The bass line at the end is more melodic than I usually write and it felt good enough to me to justify how asymmetrical the track really is.

3. Anticipation of the Night
“Anticipation of the Night” was written after I saw the film of the same name by Stan Brakhage. I was only able to see the movie once and it’s a very thick piece to absorb so this track was almost me fantasizing about what I remembered and didn’t remember from the film and attempting to reconstruct something that reflected how the film made me feel and what it brought out of me. Brakhage has this way of bringing together images that seem completely disconnected but are so visceral and emotional that you create connections in your mind. Something I strive for is to not be so literal with everything because the way we think and process information is not linear.

4. War Song
This track was written a long time ago, pretty early on in the process of the album and towards the beginning of the photo project [that accompanies it]. To me it has a slightly different vibe than the rest of the record but I like that it shows the infancy of the whole thing and how I was trying to develop a sound for the record. One particular part of the track I really love is right at 2:08 until 3:10. I had spent a bunch of time dumping a lot of my material onto cassette tape using different tape recorders to see the types of sounds they imposed. This was one of the first times I had done a lot of that and it became a pretty consistent process throughout the record.

In terms of my sound design, I really wanted to mimic the natural decay you see in the buildings, a sonic parallel to the look of the images. Some people might not understand how my music relates to those desolate desert images, but I wasn’t really trying to write what sounds should exist there naturally; I was trying to represent what was happening in that space and the energy and the feeling it gave me.

5. Fever. Chills and Sweats
I made this track when I was horribly sick. (I get sick a lot.) I had a really bad fever and kept having these really intense fever dreams. This was a track where I messed around a lot with more controlled field recordings like putting out matches in different cups of water. A big focus of the track was exploring alternative sound sources and developing my own methodology for foley recording.

6. Earning Bridges
I actually wrote this track about a time that Daedelus came into the studio. I wrote it back when we were working on “Proximity One: Narrative of a City,” and it was really exciting watching the fruits of my labor grow a little bit and forge these new relationships. Having Daedelus be interested in what I was doing was inspiring. Even when something positive is happening, my perfectionist tendencies make me check myself. Am I good enough to be an artist? Whether or not people decide that I am, I need to make sure I am doing everything within my power to make my work as good as it can be.

7. Rain Song
It’s just a field recording of me driving in my car in Van Nuys when it was raining. It was a really good, beefy rain which we rarely get in L.A. I love the way the inside of my car sounds so I recorded a ton of rain that day.

8. 13.73 ± 0.12 Billion
The title is actually the age of the universe. I kind of just wanted to make a cheesy, stargazing song. In high school I was really into experimental and electro-acoustic music and there were a lot of good noise shows in LA that I used to go to. When I went to CalArts you would think that interest would have just continued, but as soon as I got there I got so annoyed by the attitude surrounding that experimental music that I just wanted to make beats again and pop music. Thankfully I go over my annoyance and now I’m back to doing both. I like to treat all of the music I listen to on the same level, whether it’s pop or experimental or cheesy or whatever. I love all kinds of music and it seems stupid to create a hierarchy. With this track I just wanted to create a synthy space anthem that was kind of a portrait of when you’re looking at stars in the desert.

9. I’mage
My favorite part of this track is the guitar part. I wrote the guitar part, recorded it, and liked it but I didn’t like it enough. I went back and recorded each note separately an octave below where they were before, and then arranged them to match the part I had originally played. Then I pitched each note up an octave so it was back to the original register. The strings with less tension are more out of tune when you first pluck them, giving them that twang sound and I wanted to capture that. It ended up sounding kind of like a banjo to me, but it was also subtle enough that it wasn’t totally clear that I had done that.

10. Ice Plant / Newly Destitute
Ice plant was a plant brought in to reinforce and stabilize the soil around the railroads in California. Then the ice plant took over everything and it became a huge problem because they essentially soak up all of the nutrients and water form the soil so the native plants can’t survive. “Newly Destitute” came from a guy I saw while driving to the studio. He was dressed in his Sunday best with suspenders on and holding a sign that said “Newly Destitute”; it was pretty tragic. The over-arching idea I guess is just a parasitic relationship. I tried to imagine how that guy ended up there and what decision lead him to that destitution. The “Newly Destitute” half of the track was created using a generative Reaktor FM synth patch that I built. That patch felt like a big achievement to me because it was some of the more interesting synthesis I had done and I really liked the sound of it.

11. Randsburg
Randsburg is the name of one of the towns I visited throughout the photo series excursions. What’s funny is I don’t actually have any pictures from there in the collection, but it was just a really bizarre place because it was still half-functioning. Half of the town was like a ghost town and then there were people still living in the surrounding houses. There were all kinds of trains near there involved in mineral mining so that’s why you’ll hear train samples in the track. I’m not sure why I made it so major and epic at the end but I wanted to finish it that way and wouldn’t let myself not do it just because I was self-conscious about it.

12. We Offer Our Silent Presence
“We Offer Our Silent Presence” was written in dedication to my friend Steven who passed away. The name of this track was a quote from his eulogy by his rabbi conducting the service. The field recording of the water was captured at Mother’s Beach in Marina Del Rey. Steven was a big sailor so I wanted to capture the sounds of the place where he was most happy and include that in the track. Often I get caught up in making sure things have direction so I was pushing myself to create something that felt more open and spacious melodically—even wandering.

Baptized in bong water like every Psychic Ills album before it, Hazed Dream lives up to its title with an ambient-psych sound that’s as loose and liquified as the neon clumps of wax that glide, ever so slowly, across a lava lamp. With that in mind, we asked frontman Tres Warren to share the stories behind his band’s blissed-out anthems, right alongside a complete stream of their Sacred Bones debut…

1. Midnight Moon
Alright, if I remember correctly, this song was written late at night or early in the morning sometime after coming home from somewhere. Playing guitar through a little practice amp in my place with some echo on it, it came together real quick—the way songs do when you’re not trying to write them. I think I made a rough recording of it and went to bed.

2. Mind Daze
“Mind Daze” was almost the same story as “Midnight Moon,” but more of a pop deal. A lot of them happened this same way. Playing guitar at home, on the highway to the end of the night. If an idea surfaced, then I’d do some full-on demoing later—write a drum machine beat, add some keyboards and then Liz [Hart] would come and add the bass lines. I have this little cheap amp that I like with some effects built into it. When we actually did the recording of it, I used the same amp on most of this record. I think Mitch the engineer thought I was crazy because they have all these good amps there, but I was already into the way it sounded in my apartment.

3. Incense Head
With the exception of “Sungaze,” which got pretty reworked, this is really the only thing on the record that came out of a jamming scenario. This was probably the oldest idea on the record. It’s something that we had jammed on about a year ago before [drummer] Brian [Tamborello] split town. I was trying to play some Mexican sounding riff in that first part, but I sort of blew it and wound up back in the Eastern mode.

4. Mexican Wedding
This was based on some riffin’ that Liz and I did at our practice space and she named it—I guess we’ve got a lot of nostalgia for things out that way. It’s just some mellow broken blues type thing with lazy vocals and some harmonica toward the end.

5. That’s Alright
This one came out of a riff that I had been playing that Liz and I were jamming on. We fleshed it out and made a demo of it. The acoustic and slide guitar stuff was added later. I guess it’s reflective of stuff I’d been into, a lot of country and loner songwriter stuff.

6. Ring Finger
This is just some blurry ode to a girl that’s on my mind a lot. I wanted it to sound like Relatively Clean Rivers—this semi-obscure rural folk record, which I couldn’t seem to stop listening to around this time. This was another bedroom thing.

7. Travelin’ Man
This is some kind of escapist ramblings about gettin’ gone I guess. Sonically speaking, maybe this could have been on an earlier release. It’s got more of the type of thing we were trying for on the last record. It’s cool that it’s different than the rest of this stuff, though. We kept the drum machine beat from the demo just to give it a different feel along with Brian’s percussion.

8. Sungaze
The main riff was something from a jam between Elizabeth, Brian and myself. We reworked it and turned it into this. I guess it’s just sort of a straighter space-rock type thing.

9. Dream Repetition
This is just a momentary space out to give the listener a rest! It’s the guitar from another song played backwards along with keys and some on-the-fly synthesizer stuff on top of it.

10. I’ll Follow You Through the Floor
This was more intimate and less of a rock thing in the demo and before the wah pedal stuff, but now its sort of the blow out at the end of the record, but that’s cool. You can still hear the shruti box a little bit. I can’t remember what it’s about.

11. Same Old Song
In my mind this was an attempt as some sort of sub-JJ Cale type deal. But I don’t know if that’s how it reads! Anyway, it just seemed like the only way to end the record.

Photo by Aaron Richter

Since Com Truise is currently on tour with Neon Indian and heading overseas soon after that, we thought we’d reacquaint our more curious readers with the hover craft hooks and laser-like synth lines of his sci-fi epic Galactic Melt. Stream it in full below alongside a scene-by-scene commentary by the producer…

1. Terminal
Com Truise, the first known android astronaut, opens his eyes. He’s alive. Hello.

2. VHS Sex
Astronauts used to be famous. Com Truise is a star… and he wants to party. It’s about having a desired form of satisfaction, but being stuck with an obsolete form of media.

3. Cathode Girls
The party continues, but there are feelings of being disconnected form real communication. It is a numbing experience.

4. Air Cal
Being an android is not all it’s cracked up to be. They have become too good at programming human emotions. It’s really about the fear of flight.

5. Flightwave
Leaving your earthly connections behind to achieve greater goals. Com is launched and there is no turning back.

6. Hyperlips
Suspended animation, radio chatter, interference and the loss of depth without physical human interactions.

7. Brokendate
Being late, missing commitments. Being bound by systems of control, yet being so free to break apart the set plan. Deviation from the original course.

8. Glawio
Sometimes it rains in space.

9. Ether Drift
Com enters the Wave 1 galaxy, and loses control of his systems. He’s paralyzed in some unknown psychedelic state.

10. Futureworld
Com touches down on Wave 1. It’s about assimilation into another reality apart from the material and the physical. The colors are different and everything is new. Anything is possible now. Goodbye.

As if Bryan Hollon’s Neon Neon project wasn’t enough of an indication that the producer’s come a long way from the abstract hip-hop beats of his early Boom Bip records, the schizophrenic hooks of Zig Zaj hammer that point right home. In the following exclusive feature/full album stream, Hollon helps us make sense of everything from the tribal drone textures of “Tum Tum” to the melodramatic pop melodies of “New Order” (featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer and Empire of the Sun’s mildly insane frontman, Luke Steele)…

1. All Hands
I like to call this one my Wyatt-inspired track. There is a song by Robert Wyatt called “Life is Sheep” and the female vocals in it really got into my head. When I talked with Mike Noyce of Bon Iver about the track, I mentioned its haunting qualities and how I’d like to replicate that in some way. I also felt the song had a lost at sea quality, which he picked up on immediately. The pace and swing of the song somehow bring to mind the swaying of a boat at sea. Not really sure why that is but I’m all for it being a happy accident.

2. Goodbye Lover and Friends
This track took on so many different forms before it became what it is. I could probably release an album of just the early demos of this track. Josh Klinghoffer and I did an instrumental alternate version I’d like to release at some point. Its much more stripped down and tribal, and sounds like a lost Talking Heads b-side. Lyrically, I told Alex Kapranos to imagine he is in a sideshow performing magic tricks around the turn of the 19th century—lots of dark velvet curtains, rabbits and pigeons being pulled out of hats, and freaks lurking around the tent. The result is what you hear. I also see Aleister Crowley’s face when I hear this tune.

3. Pele
I have a deep love for surf rock and it seems to have reared its head in this song. I recorded this song in about three hours out of frustration with another track. I laid down the drums first, added metal percussion and taped up cymbals over top, tracked a simple bass line, added a synth or two, and finally the chorus guitar. The entire track was recording alone in the studio at about 3 a.m. Its basically a short burst of frustration and inspiration…a release if you will. It was never intended to be on the record but others told me I should put it on there.

4. Do As I Do
This was originally going to be an instrumental track but I sent it over to Cate to see if it inspired her at all. I really love her cadence in the verses on this track. Cate’s mood and tone is so great for a driving track like this. This track has the one and only sample used on the album. It’s slowed down to an unrecognizable speed, but I’m curious if anyone will ever actually hear what it is!

5. Reveal
“Reveal” was originally a 12-minute song. I had the hardest time cutting it down for a normal person’s attention span. At first I thought my album was going to be four 12-minute songs but I chickened out. If you could see the amount of tracks in this song, you would think I’m mental. It’s definitely one for the headphones and I promise you will hear something new and deeply embedded in it each time you listen. It’s got everything from whispers to street noise creating the atmosphere.

6. Manabozh
[Money] Mark and I were introduced to each other years ago by our mutual friend Danger Mouse. I had a huge appreciation for his work from way back in the day, with his Mark’s Keyboard Repair album and Check Your Head. I wanted Mark to get aggressive and go crazy with his collection of gadgets and pedals. The song is built around that harsh arpeggiated sound—created by the Korg MonoPoly—and was never really intended to be much more than an interlude. However, once I got that nasty lead synth through the guitar pedal tone, I got inspired to extend it. The dirty drums were created by using a Roland Dr. Sample in record mode for a mic in my dirty and wooden Echo Park studio. I got the Dr. Sample idea from Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips.

7. New Order
I could write a book on this track. Luke Steele and I got crazy with this one. It has so many layers and is incredibly dense, giving it an ’80s fantasy film-like quality, which is perfectly suitable to Luke and I. As many probably know, Empire of the Sun and Neon Neon were both deeply rooted in ’80s tones and structure. This was our chance to let the two worlds collide and to not hold back. My favorite part of the song is the insane modular synth solo that Josh Klinghoffer and I came up with. He ran his guitar through a huge AS modular system as I tweaked the controls. We got some intense tones that can never be replicated or pulled up again.

8. Automaton
Named after early robotics of the 18th century. Automatons were used in the early years of magic to give objects such as toys or dolls life-like movement. They used an incredibly intricate and complex set of gears and weights on the inside to create the movement. This track is the most syncopated and synth-y track on the album and it felt very robotic to me. Thus, the title.

9. Tumtum
I’m a huge fan of textures for inspiration. This song heavily uses the Elektron MonoMachine to provide layers of slow moving textures. After I had the layers, I went back with simple repetitive percussion to bring on a trance-inducing rhythm. Pieces like this have to be long in length to be effective, and for the mind to unwind it takes about four minutes of repetition. It takes at least six minutes to get lost in it. I shot for a Stars of the Lid style track and ended up with this.

10. Mascot and the Moth
Named after a very early magic trick where the magician makes a lady on stage disappear into a puff of smoke as he tries to embrace her. The track has a haunting sound bookending it that was created on a modular synth system by accident. I really wanted to use the sound on the album but it didn’t really stand up alone. I used an old Siel synth to created the melody over it and the rest just seemed to fall into place. I really like the bang of the drums on this one. I owe that drum sound to the magic of Chris Shaw, who mixed the album.

CANT's Chris Taylor

Photo by Travis Huggett

Words by George Lewis Jr.

Chris and I spent a couple weeks together locked away in a beautiful studio upstate—one week in the fall and one week in the winter. I’m sure his memory is better than mine, so I would like to talk about the first night of the making of Dreams Come True…

Chris picked me up from my house in his purple Explorer, which looks a lot like Grimace on wheels. The back of the car was loaded with tons of alcohol, music equipment and camping gear. We headed upstate and throughout the entire ride, Chris kept dodging the question of whether we were staying in the house we would be recording the CANT record in. I wanted to sleep on a big brass bed in a mansion in the middle of the woods; secretly Chris wanted the opposite…

About 25 miles from the house, Chris sprung it on me—we would spend the night camping instead. We drove up to a campsite in the middle of the night. Chris jumped out of the car with a headlamp (I didn’t even have a flashlight) and I watched as it faded off towards the campgrounds. He moves so fast; it’s like watching a firefly out there, working hard setting up the tent and grabbing dry wood for a fire. By the time my eyes adjusted to the pitch black night, the camp was nearly 75-percent set up. Chris went on telling me everything I needed to know about making a perfect campfire and once it was built, he ran to the car and came back with a tall bottle of Jameson and other condiments. We spent the next three hours talking about what we wanted to accomplish; what our expectations were; bullshitted about what other peoples expectations would be; spent a good 30 talking about how much we love the Dream and his production; talked more about bears and how Chris had just weeks before been a little to close to one. What we came up with out there was simply that we would take our time, relax, eat good food, drink mad cocktails, and make what we wanted—experiment and not feel guilty or any pressure.

We both woke up regretting the whiskey and went to the house and started doing. All that we spoke of that night is exactly what the record came out to be. When Twin Shadow picked up, I was unable to be with Chris to wrap up the record. When I left it, he was still struggling with his voice, and by voice, I mean what he wanted to say. I was very happy when I got the finished product. Chris was afraid and he totally conquered it; said what I think he wanted to say. The result to me is very personal and beautiful.

Photo: Frode Fjerdingstad

As much as we appreciate all of the track-by-track commentaries that we’ve run over the past few years, self-titled especially loves the ones that took a lyrical approach—anecdotes that are abstract rather than a literal “and then we did this” breakdown of what went down in the studio. Case in point: the trail of metaphorical bread crumbs that Roll the Dice left behind while divulging some of the bleak themes that drive In Dust, a must-listen for anyone who’s ever wanted to watch a 21st century version of Metropolis; one that’s been scored by Vangelis, John Carpenter and Emeralds.

1. Iron Bridge
Aching feet shuffle across the horizon. Any green flickers of new life have begun to disappear from the landscape, replaced by rocks caked with grime. Any promise that remained before leaving the old world behind has vanished, replaced by a vague sense of trepidation. The maw of the Iron Bridge beckons, and in the distance, a rising glow of synthetic light.

2. Calling All Workers
Every morning it’s the same: get in uniform, get in line, start the day as one of the masses. We only just arrived and already we’re already being assimilated into the routine of this new world, taunted by all its frustrations and lack of resolution. But our minds are elsewhere, still searching for the next stage of this journey.

3. Idle Hands
But there is still something strangely involving about this. Even as the idea of an outside world becomes harder to fathom, and the monotony of these tasks begins to numb the mind, there is an underlying sense of gratification and reward. Once we begin to work, it is oddly difficult to imagine stopping.

4. Maelstrom
The machine has powered up and the air is thick with the massed presence of the workforce. Patterns of bodies assemble and disassemble according to some enigmatic logic, impossible to control and hard to resist. As these collective behaviors become established it becomes harder to pick ourselves out as individuals from the whole. The sense of self begins to diminish, and we lose our identities in the fray, cloaked in thick layers of dust and grime.

5. Dark Thirty
Our bodies ache, and our hands are scratched and caked with soot. Imaginations are jarred by the day’s imagery, and instead of giving release sleep only serves to draw us deeper into this nightmare. Before long the dawn is approaching, and still minds work overtime, conjuring up repeat iterations of the same day over, and over, and over. When we wake with a start, it’s hard to tell whether this new morning is reality, or merely a further level down into the dream.

6. The Skull Is Built Into the Tool
The real and astral worlds have become interwoven, and as it becomes more difficult to separate the two, so it becomes harder to resist the pull of the everyday trudge. Our bodies remain hard at work; grease and soot still cake our clothes and fingers, but we’re not entirely there. Most of the time, we’re somewhere else. Perhaps thinking about sleeping later—but knowing that it promises little but more of the same.

7. Evolution
“I’m not quite sure what’s happening… It’s the end of the day, everyone else has left, and all I can hear is wind whistling through abandoned machines, and the distant roar of furnaces downstairs. They’re starting to sound more and more like human voices, keeping me company in the dark.”

8. The Suck
The voices of the factory gradually begin to harmonize, and our own voices start to join in. The song is a sad one, but not entirely devoid of hope. Something’s shifting—each morning we wake feeling a little less resistant than the day before, and these changes don’t jar.

9. Cause and Effect
The rhythms of the machine leave space for wandering thought. As the body adapts to a routine way of being, the mind once again has time to contemplate. To begin to understand the nature of this place and how it ended up here. And ultimately, how it might escape.

10. Way Out
We seem to have spent forever trapped in this looped life, with little end in sight. Perhaps we were wrong to imagine a physical route out of this world. Instead, becoming more involved in its patterns offers a chance of redemption, a light gleaming at the end of a long tunnel. We are coming closer to that knowledge.

11. See You Monday
Every morning it’s the same: get in uniform, get in line, start the day as one of the masses. But now there’s bliss in these repetitive cycles. The journey here has been arduous, its promise gradually worn away. But in exchange has arrived something else. We are beginning to embrace the rhythms of the machine.

Photo by Samantha Casolari

The blood-curdling scream that sparks Chelsea Wolfe’s second Pendu Sound LP (Aποκάλυψις, the Greek word for “Apocalypse”) could easily double as the screen test for a throat-clearing demon, the kind of cranky poltergeist that maintains the body count in midnight movies like The Grudge. And yet, as highly theatrical as “Primal/Carnal” sounds, it’s essentially a caustic palate cleanser for a much deeper listen; a downward spiral disc that delves into theology, The Road and Ayn Rand without losing sight of the hooks at hand. Similar in spirit to doom metal in the way it seems to march slowly into the sun, it’s explained in part by Wolfe in the exclusive track-by-track commentary below, and will be fully explored in self-titled’s thirteenth iPad-enhanced issue next month…

I wrote “Mer” after flooding myself with a slew of documentaries about world poverty, food and water issues—the end of the oil age, etc. etc. It’s a string of words that came to me when I couldn’t sleep; images of the terrible and the good, blending into and over each other, admitting how bad things can really get in certain places or homes.

“Tracks (Tall Bodies)” is the love song on this album, directly influenced by a poignant moment in Atlas Shrugged when the main character is looking into the distance and thinking of her true love, her equal, at the end of the tracks.

“Pale on Pale” is an exploration of the moment of death and the idea that in that moment of death one’s mind is truly and finally clear. Not thinking of my own death or anyone’s in particular; just a question into this moment and a sort of scientific/spiritual response. I often think of Death as a character. I have a strange sort of an affinity for him; probably because I’ve never really been faced with him outside of dreams.

“Demons” and “Moses” have a more surreal sense to them and speak to my own issues with human energies and paranoia about allowing others to get close.

“To the Forest, Towards the Sea” was the last song added to album and was recorded a few days after watching The Road. I was intrigued by this movie. I like how the focus is on the aftermath rather than the event—the survival and the struggle, and what reveals itself to be most important in that kind of situation. I saw the film first. I have the book in queue on my shelf.

“Friedrichshain” is the song with the most innocence on the album, although innocence isn’t something I consider a lot. I think about integrity, because once there is that loss of innocence it’s more about how you choose to live your life. When I look at my childhood I always think, ‘I never was a child’. From a young age, I understood that things were dark and sad and somehow sometimes good even despite those things. Innocence doesn’t really fit into that worldview but it’s not a negative thing. “Friedrichshain” is about finding yourself in this childlike vision of an enlightening, sparkling forest. Something that makes perfect sense.