John Congleton mixed the album. He’s a record producer, mix engineer, a good friend of mine, and someone I’ve learned a lot from about music from a technical and philosophical standpoint. A couple years ago, I was doing a short course about experimental music for Atlas Obscura. For part of the course, I was interviewing different musicians. I was interviewing John and asked him which records particularly inspired him. One of them was Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral. I asked him what he loved about it, and he said it seemed like every musical decision was iconoclastic. It is such a weird record and completely baffling to me how it became a Top 40 record. There’s some jams on there but a lot of it’s super brutal, pure noise, and the subject is pretty hideous and unforgiving. It’s constantly unrooting scriptures.
The idea of iconoclasm and musical ideas wasn’t something I’d really thought of until John mentioned it. Being consciously fearless about unraveling something aesthetic almost ruins it. It becomes nonspontaneous and then accidentally institutionalized because you have decided, “I am the coolest kid on the block because I have destroyed this idea”. But at the same time, being afraid to destroy ideas completely ruins the possibility of doing something bold enough to be meaningful.