Our journalist Lachlan caught up with James Webster, Keith Rankin, and Tech Honors of the mesmerizing experimental electronic and vaporwave trio death's dynamic shroud. With the group having just released a follow up to last year's opus Darklife, their discussion covers new album After Angel, why Americans hate Celine Dion, "Excited Family Time No. 14," sampling video games and CSI: New York, The Eagles's Greatest Hits: 1971-1975, and A-frame chalets in Alaska.
LACHLAN: For those who don’t know, according to the three of you, who are death’s dynamic shroud, and what kind of music do they make? Why do they exist?
JAMES: I always feel this one, but I don’t know if it’s a lame answer. I always say: death’s dynamic shroud, what we want to do is make people ‘swoon,’ is the idea. And not like “Oh, Frankie,” you know, but the idea is the feeling you get when you listen to a certain kind of music, a certain kind of chord change or whatever it is, that makes your heart feel like someone is gripping it, suddenly. It’s not because you’re relating with the music. It’s that there is a scientific reality to people who were socialised in the Western world: they hear certain chords in a certain order and it’s emotionally impactful. So, Tech and I were in a band together when we were in high school and Keith went to the same high school too. So, we all knew each other. And Tech and I really clicked because we realised that as we were growing up, certain moments in songs made us feel that way and as musicians we were trying to figure out why we wanted to cry when a certain chord was happening or a certain sequence of chords. So, we’ve been sort of chasing that our whole life.
KEITH: Do you remember the first chord change that made you feel like that?
JAMES: I mean, not to get too technical but the minor 4 was always something. I mean, The Blue Danube. The beginning. The daaa dah da daah, daaa dah da daah.
TECH: It’s not just the minor 4, it’s the parallel minor 4. Because it wouldn’t be in the key.
JAMES: Right, and I think that might be a diminished second possibly. The easiest example is “In My Life” by the Beatles. ‘There are places I remember, all my liiiifffee, thooooough some have changed.’ Like that right there.
KEITH: Is that the first time you heard that?
JAMES: I don’t know specifically but the first song I ever tried to write myself, on the piano was literally, F major, F minor, C, C, C. F major, F minor… I mean the Super Mario Brothers, when you get a “Game Over,” that’s a minor 4: daa da dahh daa…
KEITH: I remember hearing this Green Day song, what’s it called? It was one of their first big hits.
TECH: Oh, “Basket Case.”
KEITH: Like I remember hearing that on the radio and it being one of the first times where I was like, ‘Holy crap, these chords.’
TECH: I think “Basket Case” is a circle of fifths thing.
KEITH: Yeah, it’s probably something very basic, or the first time I noticed a minor chord.
JAMES: Me and my sister loved that song when we were kids.
TECH: Yeah, me too. Anyway that’s the answer.
*Laughing*
JAMES: The point is: there are all kinds of music out there. There is very lyrically driven, poetic stuff. Like Bob Dylan, for example, the reason Bob Dylan is great is the opposite to the reason why we’re great, in my opinion. And I love Bob Dylan, he’s one of my favourite artists of all time, which is interesting because he’s the opposite of what we do. And so in a Bob Dylan song, like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” when he does use sick chords, it’s like, this is probably the best song I have ever heard. Well, Tech, you were telling me about how you were really into Meatloaf.
TECH: Yeah, with regards to theatrics or whatever. I loved Celine Dion and Meatloaf and Neil Diamond and other artists that I feel are… corny. I understand why they’re corny, but there’s something to that that is good and maybe if these ideas were reframed in a way that wasn’t so…
JAMES: … Tasteless…
TECH: … Ridiculous, then maybe something can happen.
KEITH: I read a whole book about why people in America specifically hate Celine Dion.
TECH: A whole book?
KEITH: I can’t remember any of the conclusions…
*Laughing*
JAMES: Well there was a moment in 1997 when everyone loved Celine Dion. With Titanic.
KEITH: Well it was basically about how in other parts of the world she is unironically beloved. Or at least this was fifteen years ago. I feel people in the U.S. have come around more to Celine Dion and artists like that in the last ten years or so.
TECH: In the same way that people in America have come around to things like soft jazz or whatever. Things that were part of the New Age.
LACHLAN: With the mention of the three of you being in the same high school, under what circumstances was death’s dynamic shroud formed, with Keith’s inclusion? And what were the new, early ideas you intended to channel through the group? Working even further back, for Tech and James, what are both of your early memories of making music together prior to DDS and what changes have taken place in your process from then until now?
TECH: Well, James and I were in a band together back in high school. Keith was in another band. We played against him twice in a battle of the bands. We lost once and tied the other time. We’re all from Dayton, Ohio and we played in bands in our early twenties. James and I were always in the same band. Then we all moved and did our own projects. James and I did a project called the Rebecca Peake project, where we wrote and recorded a new song every day for a year.
JAMES: And they’re good! Tech, I was listening to “World’s Strongest” last night and, man, there are some good tracks on there. I was cleaning the house at the time, you know.
TECH: Yeah, we did that for a year. Then I moved back to Dayton, because we were in Philadelphia. And that’s when death’s dynamic shroud really started.
JAMES: I was in Philadelphia, Tech was in Dayton, Keith had always been our friend. When we were in high school, it was always known that he was a savant musician. You know, he was a guitarist, he was a drummer, and he was a lot better than everyone else. I remember thinking, not to make you blush Keith. I felt very lucky to be a part of that Dayton, Ohio scene. Because there were a lot of cool musicians doing a lot of cool things. I used to hang out at Keith’s house and we would listen to music. We had our own rock opera planned, and it was really ahead of its time because it was about whales attacking boats. Sadly, most of that stuff got lost over the years. We were all interested in our different abilities and how we could help each other, even way back then.
TECH: And by the time death’s dynamic shroud started in 2014, Keith was also recording a lot of solo stuff under the name Giant Claw. Not to speak on your behalf, Keith. And he founded the label Orange Milk. So we’ve been working together in making music since 2000, I guess.
JAMES: Jesus Christ. Yeah. This is our century.
TECH: Yeah, so in 2014 death’s dynamic shroud started, really as a way to stay in touch with each other to some degree. We took turns initially. Like James made the first DDS, we call them mixtapes because they were so sample-based that we weren’t comfortable calling them albums.
JAMES: We had a lot of hang-ups using samples because we were in a band for so long and then both of us released so much solo material, just to compose, put out albums, we didn’t really have an audience except each other but we just kept doing it. Because in the early 2010s, there was a lot of weird music that was starting to blow up on blogs and stuff. Then there was this really cool experimental ambient scene that Keith was at the centre of because he ran Orange Milk Records with Seth Graham. So it was like, maybe if we keep going and keep at it then maybe something will stick. But yeah, death’s dynamic shroud was quite famously at the start, just a joke. Because it was like ‘oh vaporwave: they’re just slowing down videogame music.’ Well, man, if we were slowing down videogame music, we would know the best music and best parts to loop because we’re “real” musicians or whatever. And that was the attitude we went into it with at the time, it was just kind of a ha ha ha. But then we received a message from Atlantis Recordings, which is like this legendary vaporwave label and Scott Michael, who is one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known, is just like: ‘I love what you guys are doing, this is so awesome. You’ve got to do an album for my label.’ Which was amazing. You know, I had put out something on Keith’s label but no one had ever approached me to say, ‘make an album for my label.’ And from that point DDS entered the vaporwave narrative, I guess. From then on, we started to take it more seriously and, in letting go of our egos, realised it doesn’t all have to be original music. You can make a lot of really cool music pretty fast. And then Keith was our friend and a figure in the electronic music scene and he was also interested in vapourwave and he was just like, ‘I would love to do something for DDS someday,’ to which we thought was awesome. Then he was in town playing a show in Philly and came to my house and we made EVANGELIS in one night, just hanging out and having fun. Literally just recording the system audio and opening YouTube playing back a video and randomly picking bits to take.
KEITH: Then editing in the YouTube logo.
JAMES: How can you make an album in one night? How cool would it be? And it’s alright. There were cool enough ideas on it that, Keith especially, wished we had spent more time on it. So he eventually came back for a whole week basically and I took the time off work. And that’s when we made, I’ll Try Living Like This. Seeing what would happen if we took these ideas and worked on them as if we actually cared about them. That’s how all of that happened.
KEITH: I have a memory. Was DERELICT before those? Because I have a memory of you asking me and Tech if we wanted to contribute to DERELICT.
JAMES: Really? Well, I probably did because DERELICT’s megatower is this like four-hour long album and the whole point was that I wanted it to be four hours long. So I can definitely see myself reaching out to you guys to make it easier for myself. Give me anything you got. Because it was a mix of original music and video game music it was a whole pretentious thing. But yeah, that’s a summary of the early years of DDS. With Keith’s inclusion, our collaboration was initially just ‘yeah, I guess I’ll do it’ before it became more serious. Then, eventually – because Tech put out CLASSROOM SEXXTAPE – we eventually thought, what if all three of us made a real album? And that was Heavy Black Heart, which started with the three of us physically together, in the same room. Maybe that’s what I’ll Try Living Like This was; us sitting together, and that’s the way we like to collaborate.
TECH: With Heavy Black Heart, all the songs were made with at least two of us in the room, some with three. It was like, that was the way we needed things to occur, all of us working together. And then for Darklife, we intentionally got back together for two weeks to record it in the same room, all three of us trying to record as much as we could as and when we could. Then after that there was a lot of emailing and sending links, things from a distance. We can do that now.
KEITH: It’s weird to imagine how loose it was. Even around Heavy Black Heart, there was so little communication between the three of us at some points where it was so loose. In a way, I look at there being two phases of DDS, one being between 2014 and like 2017 and then 2018 or 2019 until now feels like a whole different thing.
TECH: It definitely does. A lot of it started to be that our livelihoods started to be affected in a meaningful way. Now it was what I actually do for a living. But yeah, for sure, back in the Heavy Black Heart and prior days, just even Keith’s presence on EVANGELIS, there was no precedence set for there being anybody. James and I were just making tapes going back and forth. I don’t think anyone knew who we were, like we might have still been anonymous at that point. So when Keith was contributing to one it was like ‘sure, no one knows.’
KEITH: Theoretically back then, any of our musician friends probably could have contributed and then been death’s dynamic shroud.
JAMES: I think that when we did do Heavy Black Heart together, I’ll never forget the night Star Wars Episode XII was out, it was Christmas time, and we all went to see the movie together, then we all went back to Tech’s house and started working on the track “Tell Me Your Secret.” Just starting from something like ‘let’s make a song together, are there any songs you’ve heard, any a capellas?’ then we just start making this pretty crazy track. It’s awesome! But that night, I’ll take about that night when I’m 60 years old. I feel like that was one of my greatest experiences making music because all of us, we were just laughing and there was just so much love in that room. Love for what we were doing. Then the way it was coming together: all three of us were so excited. It really felt that we were suddenly striking something that was vaporwave. We were using all these tools and our abilities as musicians. Thinking ‘what if we throw a synth pad on here? Or put this chord progression over it’ and suddenly it was like being in a band again. Which was something that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. That session ended with one of the worst things we ever tried to do, that will never be heard, it also produced that song (“Tell Me Your Secret”) which was awesome. I know I then got pretty hooked on that feeling and I think that night was really the turning point where we thought we should do all the DDS albums as all three of us together in the same room as much as possible because there’s something special happening. At least that’s how I felt.
TECH: Yeah “Tell Me Your Secret” felt like the origin point of how DDS exists now. And the Darklife recording sessions were literally as fun as that but for two weeks. That’s why I love making music.
JAMES: We knew it was going to be going into Darklife. We had demos and had a few things and it was hard to believe that we could do this, sunup until sun down.
TECH: Yeah, so basically, we just like to laugh and have fun.
*Laughing*
JAMES: I feel like the best – if you watch behind-the-scenes documentaries for movies and stuff, it seems that the best art gets made when everyone is laughing their ass off and things are full of joy. Towards the end of the process when its mixing and mastering, it can get extremely stressful, yes. But just that first 50% of making the songs is just so much fun.
LACHLAN: Obviously it’s a pretty big question for the three of you, but when it comes to each of your sampling processes – identifying samples, finding what’s striking or indicative of something being able to be cut, chopped, and manipulated to death, as well as possessing a particular emotional resonance to manifest, be it a melancholic or alternatively more intense substance, before ending up in a final form on an album? How does the sampling process happen for your tracks?
TECH: I think all three of us have our separate sort of voice and preferences and ideas that we bring to the table, that work well together. For myself, there are like, I would say that with regards to any rules to sampling, I kind of feel that where there’s music that’s either too easy or too corny to sample. If you just took “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd and then slowed that to vaporwave, I’m not going to say it’s not good – it might sound cool – but I feel there wouldn’t be anything transformative about it because that song is already durged, it’s already sombre. Adding reverb to that isn’t going to – it's not bringing any new ideas to the table. It’s not transforming it into something else. So there are things that I don’t want to sample and would think ‘that’s lame.’ Then, for sure, video game music, especially 8-bit, and trying to find things there that can be laced into other things. When I think of samples that I want to use, a lot of the time I try to think of things that would adhere to production well. So I like to sample 8-bit music because it’s easy to lace into something more complex. Because you can remove bass from it and it’s still bright and shiny and can come through in the mix and that kind of thing. But as James was saying earlier, there are chord choices that we strongly prefer. Very romantic chord changes.
JAMES: I was just going to say, I’m a big Shazamer. A lot of the samples that we’ve ended up using have been from in the back of an Uber thinking ‘holy shit, whatever trashy pop song this is, I can exploit that.’ I’m also kind of a media junky. Like I watch a lot of shitty TV, knowing it’s shitty. Literally soap operas, the worst, lowest form of non-intellectual entertainment. I don’t know what it is but there are just moments. With The Young and the Restless, this American soap opera that is completely ridiculous but every now and then, there’ll be one guy doing all the music for it and most of the time there’ll be nothing, just little bits, then now and then there’ll be a pivotal moment in a story line that has been going on for six months or whatever and you can tell the composer is just going in and has one moment to be an artist. But it’s also that the things they say are so ridiculous that we have a lot of spoken word samples. Most famously on I’ll Try Living Like This, it was an episode of CSI: New York I think: “living in the street like dogs.”
TECH: With Kim Kardashian.
JAMES: … And the dude from Train. They’re talking about the lead singer of Train, who is playing this homeless person. He’s the actor of some character who has been taken in by some rich widow who is elevating this homeless person so she can cash in on the insurance money. So, yeah, I always have my ears perked and listening. I have a big, long notes file that’s just anytime I hear something I make note of it. Then I have a file on my desktop so that if I’m doing something and have a soap opera on in the background, I can quickly capture the audio and put it into the folder. I have mountains of it. So, that’s where I get my samples.
KEITH: I think we’re reaching a point where there’s an ungodly amount of recorded music. The idea that a lot of that is going to slip through the cracks, even pop music can fall into this category. I was listening to a YouTube compilation of every hit song from 1990 or something and there’s tonnes on it that has pretty much been forgotten. I can feel music slipping between the cracks and being forgotten. I like the idea of being able to recover bits of that. For people who like DDS, it’s almost like making personal mixtapes for them. Especially with the subscription club, there’s an assumption that there are going to be samples and they’re going to be on a sample scavenger hunt for stuff we put out. It’s basically letting this music exist again in a different form and as a different thing than as what was originally intended.
JAMES: There’s a track on After Angel that was one of the first things Tech and I worked on together for Darklife, that didn’t make it onto Darklife. And we were going onto YouTube to specifically get something and then this commercial played and it had the stupidest song, but it kind of rocked. Just like dah dah duh dun. We were like ‘we have to grab this right now.’ Then we did and made it a little bit slower and thought this really rules. So we dropped this Nine Inch Nails sample with these crazy drums on top of it. This is so fun. I can’t believe we can do this.
KEITH: The funny thing is that, as Tech was saying, if we sampled a Pink Floyd song or something, how the music you hear is perceived is based on your background. There have been times we’ve sampled and people have recognised it because they’re familiar with it and that makes it off-putting in a certain way. In the same way we would be off put if “Comfortably Numb” or another classic rock song was being sampled. There are just so many tiny, tiny music communities who can pick up on things.
JAMES: I mean I remember when we worked at a sandwich shop that will go unnamed, way back in the day, in the early days of DDS, we all had day jobs, and I would be working late at night and play some of the DDS stuff that we were working on, just to be able to hear it over the speakers. I mean fuck the man; I want to listen to this really whack music over the speakers of this centre-city South Philadelphia sandwich shop. And I had sampled E102’s theme from the Sonic Adventures soundtrack and I was working with this guy who was kind of nerdy and was like ‘em, E102?’ So, yeah, to him he’s not hearing it as DDS. He’s hearing it as this is the Sonic Adventures soundtrack slowed down. So maybe some stock music guy will be like ‘I recognise that, they’ve used that in YouTube commercials, that’s “Excited Family Time No. 14” from the archive.’
KEITH: Yeah, and the perception of the music is going to change a lot over time, also. Like in twenty years, if people are still listening, it’s going to be different because some things will get more popular and less popular. The sampling adds this weird time element. Obviously, people’s taste in music can and will change, but also the relation to the samples and the cultural trash is going to change too.
TECH: If we’re sampling a lot of ’90s videogames, then there’s a certain appeal for people who grew up with those games. Then there’s an appeal for the generation that came later that sort of idolise the ’90s as this bygone era. But then eventually it’ll just be some decade. So this kind of thing does just resonate more strongly with us.
JAMES: I think we’re almost already experiencing that in a way. I mean we’re all in our thirties and most of our fans are much younger, you know early 20s. We have a large Gen Z fanbase and we have this big Discord server as part of our mixtape club and it’s always so interesting to interact with our younger fans. Because I got the idea to sample this game or whatever because I played it when I was a kid. So, the games that have survived the test of time and those soundtracks that are legendary now, a lot of younger people will pick up on that now. I remember in the early days of DDS thinking we need to sample all these games that we loved from our childhood before someone else does. Because they don’t deserve to. They probably stumbled upon it by accident. No, I played Phantasy Star Online, I need to make sure I’m the first person to slow down its music. Because Vectroid had already honed in on Nights into Dreams and that was such a huge game to me. That was my first exposure to vaporwave and it pissed me off. Who is this young punk sampling Nights into Dreams? Did they rent a Sega Saturn from a Blockbuster in the sixth grade? I doubt it. Were they even alive yet? But I do find it interesting how we’re already finding some of our—like the pop music tech grew up with in the 90s surfaces a lot in his music. Growing up, my parents listened to some New Age music which was interesting because I remember the first time making my own solo stuff in the early 2000s and being interested in trying to make ambient music and New Age music and at that time it was still kind of kish and not considered “cool” at all. Like ambient music was for nerds with pan flutes who live in the American South-West. My parents’ generation, like Baby Boomers had New Age as a complete taboo. A lot of Boomers felt the same about disco. New Age was the most boring music that you could possibly imagine and that was the perspective.
LACHLAN: In the vaporwave and electronic scene, do you guys have any strong contemporary influences, who you might’ve worked with or appreciate the techniques of and aspire to in certain ways?
JAMES: Yeah, I was just thinking, I only got into the vaporwave around the time I’ll Try Living Like This came out because that was the first time that DDS was actually popular. And because of that, I started to interact with a lot of other vapourwave artists online. So my top 20 albums of the year list that I always did, there was just a tonne of vapourwave stuff on that. It’s not so much that I feel that I know what is happening with new vapourwave stuff because I’m not universally interested in hearing more eccojams. It has been eleven or twelve years at this point. So, especially for Darklife, I don’t feel that there is any direct vapourwave influence. I mean we were listening to like Ozzy Osborne and ’90s Pink Floyd. We were thinking more to do something like this track from The Division Bell then listened to it and wanted to bust out the acoustic guitar. So I think that we learned all of these lessons about treating samples and using music that we hear as an instrument that we can use in a track. But by the time you get to Darklife, we were really thinking about it as if we were in a band and the samples are just one member of the band. So, I still have a folder of samples and we can still use this stuff, but you know Darklife was so fun because it had a lot of material on it that we wrote when we were a lot younger. Some of those songs date all the way back to 2005, to stuff that Keith wrote. Two of the singles “Neon Memories” and “Messe de E-102,” Tech and I wrote those as Rebecca Peake songs back in 2012.
TECH: I think at this point, I don’t think any of us listen to a whole lot of vapourwave proper that is new. I know that early on I really liked and was influenced a lot by and Nmesh’s album Nu.wav Hallucinations because it felt labyrinthine in a way that was interesting to me. Then there was another artist, MJ Lincoln, who put out an album called Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 2, and the eccojam style on that obviously… Daniel Lopatin had already done Eccojams but I’ve never actually listened to Eccojams.
KEITH: Really?
JAMES: Neither have I. I love OPN but have never heard Eccojams.
TECH: I think my influences were people who had already been influenced by his work. Then I really got into the idea of layering samples on top of one another more than just reverb and slowing things down. So I was really into two artists in particular who have nothing to do with vaporwave. One was called Kids Explosions, who had an album called Shit Computer that was just very glitchy and mostly laced hip-hop vocals on top of glitched-up many-songs. It was kind of like Girl Talk but like ten thousand times more interesting. The idea of cutting songs up, of cutting many songs up and lacing them into each other – not the Girl Talk style of just having a beat and the beat changes to a different song and then another different song – that feels like a no-brainer to me. The other one was DJ Earworm, who would make these songs that have been played a gillion times. He would take the top 20 songs of a year and make a single, coherent song out of them. The 2009 one just laces like Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” and a Taylor Swift song and Beyonce’s “Halo” in this really beautiful way. And it’s not reverbey and not eccojammy, it was using Black Eyed Peas as a backbeat.
JAMES: That is such your style, Tech. Because I remember us listening to Olympics, and it was the fourth of July, and you put Miley Cyrus over Bruce Springsteen, which is the most iconic Tech moment. What you’re describing was a lot like that.
TECH: Yeah, I was basically doing what DJ Earworm was doing but with a vaporwave sound pallet of reverb and slowness. Then, you know, putting some video game stuff in there.
JAMES: At least for Darklife, I’ve always been a huge Chemical Brothers fan and into sick blast beats and techno. So for Darklife, that was what I was really getting back into when making that album. So I wanted a lot of stuff like that on it at the time. What about you, Keith?
KEITH: I was thinking about the vaporwave film, the Nobody Here film. Do you know what I’m talking about?
TECH: Yeah, yeah.
JAMES: It doesn’t exist yet.
KEITH: Yeah. Well, in case you don’t know, this place was doing a documentary about vaporwave and I did a preliminary interview with them and they were asking me what I thought the origins of vaporwave was. And I just remember saying to them that my first experience was the PaulStretch VST. That was the first VST where you could slow down stuff and not have a bunch of digital artifacts. Then a bunch of people were uploading pop songs that were really slowed down. My favourite was a Justin Bieber song slowed down like 800%. So the vaporwave scene was just germinating in the underground electronic scene in the early 2010s. I feel that’s when OPN came up doing synth stuff and I loved OPN’s early synth albums like Zones Without People. I was really into that and the whole electronic tape scene surrounding that stuff. There was an artist Darren Howe, I hope I’m remembering that right, I think he was doing some of the ultra-slowed down stuff. Then you see emerging out of that ooze people like Vectroid, who were building on that idea and chiselling it more. Making it less abstract so it’s not a two-hour long Justin Bieber song slowed down 800%. I suppose you can see that as the second wave of vaporwave. I guess DDS emerges out of that even further. Essentially refining that process even more. A split happened where a lot of artists tried to start making the music but completely removed from those experimental origins. Experimental in the literal sense of taking this technology and fucking with it and trying things out. To me, in my mind, DDS is a part of that 2010s underground electronic lineage. I still enjoy a lot of that music and through Orange Milk I still follow where these micro scenes have developed now. You can even trace hyperpop to certain points from that scene.
JAMES: It makes you wonder what primordial ooze exists now in pockets that we’ve never heard of. Because vaporwave is expiring, it’s on the shelf and it’s expiring. If I was a young person, I would not want to put palm trees over a pink grid and slow down music. That would feel like something that thirty-year-olds do. So what’s out there now? It’s exciting to think about.
KEITH: I like looking at it from that musicology approach because I remember in the early 2010s talking to people who were five or ten years older than me and they would be making the same ’90s tape scene connections as me. The same intricacies existed between these music scenes and how they function, propagating little trends that would then branch off into whole little subgenres. It’s crazy. I wish someone would write a book to try and trace the lineage of some of these underground scenes because I don’t hear people talking about these things and am worried a lot of it will be lost.
JAMES: The internet history is decaying and when Twitter goes so much history is going to go with it.
TECH: Anyway, so those are our influences.
*Laughing*
LACHLAN: With After Angel, how do the unreleased tracks and B-sides from last year’s Darklife add to your self-professed opus, in continuing or expanding the album sonically and conceptually? How does it fit into the DDS narrative?
JAMES: We had a dream early on that we would do these EPs and there are going to be these B-sides and wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a royal version of Darklife that had a third disc with all the B-sides on it. But financially it didn’t make any sense to do that. We already had copies of Darklife out and didn’t want people to feel that they had to go out and buy another. And so we also had these four songs that had not been released. It still blows my mind that they’re not on Darklife because in my brain they were so intensely a part of the album right up until the last time we got together and started to figure out how we were going to sculpt the album. The songs on this album were so dense and so intense that if we had “Light Left the Garden” on the same album as “Blast Jammer” for example, neither one of those songs will be listened to or appreciated in the intended way. Because the human ear can only hear— there’s a great line from Amadeus, the Mozart movie, where the emperor is criticising Mozart and he says, ‘there are just too many notes, the human ear can only hear so many notes in the space of an evening, just cut a few and it’ll be perfect.’ And it’s kind of true though, if you have two hours of the most insane circus show music where every ten seconds there’s another explosion or gunshot blast and glass breaking over a new core progression then a key change of about a half-step. It’s too much. We did, and maybe it’s because we’ve made so many albums and are at the stage of our lives as musicians, know that we had to make cuts. So when were finally thinking to just finish the tracks and put them together, we discovered that we were able to sequence the B-sides with these tracks in a pretty cohesive album experience. The B-sides themselves are pretty interesting. A lor of them were Tech and Keith taking things that all three of us had done and putting them together. While I was busy finishing the final mix and master of Darklife, we had to come up with these B-sides for the EPs. I contributed some tracks that we had done live. Tech was like this production wizard who was able to combine all of these strange demos and ideas that I had had and Keith had had, then we was able to put them together and put new stuff on top. It was almost a completely new way to do DDS and it has resulted in a very different album.
KEITH: Before you got on the call, I was speculating that a lot of our fans prefer the looseness of After Angel over the more refined and laboured-over Darklife.
JAMES: There was definitely this feeling with Darklife that this definitely has to be the best album that we have ever produced in our entire lives. If we are musicians at this stage and this point of our career, it can’t just be Heavy Black Heart, with these very long K-pop samples as the foundations for songs. It needs to be a true reflection of us as musicians, as composers, as artists. Let’s go for it. But because of that, there was a lot of pressure. The album took so long to make because, especially in that mixing process, we thought this has to be so insanely refined that every microsecond and every single layer is very carefully considered and the best that it can be. The tracks on After Angel were not like that. Maybe we can learn some lessons from that, given the success of After Angel.
TECH: I have seen just as many people say that After Angel feels like a B-sides compilation. So I think different people have different tastes and preferences. I don’t think it’s necessarily a reflection that we shouldn’t try too hard. For sure, we spent a lot of time on Darklife. And at least as much time on four tracks from After Angel. But if there are people who are fonder of After Angel, I think it has more to do with the fact a lot of the songs are simple bangers.
JAMES: It’s almost more I’ll Try Living Like This-esque in a way. The songs kind of just jam and go.
TECH: It’s not as proggy. I mean the first track on After Angel is proggy as hell.
JAMES: I guess the B-sides are more what I’m talking about, not the four additional tracks.
TECH: After Angel as a whole ends up being a lot less proggy than Darklife. That makes it even more fun for us though. I don’t want to think that we can do particular things to appeal to even more people next time. We like being proggy and esoteric and we also like to make concise pop bangers. I think moving forward we’re still just going to be doing all of that. I feel like After Angel is like Live From Japan, in that in some ways it was just a compilation but the way it has been appreciated by people makes it feel more like its own album.
JAMES: It’s like Eagles Greatest Hits: 1971-1975.
TECH: The greatest album of all time.
JAMES: That is an album, and you cannot convince me otherwise. The longer time goes on and the more context is lost, that album is a little more specific as it’s right in the album title. But I think in twenty years, let’s say no one is listening to DDS in twenty years, except this one kid who discovers this crazy band who had all this weird shit. If they find a download of After Angel, they don’t care that it’s a B-side compilation because it’s presented as an album. We did that intentionally because we like albums more than compilations, so it’s almost a psychological trick in a way.
TECH: There’s a part of me that does understand or is too aware of legacy or the way people who are super into music will feel about the chronological progress an artist will make. So it occurred to me that because After Angel isn’t as good as Darklife that if people don’t understand that it’s a B-sides compilation then it’ll look like we made Darklife and then took a dip. That was my concern, I don’t really feel that way now that exists and can see the way people are reacting to it. It expands the potential pallet. New fans who discovered death’s dynamic shroud through Darklife might think After Angel just isn’t as heady or whatever.
KEITH: I wonder if on Bandcamp, we hadn’t put ‘B-sides compilation,’ how different the perception of the album would’ve been just based on less information.
TECH: Truly. If I saw something sold as B-sides, I would be much less interested in buying it. But I kept on thinking of Smashing Pumpkins’s Pisces Iscariot when we were putting it together. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to Pisces Iscariot but I don’t think I understood as I was growing up that music publications would say there was Gish and then there was Siamese Dream and then there was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. But I know that I’ve seen this other album Pisces Iscariot, where does it fall in. So there was this weird interest in it, but it’s just a B-sides compilation and I just didn’t know that or understand that because they didn’t call it that.
JAMES: One of my first Nine Inch Nails records was Things Falling Apart. I heard Things Falling Apart before I heard The Fragile, which coloured the way I experienced The Fragile. I think I liked a lot of those versions better than Fragile versions, which is ridiculous in retrospect, but it’s how I felt. So regarding what Tech said about whether it’s a step down, I’ve kind of given up on predicting how someone will respond to the music. Okay, if we work on something to a particular degree, it’s going to be good enough from our own instincts as musicians. In our mixtape club, because we drop a new mixtape every single month, and it’s a solo album by one of us. It’s always so interesting because those we make pretty fast, two-to-three weeks of working pretty diligently on it but doing that once every three months. Then when we release it to the mixtape club, everyone listens at the same time and they just throw their live reactions into Discord. It’s this insane adrenaline rush for an artist to make something, drop it, and instantly see visceral feedback. People throwing nonsense into the chat at their favourite moments because their overwhelmed. When making one of those albums, I’ll think in my head of specific fans in the club and what they like. This person is probably going to freak out during this particular part of this song. Then many, many times I’m completely wrong about what people think is awesome, what they’ll catch onto. So, I was so pleasantly surprised at the way After Angel has been received. A: as an album and B: as a good album. Because I thought to go all in and say this is the companion album. I was thinking of it more as the appendices to Darklife. Like Lord of the Rings style: this is just extra information. And that was reflected in the first teaser trail, where you see this angel erupting form behind a mountain. We had this visual language for Darklife and now we have a different one for After Angel so why not go all in. Hopefully in the future it will be seen as a part of the Darklife era and Darklife Universe. But I’m also ready to break ties with Darklife and start a new thing because we have nothing else from this era. Through the mixtape club, we’ve dropped two and a half hours of demos and early versions of Darklife stuff as an actual anthology. So you have all of this material that reflects us over the last year and through this year too, but I’m ready to look into the comeback.
LACHLAN: Well looking into that future, what ground would you all love to tread with DDS? What’s an ideal exploration through music that you would love to do, and what’s holding you back from that? Just to add a second clause to that, with your careers in music, if you could achieve any one thing, within music or the wider world, what would it be and look like?
JAMES: I really want the next DDS to – and just me personally, we haven’t talked about this.
KEITH: I’m interested to hear this too.
TECH: Yeah, what have you got to say, James?
*Laughing*
JAMES: I would like there to be more strange, avant-garde moments. Like on Heavy Black Heart, one of my favourite moments is “Nothing Like This World.” There are these great gasps of silence in it and it’s not a banger. It’s this delicate layering of these almost silly vocal samples but what that produced is just insanely beautiful, I think. I also really loved the moments on Darklife that were really harsh and noisy. Personally, those two ideas. Not just to be there for there’s sake, but naturally, with the three of us in consensus, turn to creating music that reaches that would make me happy, personally.
…
TECH: I think it would be nice to have more “real” instrumentation. Or at least really good VSTs of live instruments. I liked getting away from rock drums for a certain amount of time but now it feels like they can be used in a way that isn’t just as we have always done. Where it’s kind of fresh in a way. Guitars for sure.
JAMES: A lot of real ass piano.
TECH: It would be sick to do that kind of stuff. I don’t know how likely any of that stuff is but we’ll do what we can.
KEITH: I actually agree with both of you. Having a live band sound and being very adventurous with live instrumentation and then mixing that with electronic aspects. I feel there is fresh ground to break there.
JAMES: Re-inventing prog-rock.
KEITH: And I’ve also been playing around with distortion more. Even some of my mixtapes for our Bandcamp, trying to have really heavily distorted bass sounds is something that’s very interesting. Mixing that with live drum sounds would be cool.
JAMES: It sounds like we need to rent out a studio for a month and do it Kid A style. Just live in the studio and get… real weird.
TECH: … in debt.
JAMES: That’s really the dream though. Not to be in debt but to be in a studio together.
KEITH: Or hiring musicians. Like a children’s choir. Iglooghost and some of those UK artists, I’m pretty sure hired a children's choir. Damn, we could do that.
TECH: Yeah. As far as dream goal, personally speaking, I’m all for being a huge star. You can make me Beyonce. James and I always wanted to be rock stars. In the ’90s Oasis was always so cool to us. Being bigger than God.
JAMES: With the Stone Roses, you know, “I Wanna Be Adored.” On stage with my guitar, people losing their shit. The idea of that makes me feel good.
TECH: I think it’s such a double-edged sword because the more popular you are, the more awful people become towards you. There’s early on when no one knows who you are. Then you get to the point that people start to be jerks and it actually can impact on you. If you get really popular, then people are jerks but it doesn’t matter.
KEITH: I think I read a Billie Eilish interview where the interviewer asked whether she was ever afraid of crazy fans or anything and she said she isn’t really now but that there was a window right before she got popular that she considered the scariest times. Because people begin to know who you are but you don’t have the insulation or firewall of being famous. I don’t think DDS is quite to that pre-fame level yet. But we’re definitely at the point where it’s uncomfortable to just hear so many voices and all their hatred.
JAMES: There’s the weird hate and then there’s the strange objectifying, as the other side of it.
TECH: The dehumanisations. I’m fine with the dehumanisations so long as I don’t need to think about it.
JAMES: Look, if I’m looking up from hell and examining what legacy I would like to have left on this earth, it would be that DDS is not just forgotten as just some vaporwave blip. We’ve never been like ‘fuck vaporwave, we don’t make vaporwave, we do our own thing.’ We came up in that scene as original fans. But, especially with Darklife, we wanted to make the best album we could as musicians. Judge us as death’s dynamic shroud and not as the forefront of vaporwave. That means nothing in 2023.
KEITH: It stresses me to think three days in the future, let alone…
JAMES: Keith, you’re dead. Where’s your head at.
KEITH: I think people in a hundred years will look back at us, everyone now, and just think we were all fucking idiots. How could they do this or think like this? Just as we look back at people two hundred years ago.
TECH: Yeah, two hundred years from now, the most straight, virtuous person right now will be criticised for something we’ve never considered.
KEITH: If we travelled a hundred or two hundred years in the future, I think we would instantly commit suicide, just because of the mental dissonance in the clashing of time periods.
JAMES: Even with music, we can look back one hundred years and listen to the hundreds or so records produced at that times. But in a hundred years’ time, where do you even start sifting through the ten trillion albums that are released every day. It’s easier than ever to be heard but it’s harder than ever to separate yourself from the noise.
TECH: It’s funny, I don’t really have a long-term idea of legacy. It would be cool if people still liked DDS, but if I’m dead, I won’t give a shit. I just care about what happens while I’m alive. And I don’t like struggling. An easy way not to struggle is to be more comfortable with money, so it would be nice to become popular enough that I’m not worried about money. Unfortunately though, I’m not the kind of person to change what I do to fit the will of the people. You know, I could try and write something more accessible and lean into something people are enjoying but I don’t want to do that. I want to do what I want to do.
KEITH: I think that’s a good quality that we all have. Sometimes I think we’re incapable of having mass appeal or being able to see a trend and cash in on it.
JAMES: Even if we tried to, we’d each have to present it to the other two in a self-deprecating way. It would just get balanced out.
KEITH: I guess we could cash in on something like that if we were legitimately feeling it.
TECH: But we never are, though. Even when I try to push accessibility, it’s not to push us into the framework of appealing to a bagillion people. It’s because I like it.
JAMES: I would love to have enough money to have an A-frame chalet in Alaska. That’s my life dream. Home ownership is probably always going to be a dream now. But I should be so lucky to not have a day job. That was always my goal and I achieved it, to be a full-time musician since I was a kid. Getting to experience things at this level is incredible. When we were just playing in Barcelona recently, we started playing “Neon Memories” and the Spanish audience all started singing along and losing their shit. Are you kidding me? This is fucking insane. Moments like that are enough. I could die a happy man. I would really like that A-frame in Alaska though. And my office would be in the loft and the two of you can come around and we can make some music together.
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