Ctrl (2012)
Word
Association: ...unlike all
the rest.
Thoughts: Ctrl is like a
soundtrack to a fictional narrative. I thought it sounded like a completely
fascinating way to make an album. I gave myself the parameters of a story that
I had to tell through that narrative. I wanted to pull you through that story
with songs based on a character that was not me. It’s about a complicated
subject matter and it’s told in a complex way. So it’s not a very accessible
album. It’s an abstract, dense, cumbersome piece of work (laughs).
Inspirations/Influences: I wrote a
story about culture’s tenuous relationship with technology; a metaphor for that
idea. The way that everybody is staring into little screens and no one looks at
each other or their children or anything anymore. This has become our
worldview. Make no mistake, this is the thing by which we are looking at the
world. We demonstrate all the symptoms of addiction with our technology. We
can’t put it down and we’re not really counting the costs of the way we’re
using technology right now.
This is kind
of a moment where I think there’s still time for us to put guardrails around
the technology and have places in our lives where technology isn’t allowed.
That just seemed really important to me as a confessed technology addict.
Josh and I had been touring Stockholm Syndrome and we had both gotten fascinated with this idea of the singularity. We were staying up all night watching videos and reading Ray Kurzweil. These ideas and technological prophecies of what could happen on the other side of this moment that arguable really will happen when computer processors get to a certain level of speed and power that they will be capable of things that we’ve really never imagined. People will say that’s mumbo jumbo, but the iPhone would’ve sounded like something out of Star Trek before it came out. Everything sounds crazy until it doesn’t sound crazy because it’s become part of your everyday life. And it happens overnight.
Production
Notes: Ctrl is easily my most ambitious album.
It took me two years to conceptualize it and record it. It involved an
ancillary album that tells part of the story as a second thing. It was a huge
undertaking and completely indulgent. It was exactly what I wanted to make and
it came out exactly the way I had hoped it would. Although, it’s easily my
least commercial release (laughs).
It’s almost
a testament to the subject matter itself that it requires such a commitment to
engage with it. There’s just a little, tiny door on the front of that thing and
very few people are going to squeeze through it. It’s not a record that will
allow you to enjoy it or understand it unless you go all the way with it and
give yourself completely to it. There’s so little attention currency available
and there’s such a high premium on it.
I learned
more making Ctrl than with anything
else I’ve ever done. I pushed through boundaries that had existed for me for 20
years as a creative person. The amount of songs I had to write, the limited
time in which I had to write and record them all, the way they all had to
interact with each other; it was such a hard thing to make. Which is part of
why I wanted to make it. It was the most challenging and the most rewarding
thing I’ve ever done creatively.
Every record
I will make going forward will benefit from my having made Ctrl.
I worked
with Josh again and early on I started writing the short story, constructing it
as a narrative. I knew it was going to be three acts and wanted to keep
simplifying the story where I could tell it without every individual song
having the burden of communicating complex plot points. I needed the songs to
be about moments of emotion. It was a real jigsaw puzzle. And then there’s
Sola-Mi (laughs). It took everything I knew and everything I had learned up
until that point to do all that.
So Josh and
I got to talking and decided we wanted to make a piece of art about it. We
wanted to make an electronic rock opera about the singularity. Then we decided
we wanted to make two records. One is about the first machine waking up and the
other is about people and how they’re interacting with it and using it to get
what they’ve always wanted, which ultimately destroys them. We dreamt it all up
and went and made it.
Mixtape: “I
Feel Everything” is a good thesis. It says so much about why that record is
important. It’s the character’s last clear moment before death after he’s
gotten everything he thought he wanted.
As an additional bonus, here's a NoiseTrade exclusive - the complete, all acoustic version of Ctrl:
A variety of cool pre-order packages for I Was Wrong, I’m Sorry & I Love You (including immediate digital download) are available HERE.
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