EX.528 Chris Korda

Chris Korda: Dance music's harbinger of ecocide

The American artist and software developer Chris Korda uses the conventions of house music to warn us of societal and environmental collapse. She's been talking about it through music, writing and direct action since the early '90s. Now as her warnings become reality, so too has her music reached a renewed relevance and audience, primarily through a pair of albums for Perlon. Back in the early '90s, she founded the anti-natalist project the Church Of Euthanasia, whose mission to save the world from ecological disaster is summed up by its one commandment ("Thou shalt not procreate") and four pillars: suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. The mission dovetailed with her music, which was introduced to Europe by the reissue and subsequent crossover success of "Save The Planet, Kill Yourself" (a Church Of Euthanasia catchphrase).

In conversation with Martha Pazienti-Caiden, Korda talks about the research behind her latest Perlon LP, Apologize To The Future, which imagines the bitter resentment of future generations inheriting a wrecked planet.

You’re listening to Resident Advisors exchange. I’m Martha, thank you for being with us. This week’s episode is a conversation I had with composer, techno producer, and environmental activist, Chris Korda.

Chris founded the controversial Church of Euthanasia in the nineties, an antinatalist movement that obliges its members to take a lifetime vow of non-procreation in a move towards environmental sustainability. Her techno track “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” was a worldwide hit reaching the shores of Ibiza and the crates of Carl Cox amongst other superstar DJs. Chris Korda is now ready to share a new project, an LP titled “Apologize to the Future” written in complex polymeter with a robot choir delivering the central theme that future generations—should they exist—will bitterly resent us for leaving them with a wrecked planet. Chris wanted to set out a few things about her research around this new record and the emotional consequences of looking into the state of our environment, right from the start of our chat. So you’ll hear from her first and then the full interview.

This album “Apologize to the future” cost me a lot emotionally. You understand? Emotionally. I still have a hard time listening to it. It upsets me, and that’s because it’s intended to, and I guess it’s fair to say that it’s supposed to hurt. If it doesn’t hurt, something’s wrong. And so I feel that that’s the elephant in the room. That this is a terrifying thing, and to have even thought about these issues—even in a relatively trivial way—would already be traumatic, but to have explored them and visualized them in such excruciating detail is awful. It was a long process and unpleasant, and it is the culmination of decades and decades of research and study. And of course it synthesizes all of the Church of Euthanasia and everything that went into that. You could say that more than thirty years of my life is embedded in this album.

And so I feel that it’s important to talk about that, to talk about what it means to have to say something like this in the public sphere. After all this time, after all the water that’s gone under this bridge. It’s arguable that this is the electronic music album ever made entirely about climate change and human extinction and all the rest of it, intergenerational injustice. I mean, these are really major themes in our society at the moment. These are the essential themes of the 21st century. And so it’s as much a political development as it is an artistic one.

Do you remember a moment where you became passionate about the environment? Like, was there a key memory that stands out to you or an initial moment of realization about how much humans are damaging the earth?

Sure, sure. I read “God’s [Own] Junkyard.” My mother had it. She was quite an environmentalist and very passionate about it. And so she had a lot of books on her bookshelf that would have been interesting for a child to read. And some of them were easy. “God’s [Own] Junkyard” is a picture book. It’s just photographs … of primarily billboards and other littering of the landscape, if you want to put it that way. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when there weren’t laws against littering. And so I grew up as a child in a world where littering was the norm and it was quite vile. People just threw their trash out the windows of their cars. It was a long journey from being a five-year-old or whatever I was when I first encountered my mother’s environmental books to founding the Church of Euthanasia in 1992. A lot of stuff happened during those years that’s not relevant, or that’s only relevant if we were writing my biography, but somewhere during that time, I grasped something deep that perhaps … it helps to grow up in New York City to grasp, which is that the world was overpopulated. This was pretty obvious to me. And that overpopulation and overconsumption were having massive effects on not only on the environment, meaning the nonhuman world, but on human beings. You can’t stand in Grand Central station and not get that. I mean, it was years and years later when I saw Godfrey Reggio’s famous film “Koyaanisqatsi.” And of course one of the highlights of “Koyaanisqatsi” is the stop-motion or speeded up photography of rush-hour commuters pouring through the escalators of Grand Central station, intercut with sausage, going through a sausage machine.

And of course the implication is pretty obvious, that humans are meat in the machine. It’s a wonderful film. It’s a very glum film actually. Its ultimate metaphor for human civilization is a rocket. A giant rocket taking off, slowly taking off—it takes a long time to get a rocket in the air actually, but once it gets in the air, it’s very powerful—but it shows the trajectory, the arc of the rocket, and it’s very impressive and powerful. And then the rocket explodes. I feel bad, I’m spoiling the ending, but most people have seen it by now. But I feel it’s actually a pretty apt metaphor. And so Godfrey Reggio had a point. But I grasped all that at a very early age. I saw that humanity was overwhelming earth, and that that was bad strategy. And that wasn’t gonna work out. I mean, by the time I was a teenager, I had already grasped that.

And so the seeds of the Church of Euthanasia go all the way back to my childhood. I think most people who grew up in the 1970s probably could dimly grasp that something was going terribly wrong. Remember, the environmental protection movement began in 1971. I was a child. But before that, there was no environmental protection really. Before that—I had a friend who taught me about all this—before that was referred to in America as the “go-go years,” the postwar period, post Second World War. Those were the go-go years, where if you wanted to build a factory or something—there were so many towns that just kind of sprang into existence when the interstate highway system was built in America—you would just go driving out to these exits that were, there was basically almost no “there” there, they had all been farmland a few years before.

Next thing you know, suburbs are exploding and it all kind of looks a little bit like that film “The Stepford Wives,” and you would just drive there in your Cadillac and then go to city hall and bring the mayor a suitcase full of money. And he’d hand you whatever building permits you want. They don’t care, whatever you want to do, great, build it. And nobody was checking to see what you were dumping in the sewers. And that had terrible consequences. It took years, decades, before we got that under control. Industrial pollution exploded in the 1960s and even starting in the fifties, actually a lot of the damage was done in the late fifties, when the plastics industry really got underway, people were pouring the most ghastly things right into the sewers.

And in many cases melting the sewers. I worked in a company in Boston where that actually happened. We were sited on top of an enormous toxic waste [dump] that had resulted from the fact that all the previous tenants of that industrial park were circuit [fabricators]. You know what those are, that’s where they make circuit boards. One of the most toxic industries in the world. And I had an eyewitness to that who said that at one of the buildings, there was a hole in the floor, a big square hole in the floor, and that’s where they poured all the used solvents. So just try and scale that, imagine that in your head, multiply that times millions of people and thousands and thousands of corporations all across America, especially in Massachusetts, where I’m from. And you can begin to understand why we needed the Environmental Protection Agency. By the time it started, we had rivers on fire and stuff like this. It was no joke. We had really made a mess. So I think that all of that was part of the answer to your question. That’s how I got started down this road.

And tell me about founding the church.

The God honest truth is it came to me in a dream. Okay. That stuff happens. It’s not only in fiction. It worked for Salvador Dali and it can work for me. It came to me in a dream, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” came to me in a dream or a trance or whatever we want to call it. And so “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” was the foundation of the church. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. To the extent that I could be a one hit wonder, that’ll be the one. It’s still giving today. Just last year, Supreme ripped it off, and sold 10,000 T-shirts. Incredible. And they ripped off the entire design, not just the slogan, with the slogan, there’s no problem there. You can’t copyright slogans.

Maybe you could trademark them if you had a lot of money and lawyers, but they didn’t just take the slogan. They took the whole design, everything. The only thing they changed is they removed the word “euthanasia” in the copyright. So instead of saying “Church of Euthanasia” it said “Church of Supreme.” So brazen! I remember talking to my gallerist in Paris about that. I was fuming. I was just ripping, you know? And he’s like, let me talk to them. Let me talk to some people, I know what to do. And he did know what to do. He made a few calls, and he said, the thing you need to do, don’t come in with your guns blazing. He said they did the same thing to Louis Vuitton, and Louis Vuitton lost in court. I’m like, oh dear. Okay.

So this is just how they roll, you know? And so he said, what you need to do is you need to send them a very polite email, and make it kind of passive-aggressive and whiny. Say something like, “I wish we could have met under better circumstances,” which is exactly what I did say. It worked really well. Next thing you know, I was on the phone with the creative director of Supreme and he was super apologetic. And it’s a big company, one hand doesn’t always know what the other hand is doing. And so like, hey, sorry about that. Our bad, let’s see how we can make this right. Well, that’s fine. But I mean, the point is that “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” is more relevant today than it was in the nineties, much more. And people get that. They see it. Back in the nineties, it seemed absurd.

Before we talk about how it was received at the time, would you be able to just lay out the values of the Church of Euthanasia?

Well, I mean, it’s very easy. It’s, there’s only really only one thing that everybody agrees to. The Church of Euthanasia is committed to voluntary population reduction. We’re an antinatalist church. Joining the church means taking a lifetime vow of non-procreation. And if you do that, you don’t have to do anything else for the environment. You get a pass, you get a “get out of jail free” card for everything else. We don’t care what else you do. Everything else is optional. You don’t have to be a vegan. We don’t care. I mean, it’s nice. You get brownie points for that. But the only thing you have to do is not have children. But you have to stick to it. If you change your mind, we kick you out, and you can’t come back. You’re excommunicated. We only have one rule, so we’re pretty stubborn about adhering to it. The one commandment: “Thou shalt not procreate.” And that’s it. It’s easy.

And so it’s really kind of a slacker religion. And it grew up at a time when that made sense. At the time when the Church of Euthanasia started, it was still “high weirdness by mail,” the ‘zine movement, the Church of the Subgenius. We had competition back then. Satanism was big, punk and post-punk were huge. There was a lot of crazy stuff going around in the mail. And so we were just one of those things, but we managed to differentiate ourselves from the pack pretty quickly. And we had legs. I mean once we went on the Jerry Springer show, there was no turning back. We had the ear of the public and we continued to say stuff that made people shake their heads and think about things differently. We didn’t just stop with “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.”

Would you tell me a bit about how the church was received at the time, in the nineties?

Well, with horror. I mean, it’s still received with horror. It’s the last thing people want to hear. Particularly in libertarian countries like the United States, where people hate being told what to do, the last thing they want is people telling them how many children they should have, or shaming them for having children. It’s never going to be popular. That wasn’t its point. Its point was to draw attention to certain things, to change the conversation. I like to say that we changed the conversation about antihumanism. We put, we helped put antihumanism on the map. By the time Elizabeth Kolbert got around to it, we’d been laying the groundwork for years. Antihumanism is alive and well today in part thanks to our efforts. And the essence of antihumanism is seeing human civilization, and human activities and human history from a nonhuman point of view. And that’s what we did. That’s a thing worth doing. And it wasn’t easy and people hated it, but it needed to be done.

So you just mentioned the “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” record. In what way were you using music as a vehicle to get your ideas out there and how did you see music kind of helping your cause?

There was a lot of luck involved. I mean, I was a musician long before the Church of Euthanasia. I’ve been a musician since I was 12 years old. I started with piano. I switched to guitar at 15 or so, and I played guitar seriously for more than 30 years. I studied jazz under Jerry Bergonzi. I briefly attended the Berklee College of Music. I had composition classes in university. I know my stuff. And so I love music, and that was my first love, actually. In life, you don’t typically get to do your first choice. Very, very few people get that. It’s nice when you meet someone who got to do the thing that they really said from the beginning, that’s what I love and that’s what I want to do. That wasn’t my case, not really. What I wanted was to be a guitarist. Well, that’s a tough racket. As you probably know, there’s a lot of jazz guitarists in the world. It’s a little bit like saying I want to be an Olympic swimmer. It’s like, okay, well, let’s see your arms. Good luck with that.

So I struggled with it. I struggled with it a lot and ultimately it didn’t work out, but in the process, I learned a lot about music and developed a deep, abiding understanding of harmony and a deep love of improvisation and rhythm and all the rest of it. So I would have made music without the Church of Euthanasia, and in fact, I’d already started making music before the Church of Euthanasia was a thing. My first recorded music is “Demons in My Head.” That’s not really a Church of Euthanasia thing. It’s an environmental … what shall we call it? “An environmental punishment in D minor.” Okay. Well, that’s what it says on their CD. It’s ambient music of some kind, or environmental music.

And it’s interesting, and I like it, but it’s more just that there were a bunch of things all occurring at the same time. At the moment where I first sort of gotten the idea that electronic music could possibly allow me to express myself in a new way that didn’t involve practicing scales on the guitar eight hours a day, around that same time, the Church of Euthanasia was first blossoming. And so it just seemed logical. The things went together. I had always said that the church should use every available media. And we did that. We were pretty good that way. We got ourselves on TV, we got in the newspapers, we did radio shows, we did actions in the street, and we made music. We did everything. We made merchandise. We were a full-service cult, you know?

And so it just made sense, like, okay, well, so I’m making electronic music and I’m figuring this out. My first few tracks were just techno tracks or whatever. But then at some point it’s like, okay, well, this thing goes with that thing. And so let’s try setting “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” to music and see what happens. And boom, next thing you know, there goes another year of my life. It took a year actually to make that record. That was a very hard record to make. I mean, it was worth it, right? It’s still today probably my single biggest hit. And it’s what got me on Gigolo. Just that track by itself. What happened exactly was DJ Hell brought it back from a record shop in New York, and his girlfriend at the time, Gabrielle, fell in love with it and kept saying to Hell, I love that track. You got to keep playing that track. You gotta find Chris Korda and bring him here and release that track.

So he put out the vibe and eventually word got to me. It took a while though. I was at some party somewhere in Boston and a total stranger [Benny Blanco] was DJing. At that point in my life, I was sort of in the habit of introducing myself to the DJ, you know, I was an aspiring artist or whatever, still totally unknown, and that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re struggling in that business. And so I introduced myself and he said, oh my God, you’re Chris Korda? Holy crap. Give me your telephone number. I gotta introduce you to DJ Hell, he’s looking for you. I thought, what a lot of shit, who’s that guy, I had never heard of any of this.

I thought it sounded pretty sketchy, but I gave him my phone number. And two days later I got a call from Hell saying something like, I mean, I exaggerate, I don’t want to do the accent, it wouldn’t be right. But he said something like, we’re going to make you a star in Germany. And he was true to his word. So that’s how “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” got off the ground. But it was a pretty long bitter process. Initially it was released on my own label and it didn’t go super well. I mean, it charted in Detroit and in Chicago, but really not anywhere else. It didn’t really find its audience until I was introduced to European audiences.

Hmm. So you mentioned that it took a year to make that record. I’d love to know a bit more about your approach to using sequences in music production. Um, it’s been described as more like sculpting rather than traditional composition.

Well, I said that, in numerous interviews, I’ve stated that my process is more similar to sculpting, and that’s true now, but it wasn’t true at the time. At the time when “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” was made I was using a more conventional process. I would, like most composers, I had a keyboard, an electronic keyboard or whatever in my little studio and some synthesizers and drum machines and stuff. And I would plonk around on the keyboard and play a few chords and try and find something that fit. That’s how most people write music, but that’s not at all how I write music today. That’s not how “Akoko Ajeji” was made. And that’s not how this new “Apologize to the Future” record was made either. So my process has changed. Pretty early on after, or around the same time that I was making “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” I really grasped polymeter and what its implications were. And pretty soon after that, I was writing almost exclusively in complex polymeter.

Not always. On the first record, maybe not. “Six Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong” has some tracks that are just in straight four, including for example “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” of course, but also “Victim of Leisure” and a few others. But there are examples of complex polymeter on that first record too. “Stencil” is definitely complex polymeter. So [are] “Buy” and “Buy More” and many others. So I had already [grasped] the idea, but I didn’t have the right tools for it. It was still a very painful process back then, but “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” didn’t take a year because of that. It took a year because it was so hard to get the mix right.

It’s a very complex track, it has a lot of parts and I’m no expert at audio engineering. No one will ever accuse me of that. And I had a bunch of pretty experienced help, but they mostly weren’t getting it right. And so in the end we had to retain really professional help. I had to actually basically pay a guy to start over and remix the whole thing from scratch, using ADAT, which was pretty cutting-edge technology at that time, where you can just put each instrument on its own tape. And, so he remixed the entire thing, 64 tracks or whatever it was. He was actually a very interesting character. His name was David Frangioni. He’d worked for Aerosmith and bands like that. Paula Abdul and so on. Jan Hammer caught my attention as he’s one of my great heroes. But so [David] had a studio in Arlington and he remixed the whole thing.

And by the time he got done with it, it sounded amazing, truly professional. And he compressed it to within an inch of its life. And that’s the mix that DJ Hell heard. It’s just absolutely thunderous from the first note, but that kind of thing is not easy to arrange. That’s skill, there’s a lot of skill involved in audio engineering and I never claimed that that was my real skill. I’m not an audio engineer or a sound designer primarily, though I have done some of that work of course. I’m primarily a composer.

Um, you mentioned that about them kind of coming to an understanding of the implications of polymeter. Um, what were those implications that you understood about polymeter?

Well, it’s simple. I mean, it’s like this. It’s just an analogy, but pretty much all music that most people today have ever heard is in 4/4, and specifically the backbeat. That’s the thing that goes, boom, cha, boom, cha, right? With the snares on the two and the four, and probably mostly in the major scale, or maybe even only in one major scale, or maybe even only in the pentatonic minor. Most disco tracks are just pentatonic minor start to finish. I mean, I should probably explain what polymeter is for the record.

Polymeter is basically really simple. It’s really just when you have a bunch of things that are different frequencies. And so if one frequency is an exact integer multiple of the other, it won’t be very interesting to watch, but if one frequency isn’t an exact integer multiple of the other, and you have a bunch of them, they’ll engage in this fascinating kind of converging and diverging movement, not unlike the planets orbiting the sun.

So it’s not the same thing as odd time. There is odd time tradition going back thousands of years. To this day, there’s still an island in the Aegean sea, part of Greece, I believe I’m pronouncing it right, it’s called Kalamata. ... But anyway, the people who live on that island have been dancing in seven for thousands of years, and they have a name for it. It’s called the [Kalamatianos] dance. And so if you say to a Greek band, hey, play [Kalamatianos], they’re like, okay, we’ll play in seven now. And everybody dances in seven and it’s perfectly normal. That’s just what they do. So odd time is as old as the hills, nothing new about that. It’s absolutely normal in Indian classical music and in Arabic drumming and many other parts of the world. But polymeter, not.

And so why is that? Well, we can speculate. There actually hasn’t been much academic research done on this and there should be. I would submit that the reason why polymeter doesn’t have a folk tradition is because it’s so hard for humans to do. Essentially what you’re asking people to do is you’re asking them to do the opposite of what they normally do. Normally what people want to do is get in phase and stay in phase. If you don’t do that, right, your music teacher wraps you on the knuckles. Hey, you’re losing time or you’re gaining time or whatever. But in polymeter, you do it intentionally. You’re intentionally going out of phase with everything else at a precisely controlled rate. And then eventually you’re going back into phase again at the same precisely controlled rate. Well, it’s super unnatural.

It’s super hard to do for musicians. Maybe very highly classically trained musicians can do it if you write it all out, but your ordinary average musician just can’t do it. And so that means that that’s why it didn’t evolve, right? It didn’t evolve because it’s just not a thing people do. And so it had to wait until the age of machines. Machines turned out to be amazingly good at this. If there’s one thing machines are really, really good at, it’s maintaining precise phase relationships. And you could do it back in the nineties, you could do it in the eighties, probably. If you had two drum machines and you locked them into sync with each other, which was not impossible to do even in the eighties, you could program one with a pattern length of five and the other with a pattern length of seven and bingo, you’ve got instant polymeter, using Roland’s technology.

So it wasn’t that it was physically impossible to do. Steve Reich was demonstrating it in the late sixties and early seventies with two tape recorders. He was pretty much the first person to demonstrate it in an academic context. So it was possible, but it just didn’t really have any tradition behind it. So people had no idea what to do with it. And the only examples they had of it were mostly Steve Reich’s music, which frankly, it comes from an academic context. It’s not necessarily all that pleasant or groovy. It sounds kind of square, a little bit square maybe for people who aren’t into academic-sounding classical music. And so people just really didn’t pay attention to it. It wasn’t a thing. I’m hard pressed to name another electronic music artist from the nineties who made use of polymeter.

I was literally, you know, I had to field to myself in the nineties. I was the only techno artist writing in complex polymeter. In fact it’s hard to find examples even in any kind of music except academic classical music. I found a couple of tracks by Stereolab, and that was much, much later. I did a pretty exhaustive search and I didn’t find it. And it wasn’t because it was impossible. It’s just because it’s not a thing that people normally do. But it really does change everything. I think that the implication of polymeter is that it’s a whole new approach to music. It really is. And so that’s why I invested so much time and energy in exploring it. And I know a lot more about it now than I did in the nineties, for sure.

And you’ve used technology across this time to kind of understand it better and bring that into the way you make your music.

Yeah, there was a big delay. The problems were mostly technological. You asked about me being an engineer and stuff. The problem was that … there’s a lot of luck involved in life and there was luck involved in this too. I just happened to own—at the time I was making “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” in the early nineties, and starting out down the road of electronic music—I just happened to own a copy of DOS Cakewalk, which was fairly obscure at that time. But it was one of the only [MIDI] sequencers you could actually get for MS-DOS, which is what I happened to be running. Remember MS-DOS, floppy disks, all this kind of thing. So that’s pretty historic, but so one of the odd attributes of DOS Cakewalk was that you could set each track’s length completely independently from the others.

And so I basically just discovered one day that you could do amazing things with this. This had more to do with setting the course of my future music development than any other single thing. I woke up one day and I’m like, oh, what happens if we set all the lengths different, and all the lengths aren’t multiples of each other? In other words, if they were multiples of each other—which is presumably what most people probably did, maybe they had one thing that’s in four, another thing that’s in 16 and another thing that’s in 32 or whatever, and then you don’t get any benefit—but if you set one to five and one to 11 and one to 13, holy smokes, next thing you know, you’ve got this crazy thing that’s evolving over days, or at least minutes, hours, long periods of time, the more prime numbers involved the longer the repeat time gets.

And so suddenly it dawned on me that this was really radical. But the point was that after MS-DOS became no longer a thing, there was a huge consolidation in the music industry, around certain technologies for sequencing. And essentially everything moved. As soon as Windows and Mac became dominant, everything became about timeline editing, just as in video. And the problem with timeline editing is it screws [polymeter] up. Suddenly you don’t have separate loop points for each track. And so if you look at the design of [sequencers] like Logic and Ableton and so on, they make it super difficult to do what I do. And this message was not lost on me. I thought oh wow, this is not good. I’m going to have to make my own thing. And so I did, I set about making my own software, because frankly none of the commercial softwares were helping me. They were making it actively difficult to do what I wanted to do.

And the problem with that of course, is that maintaining your own software is hard work. And in the nineties, it was really hard work. Basically that was back before we had universal device drivers and stuff like that. So you literally had to write your software around a particular chunk of hardware, and God help you if you lose that piece of hardware, maybe you better buy two or three of them, which is what I did. But so that whole paradigm just collapsed. And eventually it became clear that the only way forward—this was about 2003 now, after “The Man of the Future”—it became clear that there was no further gain that could be extracted from my DOS homegrown MIDI sequencer, no matter how awesome it was.

I mean, I’d used it to make two albums and it was great for making polymeter, but it was hopelessly obsolete and very limiting and it was hurting my artistic creativity. And so the only way forward would be to somehow port that program to a modern operating system. Well, that turns out to be a really hard thing to do. And so a lot of the reason I stopped making music for a while, was because I had to go learn the skills that I would need to do that. It took me years and years of mostly working in the commercial sector. I worked in the 3D-printing industry primarily for about 20 years. And during that time I learned about object-oriented programming and many other boring things, which aren’t boring to me, but they’re boring to most people. Essentially I learned the technological background skills that I would need to accomplish this task.

And I wrote a lot of open source software during that time and had some good practice runs. And by the time I sat down to actually write the new polymeter program in 2016, I was a much better programmer. And so I did a better job of it. And that was a good thing. Essentially, the new program, the new Polymeter has vastly more degrees of freedom than the original one did, degrees of freedom that I couldn’t have imagined back in the nineties. And they are very exciting and they’ve led to a whole new area of music for me. I’m now making neoclassical music.

So during the process of making this updated software, um, were you, did you have an album in mind or did that come later and you just wanted to get the software nailed first?

[They] totally co-evolved. Essentially “Akoko Ajeji” is like a diary of the redevelopment of the polymeter sequencer. I got the easy stuff working first. I’m a big believer in picking the low-hanging fruit. So I picked the low-hanging fruit. “Ala Aye” was the first track. It’s actually a really hard track, but it only uses juxtaposition. But so anyway that’s the idea is that you build that thing, and then suddenly you have new degrees of freedom and you can approach music in a totally different way.

So did you feel freedom when you were working on “Apologize to the Future”?

No, “Apologize to the Future” was kind of different. On “Akoko Ajeji” I felt very carefree, I guess, is the word. I love the beginnings of projects and I’m a very curious person. I like intellectual pursuits, I’m a big believer in—I think it was the major who said somewhere in “Twin Peaks”: “Achievement is its own reward.”—I’m a big believer in that. I believe that the best thing that can happen to you in life is that you can get really curious about something and then learn everything there is to know about it, or as much as you can learn about it. And that that’s the point. There isn’t any other point to being alive. And so, I’m happy when I discover something new or when I start something new and I just want to get up every morning and learn everything I can about that thing.

“Akoko Ajeji” is kind of a happy uplifting album because of that, but “Apologize to the Future” comes from a completely different heredity. I didn’t write the music to start with. I wrote the lyrics and it took a long time. And in some cases, the lyrics predate the music by many months or even almost a year. “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” came first. “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” has a long history behind it. “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” started years before the album. Originally it wasn’t a song at all. It started as a blog post of all things, on a blog that’s actually pretty important in my history, important enough to mention it. The blog is called Metadelusion.

Metadelusion is interesting because it is the home of what I call the post-antihuman Church of Euthanasia. I know that’s a bit of a mouthful, but that’s the truth. The Church of Euthanasia went through a pretty drastic kind of rejiggering in the ‘00s. Essentially, we made the transition from being mostly about misanthropy—mostly about hating humans for all the terrible stuff they’ve done, which we won’t list exhaustively now—we went from hating humans to actually kind of feeling sorry for them. That’s the difference. Hating them now is kind of pointlessly cruel, since most of the terrible stuff that was going to happen to us if we didn’t stop doing all those stupid things is now unavoidable, and is going to happen anyway, even if we do stop doing them. And so increasingly it’s more about grasping that humans are actually their own worst enemies, which is kind of tragic and awful.

And that includes all of us. And of course the most awful injustice of all of it is that in this case, it’s a little bit like some customers skipping out of the restaurant without paying. So the present generations are going to get to die. They’ll be smugly dead, and it’ll be their offspring, their children and grandchildren who will be stuck paying the bill. Essentially present generations have sent their own descendants to hell, and it’s that realization that I think really led to the post-antihuman Church of Euthanasia. Pretty glum. And so “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” grew out of that. “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” essentially was the late stage of my conversion to the view that what makes humanity interesting and worth saving is not just civilization, but specifically our scientific understanding of the universe.

That actually, this is our great achievement. I mean, we’ve made a lot of nifty art and stuff, and I love art, and I love outsider art especially—arguably I’m an outsider artist myself, so I’m biased—and I think art is important and a big part of the human story. But the key element of the human story is that we were kind of dumb children in the Neolithic, right? We weren’t very smart. We really understood almost nothing. And today we understand almost everything. We certainly can grasp electrons and protons and neutrons and the cosmos and the periodic table and amazing stuff like that. And so human beings have really actually done very, very well at explaining phenomena. And the only way that we ever explain phenomena is through science.

Basically there’s really two kinds of knowledge. This is what “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” is about. It’s about the idea that there’s really two kinds of knowledge. There’s knowledge that consists of predictive explanations of phenomena, and then there’s everything else. And so the “everything else” could be divided broadly into things that try to make predictive explanations, but are actually bullshit: that’s pseudoscience. And then there’s stuff that just doesn’t try to explain phenomena at all, like poetry, or painting perhaps would be a better example. So, in the first category of actual explanations of phenomena, science is absolutely preeminent. There is no competition for it. And so “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” basically starts with that. It sets the focus of the album. Almost the album’s opening line is a reference to Einstein’s famous quip that “the moon is really out there.”

His point being that it’s out there whether you believe in it or not. That reality is real. This is sort of where the album starts. And so the album proceeded from that. “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” became a slideshow that I presented in Berlin, at Gallery Spektrum in 2018. And it just grew and grew from there. I basically started giving a lot of time to persuading people that humanity’s great achievement was its understanding of its environment. And if we were going to save … that “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” was actually kind of a Zen koan, if you will, or a little bit of a paradox, because it’s not actually the planet that needs saving. The planet is going to be fine. There’s nothing wrong with the planet. It’s human civilization that needs saving. And so if we can’t get our act together and we can’t prioritize our long-term survival, then the future just doesn’t include us. The planet goes on without us, and it’ll be planet of dolphins, or planet of giant reptiles again, who knows. And whatever that is, it might evolve back into something like humans again, or it might not, but either way that won’t be our fault, because we’ll be gone.

And so that’s the realization that the album springs from. It’s an existentialist thing. “Apologize to the Future” is an existentialist album, it springs from the observation that humanity is alone in the universe, and that the universe is hostile and fundamentally utterly indifferent to our fate. If we have meaning here on earth, it’s because we make it for ourselves. And if that meaning includes long-term survival, then all’s good. But if that meaning turns out to be that we just want to have a really awesome party and screw the future, then that’s what’s going to happen. And there’s no law against that. It looks to me like that’s kind of what’s happened actually. And that’s the real meaning of … the track “Overshoot” is exactly about that.

When the rich people are on their private islands and jetting around and living these obscenely indulgent, decadent lives, they’re serving as models for all the rest of us. So we’re supposed to model ourselves on them. We’re supposed to model ourselves on superficiality and triviality and accumulation of wealth and selfishness and narcissism. Well, could be. The point is that that’s not a violation of the laws of physics. It’s perfectly possible. It’s one of our degrees of freedom. We can have a really awesome party for the few, and everybody else can be screwed and then we can go extinct. And if that’s the plan, if that’s what we’re really going to do, then we don’t need to change anything. We’ve already got the right form of government for that. It’s called neoliberalism. It’s perfect. Everything is good. We just need to keep doing it and we’ll be gone. But if we don’t want that, if we want something else, if we want the better angels of our nature to prevail, then we do need a different system. And we’d better do it quickly, because we’re kind of running out of time.

What would you want your listeners to take away from spending time with your album?

Polymeter aside, the album is primarily a lyrical achievement from my point of view. I started down the road—after “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” was becoming music and not just politics—I started down the road of hip-hop and rap and studied those forms, because I felt that they were the right model. And I’m not claiming to be a rapper or anything like that, I’m just saying that I was really influenced by all of that. I was strongly influenced for example by Kate Tempest. When I saw Kate Tempest’s “Europe is Lost” a kind of bulb went off over my head, I thought, okay, yeah. Actually I could do something like that, that that’s kind of the right direction for all of this.

This album contains more words than all of my previous output combined, if you add it all up, and by a lot, and not only that but it’s all in rhyme. So that’s really different. It’s primarily a poetic or lyrical achievement. And so I would hope that it’s understood that way. Groove magazine, they were kind of kidding around when they called me the Bob Dylan of climate change, but somehow the moniker stuck. I’m not saying that that’s true, it’s not an egotistic thing, I’m just saying that there’s something to that, that we need a Bob Dylan of climate change. We need someone to make these issues real for people, so that they feel it, you understand? So that it’s not just some kind of armchair intellectual thing, where you’re like, oh yeah, super bad stuff’s happening, but I try not to read the news actually, because it’s kind of depressing. You know, people think like, oh yeah, we really ought to do something about all that stuff. But I’ve got all this other stuff to do and I’m trying to get my new record released and then I’m going to do a live streaming and this and that. And also we’re busy partying.

Everybody has their own reasons why they don’t want to make humanity’s imminent implosion the main focus of their daily lives. I can understand that. I don’t think it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s easy. But I get up every morning and I look myself in the mirror and I think that this is really happening. And whether it’s lucky or unlucky, I have a ringside seat for the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. And so I want people to feel that. I want them to listen to this album and feel that. And so … I meant [what] I said … in “Exit Game”: the one that starts “Rich people are dumb. I hope they succumb. In expensive cars, or condos on Mars.”

That’s real, people should be angry. They should feel rage. We’ve been lied to, we’ve been used, and above all we failed. And we haven’t failed in some abstract sense. We failed the future. That’s not a good thing. That’s a terrible thing to have done. It’s bad enough to fail the present, but to fail the future is really, really bad. And so I want people to feel that, I want them to think about that. And I want them to somehow connect with the issues that are being raised on this album. They might just listen to it and say, oh, that’s some pretty groovy music or whatever, but I don’t think so. I personally feel that it’s long overdue, and I couldn’t tell you why it hasn’t happened sooner. I mean, that’s something that’s for someone else to say.

Do you think that people might potentially be a little bit more [receptive] to hearing the ideas that are presented on the album amid the context of this kind of backdrop of a global pandemic with coronavirus?

I would think so. I would hope so because there’s clear connections between the two. I mean, I was going to cite this earlier, I can send you the citation, but there’s clear academic research and peer reviewed papers and so on showing that not only is COVID connected to the climate crisis, but in fact, it was predicted long ago. It was one of the predicted consequences of the climate crisis. Essentially it’s a simple thing to understand, it’s that deforestation and mass extinction on balance tend to place humanity more in contact with species that are carrying pathogens lethal to humanity. That’s not hard to understand. It’s been understood for decades that this would be very likely, that this would be one of the things we would see happen, along with sea level rise and increasing global temperature and the acidification of the ocean and all of that.

It’s just another one of the things on that long glum list that you can get from the United Nations or whatever. Essentially it’s that as we simplify—that’s a polite word—as we homogenize ecosystems and largely strip them of all their biological diversity, we can expect the weeds to get the upper hand. And when I say weeds, I don’t mean plants that we don’t like. I mean, the tough opportunist species. Most of them are not our friends. The obvious examples are rats and roaches and pigeons and so on, but there’s lots of others. Most of them are bugs and bacteria, and they’re not our friends. And so to the extent that we create a hothouse world, we’re making life harder for ourselves. Definitely we will have more problems with our health. And so I don’t, I don’t see them as being separate issues.

I actually see COVID as a big wake up call for humanity, and a lot of people agree with me about that. I think there’s a lot of perception, especially in climate change circles, that this is actually just what we needed. It’s cold water in the face. It’s allowing people to do things that they previously said were impossible. Oh, we could never cut back our air travel, or we could never stop going on vacation all the time, or we could never stop driving, or completely rejigger our economy so that everything is moving online. No, no, we couldn’t do any of those. Well, actually we did do those things. We just did it in response to a much different threat. So that’s fine. I think that COVID has opened the door for people to think about life in a different way, and to ask pointed questions about what’s really valuable and what we really want.

And so I think that it’s actually the right moment. I’m not saying I’m glad that COVID happened. Of course I’m not. It’s made a lot of people die, and it’s made a lot of people very miserable and it’s causing a depression in many countries and that’s terrible. But I think that like so many things it has good and bad aspects. It has a silver lining. And one of the silver linings is that it’s helping us to re-conceptualize modern life, which we desperately need to do. Now, whether that’s enough is another question. That won’t be for me to say, I’m not gonna say that it’s enough. In fact there’s precious little evidence for that. Like I say somewhere in all of this, wake me up when the Keeling curve changes direction.

And for those who are not up on climate science, that’s the measurement of the amount of CO2 that we’re putting into the atmosphere each year. It’s been going up steadily since 1958, and it shows no sign of leveling off. We’re still out putting more CO2 each year than the year before. So wake me up when that even plateaus. That’ll be a sign that humanity is getting serious about its own future. And I’m sure Greta Thunberg would say something similar. In the end it’s all about CO2. That’s the main method we have to make our future impossible, is by continuing to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. Methane is not helping either, and there’s lots of other terrible stuff we’re doing that’s not helping, but if we continue to add more and more CO2 to the atmosphere every year, then definitely we’re going to four degrees C or whatever, or maybe worse.

And then we’re melting all the ice and melting all the permafrost. Then after a certain point, it no longer matters what people do. We could wake up one day and say, hey, you know what? That was all a terrible idea. And so we’re actually going to stop [emitting] any CO2, and maybe even start sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, and it could still be too late. Once you start really melting the permafrost, then the earth just has a certain inertia of its own. It’s a little bit like the Titanic. The time to turn it around is not just before you hit the iceberg, because by then it’s just not going to happen. It’s a really large, large thing, and the iceberg’s really large too. And so that’s too late. You got to turn it around like five minutes earlier.

And so we have a similar situation. We got to turn around, and we got to turn around now. Actually we should have turned around 30 years ago, when the Church of Euthanasia was howling in the wilderness, but now would still be better than never. And so I hope that the Church of Euthanasia’s message will be received. I hope that the album will have an impact on people and they’ll think, yeah, actually we can change our lives, and we have to change our lives because we don’t want to send our children to hell.

Absolutely. Um, so to end, what would your advice be for, um, being an environmentally friendly consumer of electronic music?

Wow. Well, that’s a really tough question. I thought about that one a lot last night. That one kept me awake. I didn’t get as much sleep as I should have, and it’s partly because of that question. I sort of don’t know what to say. I gotta be careful what I say, I almost am tempted to plead the fifth, because there’s a deep problem, there really is. I guess whatever, it’s a free country, I shouldn’t be afraid. I’m the Reverend, I’m not supposed to be afraid. What I want to say is that the electronic music industry, let’s just say that it’s invested in, shall we say, partying. Partying is a big part of what’s being marketed, and that’s a problem. It’s not just a problem because partying is superficial and because it leads to a fairly shallow set of values. I would point to the fact that the clubbing industry is primarily sustained by alcohol sales.

Now the clubbing industry is under attack at the moment. It’s not polite to kick somebody when they’re down, but you understand that disco was derided even back in the 1970s when I was a teenager. Disco was perceived by many people as being a step backwards in terms of musical variety and creativity, but it became the main American export culturally, and it spread all over the world. And so now 40 years later, people are still doing that thing where it goes, boom, cha, boom, cha. I can’t tell you how many people I know who are in the business of providing something like party facilitation. It’s a bit harsh, but I think you know what I mean. And so that’s a problem, right? Because there’s nothing that says that music has to be synonymous with partying.

In fact the music that I grew up listening to wasn’t. The music that I grew up listening to was extremely politically motivated. And a lot of the lyrics were very powerful and about pressing social issues. And many of the songs that I remember from my childhood were transformational. They changed me. They changed many other people. Arguably in some way, by changing all of us, they changed society. Go back and read Joni Mitchell’s lyrics. They’re very deep. There’s a lot of emotional and intellectual depth. I’m frightened that during my lifetime, art in general has become more crass, as culture has become more crass. I don’t think that Trumpism is a surprise. To me, Trumpism is just the continuation of a long glum rollback of everything. I lived through the age of rollback, and it’s been pretty bleak to watch.

I haven’t really enjoyed it much and I’ve tried to fight against it my own way. I’ve tried to contribute more depth and more feeling to the intellectual and emotional conversations and artistic conversations that we’re having. But it’s not an easy thing to change. The tide’s going the other way, right? And so that’s part of the reason I listened to and was influenced by rap music before I made “Apologize to the Future.” I actually think that rap music—and hip hop to some extent, but especially more political rap—is one of the last bastions of real lyrical depth. Now you may not necessarily be able to relate to the issues—it depends on who you are and how you grew up—but there’s no question that it’s very complex lyrically and rhythmically, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into making those rhymes. And some of them are quite interesting and they have a lot to say about society and where it’s headed.

It is possible still for music and art to be political and to change society. And I want that. I just think that the electronic music industry has not in general been holding up its end of that bargain. I’m not going to point fingers and say that that’s anyone’s fault, I just think that that’s a phenomenon that’s occurred. There’s been a kind of epidemic of superficiality, and that too needs to change because I see them all as just different facets of the same problem. I’m not kidding in “Overshoot” when I say “Into the deep we’ll soon descend; Party until the bitter end.” That’s really about the present. It’s about the present viewed from the future, but it’s still about the present.

Thanks for doing that, that thinking and going to those places because obviously not everyone wants to do that.

Oh my God. Tell me about it. And I don’t want to do it either half the time. I guess what I could say as a postscript to all of this is that this was a hard year. The year of “Apologize to the Future” was a hard year and I’m still recovering and actually it’s painful to still have to talk about it. I would like nothing better than to go back to making neoclassical piano music and playing with my sequencer and exploring the vast ocean of polymeter. My real love increasingly is atonal harmony. It’s a wonderful thing. If you get a chance, you could hear—I just released an album on Mental Groove called “Polymeter.” It’s going to have a sequel, a wonderful sequel that I love called “Passion for Numbers.”

Boy that sums up my life. What a title. “Passion for Numbers.” So true! But it’s a beautiful thing. It’s kind of neoclassical, but jazz as well. It’s kind of like stride piano, probably Fats Waller would have loved it if he could have heard it. And it’s totally algorithmic music. It really is. It’s revolutionary. It’s algorithmic music where I’m using polymeter to generate atonal harmony. I started seriously studying atonal harmony and pitch class sets and all that good stuff. And it’s wonderful. It’s a fascinating world. And I would love to spend the rest of my life working on that.

But the truth is that current events affect all of us, [myself] included. And so I might not want to spend my days talking about the climate crisis, but I feel that it’s my responsibility to do it. It’s like the Talking Heads said years ago, it’s life during wartime. We all have to put our ambitions and our personal goals aside a little bit, or at least in the backseat, and focus on the matters at hand. And I think that that’s a message that everyone should embrace. These are not ordinary times we’re living through.

Yes. And I hope one of the ways that people can understand that is by taking in your album. So I hope that it reaches as many people as possible. And thank you for your work. And I just want you to know that you are appreciated.

That’s very sweet, Martha, thank you.