Chris Korda: Apologize to the Future

by Kajaal Shah

“My mother claimed that my environmental awareness resulted from her reading Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ whilst she was pregnant with me. What I can say for sure is that growing up in New York City gave me above-average exposure to overpopulation and environmental degradation”

One year following the release of Akoko Ajeji on Perlon, Chris Korda returns to the label with ‘Apologize to the Future’. Composed once again in complex polymeter but with a social commentary focusing on climate change, Chris advances the Church of Euthanasia pro-ecology pillars of suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. “We need to realize the truth of what we’ve done. In an eye-blink of geological time, we’ve exterminated our nonhuman fellow travellers and wrecked our life-support system. Admitting it intellectually isn’t good enough. We need to feel it. The album is supposed to hurt. We need to grieve for what we’ve destroyed, including our own future.” Without remorse there can’t be restitution (the essence of the post-antihuman Church of Euthanasia).

1200 words – all in rhyme – that translate to a damning human outlook yet sparking our imagination and pushing us to reflect. There’s an eccentric whack underscoring the album. It’s refreshing, groovy, playful, edgy; emulating all those elements that you’d attribute to the Perlon sound (and for the most part it was written before Perlon had even agreed to release ‘Akoko Ajeji’).

By the age of thirteen Chris Korda had clearly visualised the primary drivers of collapse, overpopulation and over-consumption. In 1992 she began writing and speaking about these dangers, when they were still considered to be an extremely far-fetched hypothesis. Three decades later and our human activity has propelled these issues into the spotlight of the 21st century. Or as ‘Overshoot’ (B2 – PERL126) succinctly describes: “intelligent life is a cruel joke”.

The genesis of the album was a 2008 presentation by Dan Miller “A Really Inconvenient Truth”. About halfway through there’s a slide titled “What can you do?” – the first line reads “Ask your children for forgiveness.” In a cartoon, that’s where there would’ve been a lightbulb over Chris’ head. Over time, the concept of apologising to your children led Chris to the more abstract notion of apologising to future generations. “As a thought experiment, I asked myself a simple question: how will future generations view us? With bitter skepticism at best. They will justifiably feel that we abandoned them on a wrecked planet. Of course that’s assuming future generations are lucky—or should I say unlucky—enough to exist.”

Her statement is strong but the provocation and inherent polarisation are characteristic of Korda’s manifestation. We talk to the individual on the periphery who has and continues to find solace in the pursuit of knowledge and artistic expression.

When did you start to realise that you were different to the people around you?

From an early age, I thought critically and I spoke and wrote precisely thanks to both of my parents and a series of excellent teachers. My linguistic aptitude was obvious but it often made me unpopular with my classmates. I won the reading prize every year in grade school by reading at least one hundred books. Then in eighth grade my reading comprehension was tested and found to be in the 99th percentile. By then I was acutely aware of being different and the environmental realizations that became the Church of Euthanasia two decades later had already occurred to me.

So what made you decide to devote your art to politics and ideology.

I didn’t. Some of my art is ideological but much of it isn’t, for example my algorithmic psychedelic art, virtual 3D pottery, sound collage, ambient and generative neoclassical music, etc. As a teenager I was already a visual artist, musician and lyricist. It was during my thirties that The Church of Euthanasia evolved – it gave me so many opportunities to put my artistic abilities to good use but it’s a subset of my art. Yes I came of age in the 80s when ideological art was the norm, but the decisive factor was heightened awareness of overpopulation and the climate crisis.

Listening to the album, it’s clear that you’re extremely well-versed on the topic. 

The novels of Paolo Bacigalupi helped me visualize the human impacts of drastic climate change more clearly. Paul Theroux’s “O-Zone” provided useful caricatures of the super-rich. But I get most of my ammunition from conventional news sources. I also read a ton of climate science books, papers and try to follow trends in artificial intelligence.

The album fuses rap with polymeter electro, techno, and breakbeat. When I heard Kate Tempest’s ‘Europe Is Lost’ in 2016, it opened a door for me. I realized that I could rap but in my own way, without imitating existing styles. I was already aware of rap’s connection to radical politics and poetry (as seen for example in The Last Poets) but there was a lot I didn’t know so I started researching it. I studied the classics but also more modern examples. It’s fascinating how much rap has changed over time. It’s become a lot more diverse and I’m honored to contribute to that diversity.

Via the album you’re presenting human reality, equally asking us to face our reality. How long did it take you to write the 1200 words in rhyme?

The lyrics took me about a year. From the outset the central theme was facing reality. The album opens with Einstein’s memorable quip that “the moon is really out there.” Einstein’s point is that the moon is real whether you believe in it or not. As long as people remain convinced that reality is just whatever they happen to believe, we have no chance to survive. We need to realise the truth of what we’ve done. In an eye-blink of geological time, we’ve damaged our life-support system enough to make earth increasingly uninhabitable even for us, never mind for our nonhuman fellow travellers. Admitting it intellectually isn’t good enough. We need to feel it.

We’ve engaged in monstrously self-defeating behaviour. From the point of view of future generations: we’re sociopathic villains who committed horrific crimes against the future. As long as we’re incapable of conceptualising our crimes, we can’t repent them. Without remorse there’s no restitution. If we don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, why should we change course. Why shouldn’t we just keep on partying until the bitter end.

What’s needed is the proverbial glass of cold water in the face – the truth of our predicament must be spoken plainly so that everyone can understand it. How I see it is that we’re hairless apes clinging to a ball of rock in a vast cosmos that’s utterly indifferent to our fate. Either we grow up or we die.

The album comprises hardline statements throughout. What’s your answer to those who find it overwhelming?

The album should overwhelm because its subject is the worst crisis humanity has ever faced.

The problem is that we’re insufficiently alarmed. It’s as if we’re on the Titanic, it’s already half sunk and we’re still saying the captain will take care of it so let’s have another drink. We should be responding to the crisis and we aren’t. We should’ve been responding to the crisis thirty years ago. It’s by now far advanced and those of us lucky enough to be relatively insulated from its accelerating impacts are living in dreamland. We need to wake up before it’s too late.

People will need to reduce their demands on ecosystems and learn to value long-term survival above all else, or the future won’t include us. And that’s an optimistic scenario because it assumes we’re sufficiently rational to change our aggregate behavior rapidly enough to make a difference. Until the Keeling curve reverses direction and atmospheric CO2 falls below 350 PPM, our rationality is an unproven conjecture. 

The album is harsh for the same reason an alarm clock is harsh. You may not like hearing your alarm clock but it’s performing a necessary function.

We’re conditioned by both nature and nurture to get married and then procreate. Don’t you feel that we’d lose strands of culture (and humanity even) if we all stopped having children.

Even if I accepted the view that a child-free life is somehow unfulfilled—which of course I don’t, I consider this breeder propaganda and lame post hoc justification—the unavoidable question then is who gets to breed and why? And why should the desire of individuals to have a fulfilling experience outweigh the survival of our species, or the immense suffering our profligacy inflicts on humans and nonhumans alike?

How do you feel that your ‘voice’ is different to what’s already out there.

I’m outside the box and not only in terms of lyrics. All the tracks on ‘Apologize to the Future’ (as with ‘Akoko Ajeji’) are in complex polymeter—meaning they use multiple prime meters simultaneously—and were written using my custom polymeter MIDI sequencer. Most of the time signatures are odd, for example ‘Overshoot’ is in 27, ‘Singularity’ is in 11 and ‘Changing Climate’ is in 17. By the time I started working on this record my sequencer was fully-featured, so the result is more balanced and probably more similar to my earlier work in terms of sound design.

During this same period I also released an album of generative solo piano and solo guitar for Mental Groove, titled ‘Polymeter’. I began studying atonal music in 2016 and developed my own tools for working with atonality. Atonal music often features what I call the “cat walking around on the piano” meaning clusters of chromatic notes played all at once. These clusters can be unsettling and produce the characteristic horror movie sound. I developed methods to avoid clusters along with techniques for gradually changing tonality, similarly to how watercolor painters use wet paper and let the colors bleed into one another. Atonality is most obvious on the track ‘Overshoot’.

At this time I was also experimenting with polymeter breakbeat, another nonexistent category. The concept is simple: write in polymeter but instead of triggering individual drum hits, trigger samples of live drumming. That’s featured on the album’s last track ‘Exit Game’.

You say that you’re outside the box – does that translate to you being on the periphery of dance music culture? 

Yes. Much of what I do in the public realm is profoundly offensive to “normals”, breeders etc so no difficulty explaining why I’m on the periphery. My music too flaunts dance music norms in almost every respect. Rhythmically it’s composed in complex polymeter – it’s often harmonically challenging, explicitly ideological and in the case of ‘Apologize to the Future’ it’s loquacious to an extent usually only seen in rap. The history of art is one of punctuated equilibrium meaning dull periods of stuckness and conformity disrupted by drastic upheavals. Revolutions always come from the periphery. Dance music culture isn’t a fixed thing, it’s a moving target. Every time people dance to one of my tracks, we’re changing dance music culture and pushing it towards the unknown. The trend is towards chaos and incoherence but I’m swimming in the opposite direction towards unity and deep mathematical structure.

Do you think about how to influence people with your art (vs. alienation)?

I think it’s possible that art is being confused with ideology. I don’t make my art for other people or even consider their reaction to it. And that’s part of why it’s perceived as “different”. What’s the goal of art? If the goal is to receive acclaim and to be “liked”, you’re already on the wrong path. Catering to people’s tastes is a serious mistake that leads to pandering. The Church of Euthanasia’s effectiveness as propaganda is dubious—the human population has increased by one-third during its tenure—but its impact as art is undeniable. Whilst making ‘Apologize to the Future’ my primary concern was how faithfully it realized my inspiration, not how it would influence people.

Do you believe though that your music has a transformative impact on people and their behaviour.

I do. Culture is the primary determinant of people’s behavior. My music injects climate change, intergenerational injustice, antinatalism and human extinction into electronic music culture where these topics are almost unheard of—that’s culture jamming—the use of mainstream culture to subversively critique mainstream culture.

Danny Tenaglia’s remix of ‘Save the Planet, Kill Yourself’ and Supreme licensing the Church of Euthanasia T-Shirt last year helped make overpopulation and overconsumption more topical. My music has inspired many people to take a lifetime vow of non-procreation. Whether humanity will ultimately be persuaded to value its own future remains to be seen.

What do you say to those who think the album is a vehicle for Church of Euthanasia sloganeering…

The early Church of Euthanasia’s snarky sloganeering is no longer appropriate – the mission has changed from condemning humans to feeling sorry for them. Now that most of the damage is done, condemnation is pointlessly cruel. It’s no longer about avoiding environmental catastrophe (that ship has sailed); it’s about preparing for the psychological impact of societal collapse. The tragedy of mass extinction demands respect.

From the point of view of nonhumans though, our extinction would be a great blessing (not that this would or even should matter to us). Though I’ve said it time and again, it bears repeating: “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” is absurdist neo-Dadaism. In reality, the planet will be fine – it’s we and our fascinatingly complex civilization that are critically endangered. If we’re saving anything, we’re saving future generations of ourselves and we need to plan rationally for our long-term survival. This should be obvious but apparently it isn’t.

Doesn’t it feel like an “I told you so” moment – given that you started this discourse years ago (and were officially censored for it).

It might seem like an “I told you so” moment but the situation is much too serious for that. I take no pleasure in having correctly predicted that humanity would flush its own future down the toilet. I’m invested in the survival of civilization not just in a financial sense but emotionally and artistically. I grew up in a huge city, read widely and appreciated the richness of culture and history from an early age. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. My achievements for example would be inconceivable without the vast accumulation of knowledge that preceded me.

Human civilization is the most remarkable thing to have ever occurred on this planet and it’s certainly worth saving. But it has inherent contradictions that threaten its survival and that’s tragic. I’m sad that more people didn’t listen to me in the past when so much damage could have been avoided. I’ve been sounding the alarm for nearly thirty years now but our trajectory hasn’t slowed or deviated, on the contrary we’re still accelerating into catastrophe. Since disaster is no longer avoidable, the focus needs to shift to the stages of grief. We need to get past denial and move through anger, bargaining and depression so that we can start grappling with the most important stage, acceptance. As I wrote in my poem ‘Less’, it’s going to hurt. For many of us, it already hurts. But pain is a good teacher.

Which chapter in your life would you say this album has come to represent.

Parts of the album were written in Lisbon (others in Berlin) so it’s possibly infused with a European sensibility. In this chapter of my life I repudiated Americanism and especially the “know-nothing” crassness that’s so vividly satirized in the film “Idiocracy.” The dizzying concentrations of wealth so exhaustively detailed by Thomas Piketty diminished my hope for a soft landing.

Consider how the last Gilded Age ended: two World Wars, entire cities reduced to piles of bricks and tens of millions dead. That’s what it took for governments to get serious about redistributing wealth. But even if we wanted to, there isn’t enough time left to repeat that ghastly history because the climate change wolf is already loping through our wide-open door.

I was dreaming a pleasant technological dream but events roused me from my dogmatic slumber. Our future’s on the line and the clock’s running out. As sea levels rise, will we rise to the occasion? Will we be heroes or villains? Will our grandchildren thank us or revile us? Will the great work of civilization be saved or will humanity’s hard-won progress be reduced to rubble? Will geoengineering save the day, or nail shut our coffin? We could belatedly heed the better angels of our nature or embody the hapless Deckard in “Bladerunner” punch-drunk and staggering as Leon shouts “Wake up! Time to die!”

What’s your vision for this record as its message rationally extends beyond the underground. 

If you’re asking why they chose these tracks for release, I can’t be sure but I assume it’s because Zip liked the music and the concept. Seth Troxler once described Perlon to me as the “Blue Note of electronic music” – that’s good enough for me.

‘Apologize to the Future’ confronts the pivotal issues of the 21st century. Ideally it would enter mainstream discussion of the climate crisis and help people grasp the crisis in a more emotional and personal way. I hope Greta Thunberg gets to hear it. In general, I hope younger people hear it because it depicts the future from their point of view. I hope for humanity to somehow beat the odds and make it through the bottleneck with civilization intact, so that in the distant future my album will be cherished as a quaint artefact, a warning heeded.

Perlon – PERLON126LP

Tracklist:

“Apologize To The Future” is out now.