ORPHEUS PRAYED FOR ME: TRACK-BY-TRACK

A1 WATER OF LIFE

I had just finished a couple of albums which were, in different ways, very controlled. One was tightly composed beyond anything I had done before, and the other was a bit of a crowd-pleasing effort in which I forced myself not to go FULL FREAK. I was tired of thinking so hard, and wanted to take some time to just indulge in sound as much as possible, return to my noise roots, get zonked on textures. This song is the seed from which all of ORPHEUS grew. I had just read Dune, and wanted to make an album of music that they would listen to while getting high on spice and navigating the slipstream of time. I was gonna call it "Tone Poems for Sad Times," after a book of poetry mentioned in Dune. I love how this song catapults into hyperspeed and then takes a bunch of tight, angular turns. I remain nervous about people turning the album off when they get to the "power/real shit" refrain at the end because they'll think it's too aggressive and not "high art," but it's there as an homage to the opening song of Phantazmagorea, by D-Styles, the first all-scratched album ever. That was a landmark album for me, and I liked the idea of declaring with "power/real shit" that I intend to present a potent experience with the rest of the record. 

A2 THE COLOSSUS OF ROADS

Named after a piece of graffiti that the author William Vollmann mentioned in his book about his experiences hopping trains. This one is obviously a tangle of stylistic influences, containing many passages, but overall, to me, it's post-rock. To some I may abuse the term post-rock, but to me it's a genre which really embodies my love of long, slow, sad instrumental music with occasional sections of enormity. Most post-rock is too teencore for my old ass to listen to, but more nuanced groups like Do Make Say Think and Dirty Three still stand for something very important in my heart. Anyway, finishing this song felt great. This is the first time on one of my albums you can hear me playing sax, which I haven't been doing for very long. The section with the piano and Middle Eastern plucked instrument (apologies for forgetting its name) doesn't use samples—I'm playing those on a keyboard synth. The jungle drums section was performed live, by hand on a sampler, unquantized. I don't want to go into too many technical details here because I've noticed that a lot of musical discussions I find myself in during this computer era lean towards gear and technical tricks, whereas I'd way rather be talking about the spirit of the music. Gear and shit is fun, and good tools can be helpful, but y'all I'm an artist and I will use WHATEVER is around me to create. Let's talk about what we imagine hearing, the styles that would make us laugh or cry, the future we want to see for art. Don't come to me asking what my favorite BPM is.

A3 SMOKE WEED EVERY DAY, KID

This one embodies another one of the guiding principles of this album: I had decided that music was my religion, and I wanted to show that I was serious about my faith. My life had been missing something. I'd spent years suppressing a mysticism I'd programmed into myself which had been part of the near destruction of my life. My newfound skepticism was valuable to me, and I was benefiting from rigorous logical reasoning, but I'm also a theatrical rogue and I need something wild to be happening, which can be hard when you're in logical cyborg mode. The acceptance of music as a religion helped give me something to be grandiose about, which felt good. This song arose around the time I came up with the title "Orpheus prayed for me," which means "I'd be dead without music, but music would be dead without me." Music, as we know it, comes alive in the hands of people who care about it. It can reach out through our hands as we train them to translate its desires. I want to be such a vessel. So the motions of this song are really odes to music, itself. Especially that little accordion-sounding synth solo, that one came out so good! I'm really proud of that bit.

A4 SOMETHING INHUMAN

In case you couldn't tell, I was feeling goofy for this one. Humor is a huge part of my life, I run on puns and fart giggles, and even though this whole album is a joke (a posthumous album by someone who doesn't appear to be dead), I wanted to bring that spirit into the spotlight. I used to do a lot of radio play projects, with acting and sound effects, so some of that came into play here. I played this song for a friend once and he said "What are you going for here? Because it seems kind of all over the place, I can't figure out what your stylistic point is." I didn't have an answer at the time. Fact is, I like changes, I like surprises, I like the big shifts that happen in old prog rock, I'm a lifelong turntablist who grew up on Mix Master Mike scratching kazoos over Kool G Rap... basically, jarring juxtapositions are not jarring to me, and in fact this song is nowhere near the kinds of excessive omni-morphous stuff that's happening in my head. I'm really going easy on you guys. The string passage in this one gives me the chills, honestly. Swelling strings is a trick I maybe employ too much, but I do love it. Even in the worst movie, swelling strings in a saccharine moment can make me cry. 

A5 VICTORY ORGAN

This is another one which, to me, feels like post-rock. The title, Victory Organ, is a reference to the fact that the organ passage in this reminds me of Sigur Rós, which translates to "Victory Rose." A different friend made fun of this song, suggesting that the middle passage with the buildup of drums and climactic synth had a Smashing Pumpkins vibe. Guys, sorry, but I never lied about being sappy or loving sweet melodies. Go back to my 2015 album "Genushenka," or hell, I can send you recordings of stuff I made in 2008——I have never, ever wavered on being a corny, melancholic, romantic motherfucker. Life is too damn short for me to be PURE AVANT GARDE or PURE SAMPLING or PURE POST-HIP-HOP or PURE ELECTRONIC. I love music, I love tons of different kinds of music, and I love artists who dabble in lots of shit. Would you give as much of a fuck about Sun Ra if he had three albums, representing maybe two styles? Would Beck be a genius if it had ALL been like Odelay? I'm just one of those artists who's all over the place, and that's part of why I keep the cumbersome name "The Weirdo From Another Planet": I'm so weird that I'm not ONLY weird. It's not weird to be weird all the time; you generate more discomfort if you're too weird for normal people and too normal for weird people. Anyway, this is a pretty song. I think that ending passage closes out the first half of the record well, and the formless aspects of the song's first half are a preview of what's to come in part 2 (the album is structured with a bit of a yin-yang in it: part 1 includes this preview of part 2, and part 2 contains "Nora Durst," which is a resurgence of the energy of part 1). 

B1 THE STORY OF US

Just as Water of Life was the first thing made for part 1 and is the first track, this opener is the first thing I made which I knew would be on part 2. This was probably the third song I made on Voidcat, my SP-404mkII, who I love. It felt so good to finally be able to pump full song-length audio recordings over chops in the 404. Some of the mangling of time on the choir, I have no idea how I did it. I've been trying to recreate that sound ever since but I guess it's one of those things where, now that I know how the machine works, I can't get back to that innocent, beautiful accident again. Obviously this song is a lament to modern media malaise (and it's not a finger pointed outward in judgement—trust me, I'm straight up addicted to TV and movies on a level that would make any good hippie WRETCH). After working on the frenetic material on part 1, I knew that this song was the path forward: spacious, indulgently wavy, punctuated with poetic language. It's a classic dichotomy, blahblah, part 1 is growing and part 2 is dying, part 1 is waking and part 2 is dreaming, sorry but it's true. It's true. You're in the dream side now, drinking soma on an inner tube in the Styx. We're going blacklight mode. 

B2 DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL PAMPHLET

This song conjures such a specific time and place for me. 2010, I lived in a busted house in a really shitty neighborhood (sirens sirens sirens, crowbar marks on the back door, people yelling "faggot" at me while I walked down the street even though I was dressed quite moderately, trucks pursuing my lady friends trying to kidnap them). I was doing pleeeeenty of acid, reading every New Age book on the planet, trying desperately to escape to another reality while, in this reality, I was sleeping on a fold-out bed in a sea of garbage and working as a dishwasher for a bunch of abusive chefs at a chain restaurant. In my head I was Space Royalty (I am, that part was correct), but all external conditions suggested a very insane youngster. They die, but they live. My destiny. Moonlightmoonlightmoonlightmoonlight. This song captures some of that painfully sad nighttime delusional mythos. I move in another dimension. I move in another dimension. 

B3 NORA DURST

If you don't know Nora Durst, go watch The Leftovers. It's as good as TV gets. Beautiful contemplative sci-fi. So, at this point I had established to myself that this was my posthumous record. So, how about a song about my own mummification, thus further distorting the timeline of when I created the material, and what the relationship is between my live self and dead self? This was the third thing I made on an MPC X I had for a couple of months. A powerful machine, but the UI was too scientific for me. My ADHD ass loves how little information the screen of the 404 gives me. Fewer numbers to think about. After the first two songs being so similarly repetitive and structurally vague, I wanted this to act as a refresher, maintaining the dreamy atmosphere of part 2 but with some drums and moments of levity to keep you from feeling like this is becoming homework. I think this is an absolute gem, frankly. Let's be real, people, by the end of this album you will know who I am as an artist, and you'll know that this song could be my business card. All the elements are there.

B4 VICE PALACE

The name is a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Ice Palace," which I have never read, but somebody described it to me once in a manner which 100% sounded more interesting than the story could ever be. This is the most classic "experiment" on the album, as it came about by a feedback loop starting on one of my pedals during a practice session, and I liked it and started recording. 90% of this sound is just a pedal chain manipulating its own feedback, me on my hands and knees, my head under my music desk, pushing stomp buttons with my hands and twisting dials. It was a clear fit for this half of the record. It sounds a little icy and magical, and noise music is my vice, hence Vice Palace.

B5 DIRTY SNOW PILES

I come from a land of mushy snow. Hearty snow which would last, piled beside the road, increasingly damaged by mud, for months. Wind around your hat around your ears. Long, long walks in that snow. That snow in a city. A noisy city, sometimes a dangerous city, where the prettiest path by the river also had the highest incidence of rapes. I walked at night constantly, smoking and listening to warbling mixtapes I'd made. This is that feeling. I haven't been that lonely, that stranded in the ocean of city and my own nobodyness, for a long time, but the feeling never leaves you. Once you've been an absolute piece of shit, a total cosmic joke broken down to the point where you're a soulless malfunctioning camera  simply WITNESSING the city night after night, it never ever leaves you. Dirty snow piles.

B6 FLOWERS

The most blatantly personal song I've made in years. It's a posthumous record, but I had the foresight of knowing it would be posthumous, so why not show you all what will happen when my life flashes before my eyes and I cross that final boundary? I had a near-death experience once, it changed the entire course of my life. I experienced a sense of outright God (a complicated version, let's not get too hung up on that word) which imprinted on me like a branded seal. A tesseract of golden light, eating itself and vomiting universes (what did you see? flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers), all screaming out "ONE, ONE, ONE" with the voices of every bird and every song. Complete, timeless, infinite unity of all creation, a compound eye staring out through all 7 billion of our skulls and more. Which is to say that I was uniquely ready to work on a song about my actual moment of death. This is an audio recreation of that experience of looking back on my life, feeling sadness at failures and loves and the pain of the world, then being lifted out of that pain and acclimating to the new glowing golden ultrafuture and becoming a star in the sky. Fun fact: the main body of this song was made by force-feeding rhythm into pedals which are designed to subvert rhythm.

THANK YOU PLEASE LISTEN