Download includes digital booklet.
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"Apophrenia is... quite frankly experimental music at its best."
Compulsiononline.com
"Very spacious, very dense, occasionally a bit noisy, but with eyes firmly locked on the ambient and atmospheric aspect of the music. With some excellent results, I might add."
Vital Weekly
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First things first - this is NOT a concept album.
It is however, thematic.
This is my anti-conspiracy theory album, based on muscle-memory recollections of being subjected to the paranoid world of right-wing conservative Christian apocalyptica in the 1980s and early 90s that my father trafficked in. Then later, through my own times immersed in the inevitably overlapping apocalypse-culture psychedelic metaphysical occult conspiracies of the 90s that were so prevalent in industrial / experimental / art of the time.
I eventually made it to the other side of all of these views and found that I had learned a great deal about how my mind behaves depending on what seeds are permitted to take root in its soil - which are watered and which are given sunlight. And which are pulled up by the roots. I was happy to let those particular poison fruits wither on the vine and never return to them.
In the past several years though, those Christian right-wing conspiracies of my youth have become more absurd, more toxic, more hateful, more violent, more virulent, more racist and even more paranoid here in America. No big surprise there. However, they have also become mainstream - with approximately 15-20% of Americans believing in Q-Anon at this time.
This mainstreaming of conspiracy theory has stirred up some ugly feelings in me. Memories of what that bad trip, conspiratorial mindset felt like. What it sounded like from the inside. The schizophrenia of paranoia. The apophenia of unchecked magical thinking. The undertow of narcissism. The comfort of thinking you are in on something. The discomfort of thinking something is in on you. The mistrust of everything else. The relentless anxiety. With Apophrenia, I visit the graveyard of these feelings from the grassy side, and contentedly piss on the tombstone.
I should mention that Apophrenia is composed almost entirely of samples - including a brief interlude I sampled using sounds Jonathan and I recorded together in 1989 at The Barracks in Temple, GA. While many of the other samples are sourced from obscure films about war and tribal identity, and from the obscure devotional music and philosophy of actual religious cults, there are no direct references to any specific conspiracy of any stripe.
I’ve also been told by some who have heard this album that they find it “beautiful”. I don’t hear it. To me, this is a pretty ugly album, but I’m incredibly myopic when it comes to this stuff, and can't see past my own associations.
Visually, I’ve filtered this overall theme through the image on the front cover. It’s taken from an old, obscure book that I stumbled across in my own deepest 90s conspiratorial immersions. At the time I was convinced that this book was a secret key provided to me synchronistically by a secret chief or wizard or guardian angel and that all the answers I sought could be found in it if I squinted just right.
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ABOUT THE VIDEO:
The source material here was filmed, treated and edited into a music video I did back in 1994 for a song by my late musical partner, Jonathan McCall, called "This Is No Democracy". It was made at the height of my own paranoid political and occult conspiracy immersions - ultimately becoming the catalyst that reminded me of the real mission of Operation Mindfuck and helped me to extricate myself from that fictional prison.
I asked my friend Felix Connole to repurpose and remix that original music video for this one as in the America of today it seems relevant. I never thought 400 Lonely Things would have a topical moment, but if it did, this moment would be it.
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