You Are Not Welcome Here
You Are Not Welcome Here is an upcoming two-part anti-album dedicated to making a listening experience that is hostile to the audience. The first disc are songs purposefully-written, produced, structured in some capacity, and overall reviewed from start to finish. The second is more in line with the album’s direct vision, with bloated runtimes and nothing-structures for songs.
Below are release statements from the primary artists.
DISC ONE 01/01/21
DISC TWO TBA
Kilo and I have been working on this album for awhile now, and I think I speak for both of us when I say we’re very excited to show what we’ve come up with. The creative process has been incredibly streamlined; pure idea, concentrated into this terrible mass of sound drudged into your very ear holes and even your home.
I think, for a lot of people, it would be easy to write this album off as a joke, ironic, and unearnest, but for me - that gets a little lame. It’s a hiding act, right? So sure, we’ve had plenty of fun making this collection of music. And of course not all of it is deep or meaningful. But I hope the sheer, unbridled chaos, the nastiness, the overall unlistenable and unpleasant aesthetic, I hope conveys the joy we had during the creation process. No, you don’t have to “like it” or think it’s good in any traditional sense. Make of it what what you will. But I don’t want that to be a cop-out, either. I want the freedom from tradition to come across in our awful songs, and the over-indulgence in the annoying to be - in some capacity - refreshing.
Sometimes working on a project feels like a balancing act. Sometimes you have this vision you cling onto, and you have to concede into oblivion until you’ve sacrificed all the parts that made you excited in the first place. But not here. I have felt pure creativity working with Kilo in a way rare to me, pushing each other into directions of utmost discovery, stretching the initial vision in a way that’s not damning - but enlightening.
We have been a pack of rabid animals, and I couldn’t be happier.
senm_
Never before have I had so much fun making songs. It was always an effortless process, though maybe one that was tallying naughty marks on our Christmas lists— Sen or I would message the other, sometimes a garbled collection of words, like the concept for a track had come to us in a dream. When we entered Ableton, it was a free space of ideas where absolutely nothing was off limits, where we could laugh and scream and play instruments wildly.
‘Stream of consciousness’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Sometimes I’d flail on a dial on an effect and it would do something horrible, and Sen would be like, “Please do that for the entire song.”
Music theory knowledge and a whole lot of time spent listening to good music never prepared us for how much you can squeeze out of something purposefully bad. When we went into a track looking to make bad noises, and finished with bad noises, over and over again I found myself actually jamming out to shitty tracks unironically. I think when you push the envelope in the wrong direction, you learn a lot more about what you can tolerate.
There’s a deranged and lovely pleasure in that, I think. So if you want to enter You Are Not Welcome Here, do not expect it to be suddenly ‘good’ by your tastes. But if you find yourself accidentally enjoying something, then our job was successful.
Music is cool. Let’s ruin it.
kilozombie
