Words by Jason Lee. Cover image by Sydney Tate. To go straight to the interview with T. Seeberger skip to the bottom of this piece. All interpretive analysis is strictly the product of the author’s fevered mind.
Sometimes you gotta rip it up and start again.
When it comes to pop music, ripping it up and starting again has led to some of the best vanguardist pop of the past half-century like Lichtenstein minus the dots starting (arguably) when punk came along and knocked the rock dinosaurs off their perches or tried to anyway by bursting the bubble of grandiosity that’d grown up around genres like prog and psych (tho’ don’t get it twisted we love us some prog and psych!) and other self-serious hippie sh*t in an attempt to take rock ’n’ roll back to its primitivist roots as music made for the people by the people as in here’s three chords now go start a band…
…and it didn’t stop with the music either with a corollary goal of punk and later indie more generally being to rip up the music industry and start again thru the launching of DIY independent labels and zines and venues and hell those crazy punks even ripped up their own clothes assuming they weren’t falling apart already and then safety-pinned ‘em back together as a visible manifestation of punk’s destructive/reconstructive impulse…
…and when punk rock fell into its own traditionalist orthodoxy—reduced to a standard-issue look and sound—it got ripped up too with post-punk taking its DIY ethos and re-applying it to music punks were supposed to hate like disco, funk, and the poppiest of pop music in offshoots ranging from No Wave to new wave while embracing new tools and technologies like synthesizers that’d been deemed passé by punks who prized “authenticity” above all else, in a bid to infiltrate and subvert the mainstream from the inside versus simply rejecting it…
…and sure enough groups from ABC to the B-52s to Culture Club scored hits thus turning whole chunks of the charts into a pop music fever dream of weird, artsy alternatives to Phil Collins or whoever and for a few decades there was a fairly linear tho’ cyclical progression of new musical trends and newly invented genres based around the notion that all the old, outdated shiz needed to be ripped up and reassembled in some new way…
…which became even more the norm once electronic, hip hop, and eventually pop artists starting using digital samplers to literally rip sounds from their sources and make something new from the stripped out fragments which was downright revolutionary at the time—not least in providing a platform for more minority and queer representation on the pop landscape—while strongly anticipating the DIY ethos of the unregulated, un-algorithmed, pre-social media Internet 1.0 era where the ease of cutting-and-pasting and posting the results had a transformative effect on everyday life…
…allowing anyone with a computer and a dial-up connection to publicly narrate their own lives thru words and images and sounds even (anyone here remember putting much deliberation into your auto-playing Myspace profile song?) or to tear up one’s old identity and start again under a new screen name and as usual pop proved to be prescient, a canary in the coal mine to the new age of “meta” self-commentary seeing as pop artists from Madonna to Bowie had long taken reinvention and turned it into an art form not to mention all the hip hop artists who rarely went by their birth names…
…a reflexivity also found in pop about pop (meta–pop) like M’s “Pop Muzik,” an early keyboard-driven hit that acted as both a critique (selling like a hot cake / try some, buy some / fe-fi-fo-fum) and rallying cry for the poptivist future (shoobie–doobie-doowop / infiltrate it / shoobie–doobie-doowop / activate it) but more lately despite Lady Gaga’s best efforts meta-pop has been on the wane it seems and which could have something to do with the music industry being perceived as too opaque and too inaccessible today to be easily “ripped up” or reformulated…
… with a recent study revealing that in the US a whopping 84% of the industry’s overall earnings come from streaming (67% worldwide) with the overwhelming majority of those streams generated by a relatively small handful of meta-star artists pulling in hundreds of millions if not billions while your best friend’s band is lucky to make more than a fraction of a cent from their hundreds if not thousands of streams and hey welcome to the Internet 2.0 era with music by-and-large having gone extremely online and with the deconstrutive/reconstrutive tear it up and start again ethos having been absorbed into the corporate mainstream across a million TikTok vids of people putting their own unique spin on the latest K-pop dance craze or whatever’s going most viral lately…
…but all this changes today with the release of “Another Screen” by Pop Music Fever Dream cuz at last here’s a group bold enough to place meta-pop at the core of their identity and it’s not even a TikTok marketing strategy either (PMFD’s first EP is cheekily called Songs For Promoters whereas the new one’s called Songs For Emotion and comes out on September 18th) with the advance single taking a bigger-picture perspective on the “screen cultures” dominating so much of public discourse today where there’s often a curious “horseshoe effect” overlap between being jacked-up from overstimulation and put to sleep at the same time, figuratively if not literally, by the constant barrage of stimuli…
I will always lose myself / to the transmission
Planned obsolescence / is / my / game
Can’t stand the urge / to be con-stant-ly sleeping
But I can’t stand to stay / awake
…with PMFD jumping straight into the belly of the beast with a song that not only deconstructs/reconstructs past musical styles but also far more far-reaching systems of digital culture and what this system or “shitstum” has done to our bodies and minds and social lives (not to mention music scenes, nor the ability of musicians to make any kind of living at music) with power struggle forever taking place across the broad spectrum of cyberspace between existing power-holders seeking to further consolidate their power and everyday schmucks trying to cut through the noise and achieve their own goals…
…with Pop Music Fever Dream not only critiquing this digital demimonde but also translating it into a distinctive sound and aesthetic where “Another Screen” starts off with a minimalist beat that at first sounds like a rhythm box set to a simple rhythm of bass drum at the top of every four measures with snare on the 2’s and 4’s and a hi-hat tracing out sixteenth-notes in the song’s rigid, mechanical-sounding intro that’s especially impressive given how much their drummer Dominico Bancroft is a dynamic, organic-sounding player elsewhere while meanwhile PMFD’s lead singer-songwriter and co-guitarist T. Seeberger enters and declaims the lines quoted above (I will always lose myself…) in a detached I’m observing myself from afar monotone…
…which reminds us of how it feels when you open your laptop or unlock your phone first thing in the morning to perform some simple, mundane task like looking up the weather and your mind’s in a nice, uncluttered groove but within seconds your consciousness gets hijacked by a barrage of messages and notifications not to mention getting tethered to the rhythm and flow of the technology itself which is what we hear when bassist Carmen Castillo enters with a Dave Allin-esque baseline that’s dirty and distorted in a “dissolute funk” kind of way as T. Seeberger discourses on how the digital device’s “blue light cuts through my brain” which gets turned into “an extension of that glass and metal that has shattered inside my head”…
…thus marking the moment when the technology goes from being a useful tool to making a useful tool out of its user especially given the “tailored presence of bad emotions” with bad actors at every turn attempting to take advantage of the Internet’s direct pipeline to our animal brains inducing hate, fear, lust, jealousy, euphoria or whatever other emotions motivate us to stay online for longer and to possibly succumb to the bad actors’ interests…
…when suddenly the sleek, streamlined minimalism of the intro gets blanketed in a pulverizing burst of white noise like a hit of digitally-induced dopamine flooding one’s neural pathways as T. Seeberger shifts from spoken recitation to a more rhythmic delivery (24 hours / a day / the economy of attention / don’t look away / ever again / ’cause the stream never ends)…
…and before you know it instead of texting your mom you’re searching for AI-generated celebrity lookalikes on Pornhub while placing an order for fentanyl off the dark web and placing bets on a sports gambling site at the same time cuz the Internet’s a slippery slope like that but then the song snaps back into focus for a moment with Nicole Harwayne‘s guitar tracing out a bouncy little minor-key melody that moves in concentric circles around Carmen’s bass line resulting in a tight funk-punk groove that you probably won’t know whether to dance to or read Marshall McLuhan to…
….but before you’ve have much time to do either the song essentially disintegrates into formless noise and from there “Another Screen” seems to fold in on itself like it’s trapped in a Matrix-like digital house of mirrors made up of screens reflecting nothing but other screens with degraded, many-times-removed-from-its-source distorted imagery and from here on every line of the song gets repeated and refracted in a funhouse mirror kind of way (I looked at a SCREEN / and ANOTHER screen / AND another SCREEN / and ANothER...) as on cue the music turns all twisted and warped and mutated as if the band got sucked into a flange pedal-induced wormhole beset by digital artifacts and rampaging drum fills and detuned math-rock finger-tapping wizardry…
…and truly we can’t think of a better sonic representation of going down an Internet K-hole (or a k-hole of any kind really) than “Another Screen” even if Magdalena Bay’s recent “Tunnel Vision” comes close to replicating the sensation, lost in a neurotic search for some missing piece of information or some sought-after sensation that’ll somehow put your world back in order which can be oddly exhilarating even if by definition your desired destination can never be reached as the journey across the Internet’s endless nodal network and your mind’s neural networks seems to fuse into one and your ego dissolves and your mind secedes…
…and even if it’s “all too much at some point” it’s hard to resist when your device seems to morph into an extension of your central nervous system with “Another Screen” likewise juxtaposing one sonic layer to another, and another and another, like surfing a series of Reddit indiehead hyperlinks from one subreddit to another or maybe more like one of Man Ray’s Dada-esque collages translated into sound ending in a Munch-like scream assuming you prefer metaphors of the highbrow artistic variety …
…a perspective further reinforced by the T. Seeberger-directed music video featuring a series of stark, empty environments ranging from an empty beach to an empty parking lot to an empty screening room (!) to PMFD playing in a stark white room that is until all these settings start glitching like they’re getting sucked into some computer’s CPU or maybe just your Instagram feed and ultimately dissolving into a chaotic, rapid-fire, cut-up collage of dissociative Internet-derived imagery and trust me if you’re even a little bit OCD you’ll be be hitting pause a lot and going thru the video frame by frame then searching out the sources of all the imagery…
…whether its foot-fetishizing, Nickelodeon showrunner Dan Schneider or weapons manufacturer Raytheon cynically “celebrating” Pride Month or Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal repeatedly asking a Facebook exec “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” or former Beverly Hills 90210 star AnnaLynne McCord reading a poem to Vladimir Putin about being his mom all of which are buried within PMFD’s video montages and it’s all pretty hilarious in a “freak show” kind of way or it’s an indicator of cultural exhaustion and end-times entropy or both of these…
…all of which just goes to show that in confronting Big Heady Ideas and Issues about the very nature of human existence and consciousness a quarter of the way into the 21st century it doesn’t mean that PMFD’s music isn’t fun or doesn’t put across a real sense of emotional immediacy cuz after all we all swim in this pop-culture flotsam and jetsam daily and merely acknowledging this fact makes a song like “Another Screen” more emotionally relevant than all the songs content to pretend it’s still 1989 combined plus did we mention that Pop Music Fever Dream rocks like a mutherf*cker with the pure delirium of their music fully living up to their name and seriously you gotta catch these cats live…
…and when you’re fighting the good fight again against exploitation-driven technologies and governments and other means of social control here’s a band that’ll get you legitimately rooting for humanity again cuz really who could root against these four living, breathing, sweating, slam dancing, boldly vulnerable and quirkily alluring human beings making music with this much rawness and immediacy and whiplash-inducing minimalist maximalism who’re at their most human in songs about struggling to hold on to their own humanity even if it means ripping it up and starting again…
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Does “Another Screen” hold a special significance for PMFD (thematically or otherwise) or is it just another song for the band?
“Another Screen” is really special to me and definitely not just another song. I listen back to it think to myself “Damn, I can’t believe I actually wrote that.” It was written months before everyone joined the band and before any other songs for the EP were finished, so to see it take on this form is amazing. The song is, more or less, the thesis of the records. It sets the tone immediately for what’s to come. I remember being alone in my living room hammering it out. It really felt like lightning in a bottle. It’s a mix between classic post-punk, noise, dance, and a video game loading screen in my head. That song feels like an extension of my brain and thought process.
When we played it for the first time live as a band, I knew it was going to be special. We love playing it together. We almost always start with it to set the vibe of our shows.
Do you recall if there was a certain event or “light bulb moment” idea that helped inspire the writing the song?
I remember messing around with bass tunings alone one day with a massive, fuzzy sound. Not like tuning it a certain way, just turning the knobs until something cool happened (in actuality, I accidentally tuned it to drop D.) The bass line came to me there and it set the whole thing in motion really quickly. I was so amped on the idea because it was loud and nasty song that I funneled into having a form.
I wrote the back half of the song first where it sounds like video game music, which I think was inspired subconsciously from a Tron: Legacy fight scene (Daft Punk did that movie’s score.) I always love a buildup because of my teenage love of edm music, so I wanted this loud, huge ending. In that session, I also figured out that screeching guitar and the transition between the start and end that I like to call the “cult bends.” I unplugged my guitar and started sticking it in my strings by the pickups. I don’t know how, but this insane noise came out that became the basis for the noise during the choruses and the breakdown section. And, generally, once I start writing a song that I know is good, I won’t stop ’til it’s finished.
It felt sui generis in a way because I wrote the ending and this weird middle section, but I needed a start. So I intentionally wrote a very classic post-punk sound with an allusion of what was to come in to draw people in and create a cohesive narrative. Believe it or not, it was all intentional! The lyrics I kept simple. Always keep your lyrics simple, kids. I knew “Another Screen” needed to be about screen time addiction from the moment I started it. It was a huge problem in my life at the time (still is.) Turns out people relate to it.
Anything you wanna say about the recording of “Another Screen”?
After we recorded the EP in Sept 2023, we worked on it first because it was going to be the sonic blueprint for the rest of the record. We took a while with it because I knew we had to get the sound right. Huge shoutout to our co-producer/mixer/engineer/friend Violette Grim for being very patient with me on this one.
What it’s like performing the song? (It’s always such a barnburner live!)
It’s my favorite song to play. It’s a song that can be performed with deranged vigor if I’m amped to get on stage, or with extreme apathy if I’m Not Feeling It that day and both work. By the time the breakdown hits, I’m ready to put on the performance of my fucking life. I love doing the cult bends facing one another with Carmen and Nicole, I just know it freaks people out. I love that the song immediately changes the vibe of the room and makes it significantly heavier by the song’s end.
Nicole gets to rip a cool solo every time, I get to run around on stage and bend my strings till they nearly break, Carmen gets to play a fun bass riff, and it’s a great warmup for Domenico. If I’m tired, down, out, and don’t think I can even get on stage, I will always think two things that will keep me going in those moments: “I get to play ‘Control’, and I get to play ‘Another Screen.’” It’s also a great roomclearer to weed out people.
From your experience, what’s the most dystopian aspect of “screen culture”…and/or any potentially beneficial aspects of being immersed in a flood of audiovisual stimuli thru our devices all the time?
I think social media and technology started out as a really innocent and pure form of connection. Like “I can send electronic mail to my mom!” “I can send a book to my dad from this website called Amazon!” “I’m friends with my 2nd grade teacher on Facebook!” “This band Arctic Monkeys on MySpace is really cool!” “Wow! Arab Spring is a really powerful way to use social media for good!”
Now, we are all addicted to these same apps that were intentionally developed over time to draw in our attention, never let go of it, and profit off selling our data that we willingly give to government agencies, all on devices made from slave labor that are intentionally designed to become obsolete so that you have to buy them over and over. Like do you know how hard it is now to get yourself fully wiped from the internet???? People fucking offer services to do that for you now! That’s how hard it is! Don’t get me wrong, it’s still good when it’s good. I mean, we wouldn’t know about Israel committing a genocide if certain platforms didn’t exist (no matter how hard they try to silence people.) I just think sometimes that the internet and technology has gone too far. The future is now, and it’s unfortunately not the house of tomorrow. But I really wish it was!
Why collage/montage as a creative technique? Does it hold any special significance vis-a-vis other techniques do you think? Or does it fit particularly well with PMFD’s music for any reason? If not, no worries (ha!) full disclosure I’m thinking along these lines…
I like this question! That’s kind of how my mind works. I think in visuals, specific moments, or actions. I like to convey what I’m feeling or saying without actually having to spell it out. There’s no clear narrative in the music video, but you can still kind of tell what’s happening and how the character feels. I also used collaging as a method to show how the “endless scroll” really feels. I wanted to depict how desolate the internet can be. We intentionally reused cuts to convey the idea that you see the same thing over and over in this online landscape.
There is such little permanence in ideas and things in this world thanks to the internet, so it all gets regurgitated. Using short, fast cuts and tight shots really helped convey that forced immediacy and anxiety of the internet. I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Sam Blieden who shot the video, edited nearly all the footage, and did the insane visual effects. She really pulled off the feeling I’m trying to get across with the song. I had an incredibly specific vision for this video and she knocked it out of the park (let’s go mets!)
What is Pop Music Fever Dream’s spirit animal?
I’m not really into the concept of having a spirit animal. I don’t think pmfd is really a “spirit animal” type of band either. Our music is too sobering and scary. I do like snoopy though! Snoopy’s the greatest. I wish I could be snoopy. But make no mistake, he is NOT my spirit animal!!! I just like him a lot : )