Chaos With a Plan

The Mars Volta are on my influence list and they are the one that explains the most about how this record is arranged.

Chaos is a composition problem

Their music sounds like it is falling apart. It is not. That is the trick, and it took me a long time to understand it.

A mess is what happens when nobody decided. Chaos — the kind that works — is engineered. Every lurch is placed. The reason it feels dangerous is that it is executed precisely enough to stay just the right side of collapse, and that requires more control than playing it straight, not less.

Anyone can be sloppy. Sounding like you are about to come apart while never actually coming apart is a craft.

Where this shows up

The video for “Sauce That” won Best Experimental and Best Comedy from the same jury. Those two things do not usually sit together, and the reason they could is that the chaos in it is structured.

Comedy needs timing. Timing is structure. A joke that genuinely falls apart is not funny, it is just broken. So the video had to feel unhinged while being built like a clock — which is exactly the Mars Volta problem, transposed.

Dynamics

The other thing they are useful for is volume.

Their records go very quiet so that the loud parts mean something. Rap production often sits at a constant intensity because streaming rewards immediate impact, and quiet passages are where people skip.

But a record that is loud the whole way through has no loud parts. It has one texture. If you want a moment to hit, you have to give up ground somewhere first, and giving up ground is uncomfortable because it feels like losing the listener.

That is a long-form argument, and it is one reason this album took ten years — building dynamics across a whole record is slow work.

And the maximalism

They never asked whether an idea was too much. More guitar, more percussion, a section nobody expected, a title nobody can parse.

I am a thirty-six-year-old rapper from San Antonio funding my own album, who named a coffee Good Ass Mother Fucking Coffee and is building a ten thousand dollar prosthetic lion head for one show.

Restraint was never going to be the lesson I took.