Plunging Into Musical Surrealism

I’ve wrapped up production on the new album, “The Snerdif Experience.” It’ll be my final album with Conqoor- at least until he contacts me again out of the blue. Conqoor’s an odd bird, I’ll admit, but a creative genius and a striking composer, and if this really is the end of our collaborative efforts, then it’s a great way to go out- not with a whimper, but with a crescendo of brilliance. 

I remember the first time he had contacted me- had already released several projects, including Conworld69. He popped up in the comments section underneath one of my videos, asked if he could compose the theme song to College Buddies 5, which had just been released. This was a completely spontaneous offer, but I indulged his request. Surely, it can’t be that great, I thought. Man was I proven wrong. 

The College Buddies 5 theme song was so hyperpop-infused, so far out on the cutting edge, so next-level, that I knew there was talent there. Untapped potential, waiting to be marketed and given exposure. It was, to put it simply, so in-tune with the franchise of College Buddies as a whole. I was stunned. 

Conqoor is a figure I respect immensely. While we have only communicated via e-mail and online correspondence for 3 years, and I don’t know how he looks, or even any details about his life, I find his lyricism fantastic, his work ethic unrivaled. Keep in mind, when he first offered to produce some songs for me, I was unpopular. I had been through a smear campaign of epic proportions. But Conqoor saw through the lies, and over 3 years he’s been nothing but pleasant to work alongside, one of the few people I can consistently rely on for civil discussion and interesting output. 

The new album was a bit of a shock for me in that Conqoor rapidly created 12 tracks, each of which possesses that recognizable Conqoor essence. I’m not sure how to describe it, although needless to say I think it meshes very well with my Casio MT-68, which I didn’t have during the production of our last album together, “Bowling Green Miscreants.” So that’s another way the new album will sound different. It’ll have less pop-friendly hits and verge closer into the abstract and the faintly recalled. 

Conqoor entrusted me with all 12 tracks, telling me that I could do whatever i wanted with them as long as I exported them in a wav of flac format and that I accepted that I wouldn’t be making any money off of them, which is fine by me considering the potency of the music in question. These are tracks I’ve poured my heart into, spent long hours pondering how best to infuse them with my mental essence. 

The cover of the album is another selling point. I was originally going to title the album something which would cause people to believe it was a spiritual follow-up to Bowling Green Miscreants, however Conqoor wisely assured me that it should be called something different, given how different it sounds. And he was right. It’s an entirely new era of music, although anyone who enjoyed BGM will also enjoy TSE. 

The photo on the cover is a shot of the Cherry Creek mall around evening, blurry, with just enough grain to lend it a timeless, incorporeal flair. It’s a shot of a building which called itself “The Friends Experience,” an interactive Instagram opportunity where you could walk into recreations of all the sets from “Friends,” and buy kitschy aprons with the “Central Perk” insignia on them. That’s the sort of concept which is just stupid enough to get the gears in my head whirring. The photo was taken at the spur of the moment, and I didn’t even realize it was an interactive Friends-themed experience until I saw the file up close. What a serendipitous coincidence. 

The attraction is now permanently closed, according to Google, its final days upon it. Its impermanence says something, i think, about the rapid pace of the world today, and its blatant artificiality is interesting, too- a theme park built to look like a set from a 20-year-old sitcom built to look like an apartment. Simulacra layered upon simulacra. Needless to say, I took the photo into MS Paint and rearranged the letters so now the sign on the front says “The Snerdif Experience.” A reference to my classic video. 

Thematically, the impermanence works because I believe this might actually be the final album I produce with Conqoor, and much like the weird attraction, so many things we take for granted are completely gone overnight. In about a month, that building will probably be a lamp store or something. 

The most striking feature on the cover, aside from the store’s facade, is the moon, which shines brilliantly in the upper left, a parallel to my other recent album, “Rehashing Every late 90s Alt-Rock Trope Under The Sun,” which coincidentally featured the sun in the exact same position. There’s something very melancholic about seeing the moon so bright, so radiant, above a shopping mall, encased within layers of purple clouds. 

I do think this project will be much more cerebral than my previous output, in part due to the aforementioned keyboard element and in part due to the inherent differences between Conqoor’s music and my own- Denver New Wave colliding with rap in a strange fusion the likes of which will never be heard again.

I feel it’s worth praising Conqoor for never doubting me or my output. There has never been a point where he’s insulted me, my career, my compositional modus operandi, or my decisions in terms of album construction. He is a countercultural figure who appreciates the eccentric and the underappreciated, and it was an absolute pleasure to collaborate with him one final time on this new project. 

I don’t know who Conqoor is, and I really don’t care to know. All I can say for sure is that he has managed to craft a demented world of sound unlike any other, and I know talent when I hear it. Since the early days, he’s been a golden standard in an ocean of inferior knockoffs and wannabes, and I see nothing but success in his immediate future. 

“The Snerdif Experience” will be coming out at the end of this month. It’s one hour and eight minutes of pure collaborative effort on behalf of me and Conqoor, and I think it’ll be a momentous occasion. I’m looking forward to it.