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Cult Music
Album by Ann Xiety
Released January 9, 2018
Recorded Massachusetts, May 2017 - January 2018
Genre Experimental, Anti-folk, Outsider, Lo-fi, Noise rock
Length 31:45
Label Independent

Cult Music is the third album by American poet and outsider musician Matthew Little under his project name Ann Xiety. It was released on YouTube January 9, 2018.

Background[]

Little's sophomore effort Dry Hit was released April 2, 2017. Little's goal for the album was for it to consist of original music entirely constructed by himself with no sampling, and while the goal was reached, the album didn't come out as he had originally wanted. "I think I could have done better," Little said while speaking on the album. "Some songs and sounds on [Dry Hit] are awesome, but in the end it came out too quiet, like, there's nothing underneath it. I wanted more percussion and heavier guitar but I couldn't express it the way I wanted because I hardly had the freedom to record the way I needed to record."

Influences[]

In the beginning stages where Little was just starting to map out ideas for new material, he had been listening to the music of Can, specifically their iconic 1971 album Tago Mago. While he discovered them midway through production, they influenced Little in including the more experimental guitar recordings he had been tinkering with in his editor.

Daniel Johnston still greatly left an impression on Little the same as he had when Little made Death and Doubt and Dry Hit. My Bloody Valentine also influenced Little "in the way they ended most of their songs on Loveless with weird outros that come out of nowhere". Other than the three artists mentioned, Little hasn't given a main source of influence that governed his crafting of Cult Music, but did say he listened to different songs from different artists all over YouTube.

Recording[]

In May Little moved in with his boyfriend into the same building Little had grown up in. The first few days at his new apartment Little had jammed aimlessly with his guitar and his boyfriend's old amp. The original idea was to make a new album with a similar sound to Dry Hit, but instead of leaving the beats to be found in the guitar's strums, he wanted to include some percussion.

His first week there, he recorded an acoustic song called simply "On The Couch", as it was recorded and mixed on his living room couch. He experimented with what he captured, and then the next day recorded himself drumming on "pots and pans", and then sang a simple "ooh ooh" over everything, and finally added reverb and a delay. This first song served as a catalyst for Little, as it sprung on him an idea that the album should be more experimental, and feature a few songs with minimum singing. During this time, the album was being referred to as a self-titled album, and after the album was released the track's title was changed to "Dancing with Church Members".

During those few weeks there Little had experimented with other settings on his amps. Now that he was alone most of the time, he wanted to turn up the volume and record something louder than he was used to. He tried punk and grunge-sounding guitar jams, and even recorded a few. But not long after he and his friend Eli got together and recorded their upcoming mixtape Smoking wit Sylvia Plath, and while they did Little temporarily abandoned Cult Music to focus on their Plot Holes music. During one of their sessions, Little asked Eli to help come up with something for an untitled instrumental, and Little used what they recorded, along with a discarded freestyle Eli did for a different track, and titled it "I Write Poetry". This is the first time Little used someone else's vocals for a track on his solo work, and credited her as Eli Joseph.

Putting Cult Music to the side wasn't the worst thing he could have done; as he mixed Sylvia Plath, Little gained some more experience in music editing. He figured out little editing tricks and expanded different sounds that he "could have used greatly" for his prior releases. In July, on a little hiatus from recording with Eli, Little found a recording he had made in May of just a thirty-second heavy guitar melody. Having forgotten about it entirely, he quickly decided to download it and see what he could do. He stretched it and layered it over the original recording, and then added percussion, again using pots and pans, and sung a harmony over it before eventually giving it lyrics. This song turned into "Same Thing Twice", which is, in Little's opinion and truth, the heaviest track he'd ever released. The song pointed in a direction Little had always wanted to go, in one that sounded equal parts grunge, punk, outsider, and some subgenre of shoegaze.

After "Same Thing Twice", Little focused on a new, as his cousin put it, "industrial" sound. He experimented with backing guitars, odd loops of different strums, and gave the percussion more bass and in some cases echoes.

Content[]

Aesthetically, Cult Music doesn't teeter off far from Little's other musical releases. The album retains his trademark lo-fi fuzz and grainy textures and in his vocal delivery Little sings and hums in a very deadpan tone. But the album carries an "uncomfortable tone" that's darker than his previous albums.

Little explained that he was going for a "true outsider record made by the best of my abilities. I never try to make music that could be easily spotted on the radio; I keep my stuff underground because when it's only there it can be whatever it wants". He acknowledged that some of the percussion doesn't sync up completely to the melody and at times he "screws up" while playing the guitar, but he kept those elements in to convey "the fact that the person making the album doesn't fully know how to make music, but that they're trying their hardest because they have something to say".

Originally, the album title was changed to "Cult Music" because Little wanted to make music "that seemed to have come from a deranged or mentally unstable person". He sited Charles Manson's compilation album LIE: The Love & Terror Cult as a direct influence in both style and feeling. "I'm not saying I support or agree with what he and his 'family' did," Little said, "I'm saying that his music, when listened to, might sound good but all the same it gives off this evil vibe because we all know who made it and what was in their minds. It makes you uncomfortable and I love that." Another reason for the title was that he figured only a small percent of people would find his music and enjoy it, thus collecting something of a cult following.

Two tracks, "Hey I'm in the Middle" and "Mom's in Jail Again", feature audio Little captured during the summer of 2017 of two separate fights on his street. The one on "Hey I'm in the Middle" is of a man and woman arguing while walking down the street, which features the man screaming "Every fucking day of my life with you! Miserable!" "Mom's in Jail Again" uses the end of a "big fight" right outside of Little's apartment building where a pimp assaulted his prostitute. The segment used just has a woman asking the prostitute if she was okay, and the prostitute is heard faintly crying until the track ends. That particular capture was a few minutes long, and captured the moment when the pimp hits her, but Little didn't use it on account of the prostitute screaming "You're a n-! You're a n-!" over and over, and feared it would have caused controversy. Nevertheless, Little included these blurbs because to him "it makes the album feel dirty, like 'I shouldn't be listening to this' kind of vibes".

The album's opening track is an audio clip of Little playing "Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel on an original record pressing of the Graduate soundtrack (over which Little sings over). He included it because the song, to him, has its own cult following online as a source of many memes. The album ends with a hidden track played about ten seconds after "Thinking About It" titled "A Mother Loses Her Son", which is audio taken from the 2017 film "mother!", from the climactic scene towards the end where Jennifer Lawrence's character discovers a mad cult killed and eviscerated her newborn son. It was recorded from a bootlegged version found online, as Little liked how unclear it sounded, and in editing he added a light delayed echo that further adds to the madness. "Without seeing the scene it almost sounds like a mother discovering her son killed himself".

Album cover[]

Cult Music cover possibly actually

The original cover designed by Little in the summer of 2017.

Originally the cover for Cult Music consisted of a grainy cropped picture of Little's face looking to the right with the title placed in the corner. While he liked the cover, he eventually went with a picture he took of a warped candle that he edited entirely on his phone and even wrote the name and title with his finger. His reason was that the album itself was recorded entirely with his phone, and wanted the cover to match that. He also said it inadvertently resembled the cover of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, something he didn't mind at all, even going as far as calling it an ode.[1]

Release[]

Singles[]

Unlike Little's two previous Ann Xiety albums, not much promotion was used for its release. The only sort of promotion given was the release of two singles prior to its release. "Same Thing Twice", the album's lead single, was released as an audio-video July 21, 2017,[2] two days before Little's 26th birthday, and the second single, "Thinking About It"[3] came out December 29, 2017. The release of "Thinking About It" marked the first music video Little ever made for Ann Xiety. The video, shot in Little's office with his iPhone 6, shows Little simply lip-syncing on the floor, as well as pretending to play guitar. Both releases saw little to no attention.

Finalization[]

The album was officially released out of the blue on January 9, 2018[4] as a video on YouTube. Although Little planned on adding more songs and filling the music with more "unsettling, atmospheric sounds" he decided instead that the material he had was enough, and went ahead with its release, albeit unplanned.

Track listing[]

  1. Sound of Silence Played on a Record
  2. Same Thing Twice
  3. I Write Poetry (ft. Eli Joseph)
  4. Hey I'm in the Middle
  5. You Were A Happy Surprise
  6. I Was An Accident
  7. Profound Statement
  8. Dancing with Church Members
  9. Mom's In Jail Again
  10. Thinking About It
  11. A Mother Loses Her Son (hidden track)

References[]

Original Penny's Poetry Pages article, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0.