Screen Memories is the fourth studio album by American musician John Maus, released on October 27, 2017. The album was his first set of newly-recorded music since We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011). Recorded in two years at his Austin, Minnesota home, most of its subject matter concerns apocalyptic themes inspired by the newsfeed of world events he garnered while making the LP. Some of its song structures and melodies were created with the aid of an artificial neural network.
The album received generally favorable reviews from critics, and was honored on numerous year-end lists by publications such as Uncut, The Wire, Fact, and Clash magazine. Commercially, the album peaked number 14 on Billboard's American Heatseekers Albums chart. Music videos were created for its three singles ("The Combine", "Teenage Witch", and "Touchdown"). Leftover tracks that were recorded for Screen Memories were included on Addendum, released on April 20, 2018.
Artwork was designed by Lia Sued Cabral.Lia Sued Cabral It features a typeface called Shatter, designed by Vic Carless.
Background After the favorable response to Maus' previous studio album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011)—which was unprecedented for him—he became more widely accepted as an outsider artist. He did not release any new music for the next six years. Two years were devoted to finishing his dissertation, while another two were spent learning how to build modular synthesizers. At the same time, he started experimenting with recreational drugs for the first time in his life, "going into sensory deprivation tanks and just trying any trick I could think of. I became solely obsessed with this at the expense of anything else." His 338-page thesis "Communication and Control", which discussed the influence of technology on social control, was completed and submitted in 2014, and he was thereby awarded his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii.
During Maus' absence, various contingents of popular music began indulging in throwbacks to 1980s culture. Maus acknowledged that his early albums may have anticipated this development, and that he "lament[s] that they've maybe been ripped off, but it’s not like, 'Oh, I should’ve gotten credited.' It’s more that it took a trick that I had up my sleeve away. ... [With vaporwave], even if I said it wasn’t always about retro, I had maybe tried to do that very thing and dropped a thread there for people to pick up on." Drowned in Sound critic Jack Doherty posited that the 1980s-inspired sound he was associated with had "accidentally entered the mainstream" thanks to the success of television series like Stranger Things (2016) and GLOW (2017).Doherty, Jack (October 26, 2017). "Album Review: John Maus – Screen Memories" . Drowned in Sound. Retrieved February 19, 2018.
Production and composition
Maus wrote and produced virtually all of Screen Memories by himself in his Austin, Minnesota home studio, nicknamed the "Funny Farm"."Screen Memories". John Maus Official Domino Recording Company Page. Retrieved February 12, 2018.Screen Memories (2017). John Maus. Ribbon. RBN072LPXM. All of the instruments Maus used for the album were manufactured by himself. The album builds upon the 1980s-inspired lo-fi of his previous albums.Farnell, Guido (October 27, 2017). "John Maus Screen Memories". The Music. Retrieved February 19, 2018. He built the instruments first, finishing them on November 30, 2014, and started recording the album in 2015.Gordon, Jeremy (December 3, 2014). "John Maus Psychoanalyzes Ariel Pink, Announces Plans for New Music". Pitchfork. Retrieved February 18, 2018. He hoped that in producing his own instruments, he would familiarize himself with them much easier and that it would "somehow" mean he would create new textures never heard before, that he could "control voltage with a computer in a way that the modular guys of the seventies could only hoped to have done with that sort of precision." However, "it ended up being that I could have just saved some time and used the digital plug-ins."
In an interview supporting the album, Maus expressed an affinity for post-war musicians that "follow the contradictions of what they’re already given through to their breaking point, as opposed to just starting from scratch or doing the wrong thing on purpose or whatever," citing examples such as the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966) and the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" (1967). However, he denied that such principles influenced his recent work, and that he instead gave himself "more latitude to be 'complex' or something like that." To make his compositions more "surpris[ing]," he experimented with an artificial neural network for some tracks. He explained:
Screen Memories was completed shortly before the November 2016 US presidential election.Arcand, Rob (October 27, 2017). "John Maus Talks New Album Screen Memories, the Apocalypse, and Wanting to Write Like Mark Ronson". Spin. Retrieved February 17, 2018. He had planned for the music to be guitar-oriented, but he "could never get it to work." Ultimately, the album's only guitar-heavy songs were "Find Out" and "Bombs Away". The latter is the only track on the album that he did not write alone; it is a cover of a song by Holy Shit, a duo that formerly consisted of Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck. When asked about perceived connections between his album and Pink's concurrently-released Dedicated to Bobby Jameson (2017), Maus answered that the two records "couldn't have been an influence onto each other at all because he was done before he heard what I was doing, and vice versa." The song "Pets" features a quotation of Arnold Schoenberg's string sextet Transfigured Night (1899).
Themes
Screen Memories is named after the Freudian concept of screen memories, which refers to a distorted memory from childhood.Samways, Gemma. "The Inquisitive Mind of John Maus". Crack Magazine. Retrieved February 18, 2018. Maus named the album "Screen Memories" because, as he explained, "everything is mediated and distorted through the screens."Blackmarquis, Phil (December 11, 2017). "Interview: John Maus – November 2017". Reflection of Darkness. Retrieved February 18, 2018. He explained in how the name connects to the cover art, "There a sense of remembering when [a big television] was so much more of an enclosure, which has now exploded into the television in our pocket. Everything now...everybody knows it's all mediated through that device. Our social relations, our news feed—everything. Our memory."Joyce, Colin (October 12, 2017). "John Maus at the End of the World". Noisey. Retrieved February 18, 2018.
Most of the album's subject matters concerns apocalyptic themes, which are presented through irreverent and wry humor. According to critic Gabriela Tully Claymore, Screen Memories reflects a more "foreboding" tone than Maus' past records. Maus did not engage in much social interaction while creating the album, and he only learned about the dark global political climate through newsfeeds.Pequeno, Ze (October 24, 2017). "John Maus". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved February 18, 2018. Critic Aine Devaney surmised that there is also "an air of Maus coming to terms with strayed and suppressed memories of pain."Devaney, Aine. "John Maus – 'Screen Memories' review". Crack Magazine. Retrieved February 19, 2018. Writer Henning Grabow said the musical aspect of the songs are apocalyptic in that they are pop songs with "something wrong [...] – an apocalyptic, twisted notion." Maus named the song "Edge of Forever" after the Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever."
The lyrics features references to aspects of popular culture such as Jean-Luc Picard and Masters of the Universe.Grabow, Henning (November 15, 2017). "Don’t Come To It Lightly: Approaching the Apocalypse of John Maus". Nothing but Hope and Passion. Retrieved February 18, 2018. Interviewing Maus for Nothing but Hope and Passion, Grabow said "the lyrics come in [an] abstract, repetitive pattern," and Maus agreed, stating "personally, I just don’t have any gift for verses – at all. There are many examples of verse meeting music to sublime effects but that’s not a skill that I’ve got or have the time to develop. Also, I think that verse is finally foreign to music. Some of the best tracks are just in the form of nonsense syllables." Writer Chal Ravens suggested Maus' lack of care towards the lyrics led to them having "unerasable mental image[s]," such as on "Teenage Witch" ("Want to start a fire, witch? For that icy titty?!") and "Pets" ("Your pets are gonna die!").
Release and promotion
In June 2017, Maus announced a summer tour, which became his first public performances since 2012, and suggested that new music would be released soon. It was his first solo tour with a live band, featuring his brother Joseph Maus on bass, Minneapolis musician Luke Darger on keyboards, and Jonathan Thompson on drums. On August 29, 2017, he revealed that Screen Memories was to be released in the fall of 2017.Breihan, Tom (August 29, 2017). "John Maus – “The Combine” Video". Stereogum. Retrieved February 18, 2018. That same day, the LP's lead single, "The Combine," and its Tina Rivera-directed music video, "a lo-fi, psychedelic vision of farmlands being harvested" as Stereogum summarized, was released. On October 12, the music video and single for "Teenage Witch" premiered. The video is a collage of footage of Maus in his high school years.Rettig, James (October 12, 2017). "John Maus – “Teenage Witch” Video". Stereogum. Retrieved February 18, 2018. The video and single for "Touchdown" was issued on October 23.Geslani, Michelle (October 23, 2017). "John Maus shares bizarre video for new song “Touchdown”: Watch". Consequence of Sound. Retrieved February 17, 2018. Its video, directed by Jennifer Juniper Stratford, "features fuzzy footage of football players and coaches, playing out like a retro promotional sports video but with a Stranger Things twist," Consequence of Sound described.
Ribbon Music released Screen Memories on October 27, 2017. On April 20, 2018, a box set of John Maus albums including Screen Memories was released by Ribbon."John Maus Boxset". John Maus Official Domino Recording Company Page. Retrieved February 13, 2018. The set also includes an exclusive LP titled Addendum, which is a set of twelve tracks that are an "addendum" to Screen Memories.Tully Claymore, Gabriela (October 24, 2017). "A Freewheeling Conversation With Experimental Oddball John Maus". Stereogum. Retrieved February 13, 2018. As Maus explained, "It was really more that I made an album, but then I realized I had two albums worth of stuff." According to him, the songs on Addendum were made in a more "carefree" manner than Screen Memories and are most resemblant of his usual style.
The tour associated with Screen Memories and Addendum came to an abrupt end on July 28, 2018, when Joseph died of an undiagnosed heart condition while with the band.
Critical reception