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 house, most of its material issues apocalyptic themes impressed by the newsfeed of world occasions he garnered whereas making the LP. Some of its music structures and melodies had been created with assistance from an synthetic neural network. The album obtained usually favorable critiques from critics, and was honored on quite a few 12 months-finish lists by publications corresponding to Uncut, The Wire, Fact, and Clash magazine. Commercially, the album peaked number 14 on Billboard's American Heatseekers Albums chart. Music movies had been created for its three singles ("The Mix", "Teenage Witch", and "Touchdown"). Artwork was designed by Lia Sued Cabral. It features a typeface referred to as Shatter, designed by Vic Carless. After the favorable response to Maus' earlier studio album We Must Turn into the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011)-which was unprecedented for him-he grew to become extra extensively accepted as an outsider artist.
He didn't release any new music for the next six years. Two years had been dedicated to finishing his dissertation, whereas another two have been spent studying how to build modular synthesizers. His 338-web page thesis "Communication and Control", which mentioned the affect of technology on social control, was accomplished and submitted in 2014, and he was thereby awarded his PhD in political science from the College of Hawaii. During Maus' absence, varied contingents of fashionable music began indulging in throwbacks to 1980s culture. I feel largely the small print that I’m most centered on are precisely the sort which are going to be misplaced on most individuals. Maus wrote and produced just about all of Screen Reminiscences by himself in his Austin, Minnesota residence studio, nicknamed the "Humorous Farm". The entire devices Maus used for the album were manufactured by himself. The album builds upon the 1980s-impressed lo-fi of his previous albums. What I did was prepare a neural entrainment audio network on a bunch of harmonic sequences and then noticed what it spit again out to me.
I also messed round with Markov chains by feeding them 1000's and hundreds of chants. I messed round with a easy process where you take an integer sequence and let the numbers one-through-six designate the size diploma of a mode after which I added the extra factor of collapsing each consecutive, every I-iii-V I-IV-V triad into it. I put in place. The chaos simply kind of shook the little machine that I made. I never heard the chaos as such, however I noticed the otherwise invisible body that I made being shook by the integer sequence. Display Reminiscences was completed shortly earlier than the November 2016 US presidential election. He had deliberate for the music to be guitar-oriented, however he "could never get it to work." In the end, the album's only guitar-heavy songs were "Find Out" and "Bombs Away". The latter is the one track on the album that he didn't write alone