The Glitch Mob on ‘Ctrl Alt Reality’: ‘We made this record for ourselves’ [Q&A]
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid its unsteady recession, society struggled with the age-old existential question, “What’s the point of this?”
Among those asking were The Glitch Mob‘s Justin Boreta, Ed Ma, and Joshua Mayer. Fatigued by the sheer strangeness of a world embroiled in a public health crisis and later, of that same world’s shaky return to quasi-normalcy, the Los Angeles-based trio turned inward to find the answer to the question, which, they say, can be asked not only of life during the pandemic, but also about the extravagance of modern dance music.
Two or three months after the COVID-19 lockdowns lifted, The Glitch Mob traded California scenery for Utah desolation. They packed their bags, set up shop in a studio in Boulder (complete with its own built-in nightclub of sorts), and made their fourth studio album, Ctrl Alt Reality. The setting, quiet and removed, is antithetical to the music written and developed there. Ctrl Alt Reality—The Glitch Mob’s first album since 2018’s See Without Eyes—is a buzzy homage to earlier, ’90s-reminiscent rave sound with a wildly-beating pulse and rollicking nods to old-school Jungle breaks. The placid, still space where Ctrl Alt Reality came to be is not the same place where it was meant to flourish: on the liveliest of dance floors.
The LP is as much an ode to rave culture of earlier years as it is a contemporary attempt to restore connection in today’s ultra-commercialized dance market, where “spectacle,” The Glitch Mob say, has stolen the show. This dynamic led live events to feel somewhat impersonal for Boreta, Ma, and Mayer, who, with this record, “bow out of the production arms race” and lean into music made not to impress anyone, but rather made to unify audiences and soundtrack the fun to be had along the way.
“We were trying to harness the spirit and energy of old-school rave culture, where it was really just about people coming together under one umbrella purely for the music,” Ma told Dancing Astronaut in an interview coincidentally conducted one year to the date that the group left Utah to finish Ctrl Alt Reality back home in LA.
Ctrl Alt Reality, The Glitch Mob attest, is a product of a “joyful and celebratory process” free from the typical fetters. And whether by happenstance or design, it is also a resounding response to the question, “What’s the point of this?”: pure connection through and for the love of the music.
In a tweet you stated, “this next chapter in our artistry is intended to get back to the music, the movement, the dance, the connection of body and sound.” What prompted your desire to write this new chapter of sound?
Ed Ma: “This record exists in a post-Blade era of The Glitch Mob. The Blade was our live production and instrument that we used to perform in. This record [Ctrl Alt Reality] was birthed after essentially The Blade has gone into retirement. We’ve been at this music thing for a while, and I think when we don’t have something like The Blade somewhat dictating our creative process, we were just more free to do whatever we wanted to do. I think we all [in The Glitch Mob] grew up in an era of old-school rave culture, you know? Jungle breaks, warehouse rave culture and stuff, and that was just something that we were inspired by, and we wanted to write a record that captured the spirit of what that was all about. It’s essentially a polar opposite experience from what people equate to raves nowadays, American EDM festivals, you know what I mean? We were trying to harness the spirit and energy of old-school rave culture, where it was really just about people coming together under one umbrella purely for the music.”
Joshua Mayer: “I feel like there is a collective feeling in the air about getting back to a more simplified version of electronic music, you know, having it be more purely about the music and not so much about the spectacle. I think that obviously at one point in time, all this big money and corporate kind of influence came into electronic music and put the whole rock and roll model on it—bigger, better, louder shows kind of outdoing each other from one to the next, and I feel like it’s kind of lost that sense of feeling and soul about the music itself. So, for us, we were trying to take it back to the stripped-down version—no production, just about the tunes. We’re literally and figuratively trying to get back to the ground level of why we do it, because it’s super disconnecting being on a stage that’s 50 feet away from everybody. It’s just kind of like, what’s the point of this anymore? You know? It’s like, I’m not here to be stared at from an audience, hoping that they understand and feel our energy, but when we can remove [the music] from that kind of setting and bring it back down to the people and all be on the same level, I just feel like it connects deeper. And that was a big part of why the music came out sounding the way it did. It was just like getting it back down to the rawness, just pure energy and dancing and connecting with folks.”
Ed Ma: “In The Blade area, we had participated in the production arms race for like a long time and it just kind of felt like it was time to just bow out of that whole entire thing. There’s always going to be another artist out there that’s going to be able to do it bigger and better, with more money and everything like that. We wanted to take this record back to a pure place with nothing approved, we’re not trying to impress anybody, we’re just trying to make tunes that we’re stoked about and have a dope vibe.”
Justin Boreta: “The album comes from a place of a post-pandemic studio trip, where we went out to Boulder, Utah for a couple weeks in the middle of nowhere. We had made a lot of introspective music and a lot of music that traversed all sorts of musical realms, and it was just pure raw energy and celebration. I think we had spent so much time in our headphones and inside that this is actually such a human record. There’s a lot of love for the power of live music to unite people, but it’s really just the raw love of the energy. I think for us, it feels more connective to our community in that way.”
Your long-term listeners know that process is everything to you. In fact, in a 2018 interview with Dancing Astronaut, you noted, “music is more about the process than the final piece of work.” What was the process like of making Ctrl Alt Reality?
Ed Ma: “I think we’ve spent many, many years, making all different kinds of records. I think the one thing that people can always count on is that we’re most likely going to do something unexpected. I think from where we started to obviously flipping a 180 on Drink the Sea and then obviously going full stadium mode with Love Death Immortality, people can always count on us to just do something different and unexpected. I think after making music for this long, one sound that we really haven’t explored a lot of was actually the sound that really got us all into electronic music to begin with: old-school rave, whether it be jungle breaks, warehouse, like, rave techno, and that was just something that spoke to us at this point in time. We had just never really touched upon that kind of sound before. And as Justin said, you we took a trip out to Utah, and we just had a blast every day in the studio. It was probably the most fun we’ve ever had making a record. As I’ve said, at this point in our careers, having done this for so long, it’s like there’s really nothing left to prove, there’s no one to impress. So we could really write music from a very pure, honest place and just have a good time with it.”
Justin Boreta: “It was a very joyful and celebratory process for us. We hadn’t been in the studio together for a long time, and I think if anything, listening back to [the music now] and with these shows, you can really hear the joyfulness and just the love, the power of music, and that there was no particular intention at the moment. We knew that this whole thing was about the rawness, the energy of what a breakbeat feels like. But really just getting back to the celebratory nature of everything; it’s just joy, we were having so much fun. The studio that we were at had this built-in little nightclub in it, and we would go in after every studio session and drink beer and blast [the music] and dance around and just have fun with it. And I think that taking ourselves outside of our normal studio settings helped that. It’s funny, we wrote an album in Joshua Tree, and it was very psychedelic. You think of going out to nature, maybe you’re going to make a trippy album, but in fact, removing ourselves from society and going to deep, desolate nature, we just wanted to have fun.”
How does the title Ctrl Alt Reality align with the LP’s theme and sound?
Ed Ma: The whole thing comes from is ‘control alt delete,’ which is essentially that’s the key combination you use to force quit a piece of software. You could look at that like essentially hitting the reset button on everything. This record was a complete reset button for us. Ctrl Alt Reality I think takes it one step further and is just a play on modern day social media culture. You could look at it as thinking that Instagram and stuff is reality when it’s not, you could look at it as taking control of your own alternate reality as well. There are many different interpretations that you can take from it.
In the time leading up to the album’s release, you’ve performed a series of 360-degree shows where you’re ground-level, completely surrounded by the crowd. What led you to want to take this this approach and how is Ctrl Alt Reality conducive to this format?
Joshua Mayer: Part of it was to strip this whole thing down and get away from the ‘rockstar status,’ where it just didn’t really feel natural for us. We really wanted to rethink this whole thing, you know? It’s like, what are we really trying to do here? What is the goal these days? And I think for us, it was connecting with people, connecting with our peers, connecting with the music again, after being so disconnected for a couple years during the pandemic. I feel like we need like a big injection of connection with our community, and what better way to do that than to in a music culture scene in each city on the ground level? Literally on the ground with everyone around us. So it’s less about the show. It’s more about, ‘Hey, we’re all here doing this together. It’s not about us. We’re just part of the whole puzzle.’ It felt like a way to really translate what we’re trying to do through the sound that we’re currently creating. It felt honest, it felt organic, it felt like the most authentic versions of ourselves, because that’s where we came from. When we first started playing, we were playing in the dust out at Burning Man on the ground level. We were playing in warehouses in the San Francisco Bay area. We were playing clubs where like the DJ booth was literally just on the ground. And as you grow as artists through numbers and stuff like that, more fans and bigger shows, the rooms get bigger, the stages get bigger, the production gets bigger. And I think we kind of just hit our limit for now. Like, ‘Hey, let’s just kind of do away with all this stuff and get back to really what it’s about: music, a good sound system, and being in the mix with everyone so that we can all celebrate this moment together.’ It’s not about showmanship to us anymore; it’s about creating an energy and a feeling that we can all connect with collectively.
Ed Ma: I always tell people, we made this record for ourselves. You know what I mean? To rave out to. And I want to be going off as hard as humanly possible to this record when we’re playing it and be within a beer-spilling distance from someone locked in and feeling that energy. That’s really what the whole 360 experience was all about.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
Justin Boreta: This was an album that was created for us in navigating the music industry and navigating the strangeness of 2022 between 2020 and 2022, nothing makes sense. The only thing that makes sense now is just being real and being authentic and being grateful that we can make music and have fun doing it. We’re really grateful to the fans that have been with us for so many reboots and sonic explorations.
Ed Ma: And we’re also grateful for being welcomed back to the underground. Sometimes when you get really big and you decide you want to come back to the roots, it might not be a welcoming place. People can be like, ‘you got big, you sold out, that’s not real.’ But the welcome back for us has been profound. It’s been incredible—super warm, welcoming, loving, and man, we just have nothing but gratitude. It’s been sick as fuck.
Featured image: CAMRAFACE