The circumstances surrounding the production of the album “She’s Suspiring” are largely unknown. However, certain facts or at least partial certainties can be gleaned from the interview transcript provided below. Additionally, one particular grandmother commented, “To me, the songs all sound the same. Something for young people.” From that I take, that old people don’t like odd time signatures, uncommon harmonic changes, anti-earworm melodies, or English, but prove me wrong.
Tracklist
01 ⋅ 1:41 ⋅ 1:41
02 ⋅ Aspirar ⋅ 3:20
03 ⋅ Crown of Spring ⋅ 3:20
04 ⋅ How to Convey My Obsession with Her ⋅ 5:00
05 ⋅ I Think You Feel We Do [feat. Córka] ⋅ 4:40
06 ⋅ Lena ⋅ 3:19
07 ⋅ Like I’m 80s ⋅ 3:40
08 ⋅ O Emily [feat. Eiermann] ⋅ 6:00
09 ⋅ The Fear ⋅ 3:50
10 ⋅ (W)hole ⋅ 5:00
11 ⋅ Zoetrope ⋅ 5:40
Transcript of the interview conducted on April 20, 2020.
Interviewee: Noah Entroy (of Imperfektionist)
Interviewer: Hanne O’Tory (of Nanotheory Magazine Europe)
Translation: Nora Heynot (of Nanotheory Magazine Europe)
Editorial: Abram Breinholt (of Nanotheory Magazine America)
*
Noah’s room is large, well-lit by sunlight, and very untidy.
Hanne: Today and for the first time, I am meeting online with Noah Entroy of Berlin-based band Imperfektionist. Noah, will it be okay if I record this?
Noah: Yes, from my home studio into your home studio.
Hanne (smiles): Then welcome, Noah.
Noah (looks around his room): Pleasure to be here, Hanne.
Hanne: Please, tell us in your own words: What kind of music do you do?
Noah: Progressive indie is all I can say for sure.
Hanne: Fair enough. Who else belongs to the band?
Noah: It’s really just me, myself, and I, and last but not least, Noah Entroy. I see Imperfektionist as more of a solo project.
Hanne: But that hasn’t always been the case, right?
Noah: Right. Sadly, I had to get rid of the old members and record their parts myself instead of being miserable at teaching them. I figured it would be a simpler, more direct approach to making music. What I wanted to do were complex things, while the others stuck with catchy, bluesy stuff. I still jam with the boys on a regular basis and collaborate with our former singer from time to time, Córka of Sun & Moon.
Hanne: Glad to hear there’s no resentment between you. But speaking of complex things, let’s come back to your album now.
Noah: She’s Suspiring, yes. Released at the peak of the Corona Pandemic, or what I thought was the peak.
Hanne: Let’s get back to Corona later. First, though, give us a clue about the album title. Who is Suspiring and why?
Noah: Really nobody, or everybody who’d like to, also guys and non-binaries. I don’t even know whether Suspiring is a positive or negative thing, but the only other options would have been Transpiring or Perspiring, both meaning the same: to sweat. Except I didn’t want to do EDM, simple as it is.
Hanne: What about Inspiring?
Noah: Old hat. She may have been Inspiring back in 2014, when I got into home recording to please my girlfriend at the time. Afterwards, She was Expiring, Aspiring, Conspiring, Respiring, and now Suspiring.
Hanne: Then how come this is your first release yet?
Noah (chuckles): Why don’t you boost my confidence one step at a time? I don’t really know what to do with the old material yet. Basically, I have five completely oversaturated mixtapes. Maybe I’ll remaster and release them in reversed order, thereby creating a project that gets closer to its roots with each album release, until it becomes the pure essence it once originated from, the spark that made me pick up the guitar in the first place: love, of course. I hope the listeners don’t mind the quality also getting poorer with every release, unless AI becomes better at mastering mixes, because I for sure won’t. But once finished, the unique composition of a song matters much more to me than the quality of the recording, or on how many stages I will perform it.
Hanne: An interesting thought, reversing the order of your albums. That’s even more than a concept album; perhaps a concept discography?
Noah: Precisely, because it’s not only the albums’ titles: They each feature eleven songs, sorted in alphabetical order. It’s been a lot of fun and also a huge pain in the ace to become more and more restricted as an album filled up with songs. I feel a little exhausted by the format – it’s time to free myself from it. Now I want to get into technical death metal and lowercase noise music.
Hanne (laughs): Please don’t! We’ll also get to what you’ll be doing next, but first another question concerning this current concept album of yours, which I had the chance to enjoy listening to this morning: The song durations all seem very in shape, like for example here, 6:00, or 4:40, or 5:00, or two times 3:20. Except for two tracks, one being the album opener. Why not call it “1:40” instead of “1:41?” What’s the deeper meaning there?
Noah (pauses): Let’s say, one finds meaning where one expects it. If that doesn’t suffice, I’ll say what you said: We’ll get to that later. But before we get to the part where I reveal hidden messages and tread on people’s toes, why don’t we go over the technical stuff, which will bore you to death.
Hanne: Technical stuff? What do you mean?
Noah: How I made the album.
Hanne: We can talk about your album however you want, Noah. I don’t have a checklist of questions that I’d need you to answer. Only please do keep an eye on the clock.
Noah: Will do. How I made the album: at home. Mostly before it was cool, before Corona.
Hanne: Your quarantined neighbors must have had one hell of a time.
Noah: Those hippos got no reasons to complain. I almost exclusively wear headphones, hardly ever use acoustic instruments, and for every song I remove an additional two millimeters distance between me and the mic, to be able to sing even lower. At this point, I could touch that cheap old membrane with my tongue, if I removed the nylon stockings and the head basket, too.
Hanne: Meaning no offense, and by all means lick your microphone if it suits you, but what you did there can barely be called singing. Personally, I’m missing the vocal je ne sais quoi that would make you stick out among a thousand other voices. Actually, I found it quite difficult to pin down your voice, because it sounded different on each song and not at all like your talking voice through my headphones right now.
Noah (reserved): I am well aware of the amount of compression and muddiness, as well as my mediocre voice. But as I said, it’s the most direct thing for me to sing myself. Before I use auto-tune or take online singing lessons, I’d rather just be honest about it. That’s why I call myself Imperfektionist, by the way. Nobody is perfect, not even the perfectionist.
Hanne: No worries, not everybody pays attention to the same things in music. For example, I’m a big fan of your guitars. Since when do play?
Noah: I got my first guitar ten years ago.
Hanne: Must have gotten a lot more since then.
Noah (smiles): Talking to a guitarist, that’s a pretty big assumption. Just kidding, my gear is really not that expensive. In fact, I’ve been using that first guitar throughout the whole new album. I call her Chiara, my beloved six-string electric Ibanez with the phosphorescent Pegasus star sign on the front. I never even noticed the Pegasus until I had brought it home. Gay as funk, but I never regretted buying the guitar because she’s served me so well. Never out of tune, although the frets on the fretboard get thinner each year. If I keep playing, Chiara will end up a fretless. Should I go get up and get her for you?
Hanne: Don’t bother.
Noah: This isn’t for a guitar forum, is it?
Hanne: Why not? By the way, I had a glance at your footgear on one of the pictures you submitted. Didn’t seem cheap at all.
Noah: Okay, how much do you know about guitars?
Hanne: I know one when I see one.
Noah: I wish I were sponsored by Roland Boss. But those cuddly and colorful little bastards are addictive. It’s true, over the years I amassed quite an effective rig, along with the knowledge when not to make use of it. I’m almost sorry my mix is such a noise jungle that you cannot even make out the picking patterns that a single guitar plays; instead, it might have been recorded as two separate audio tracks. Unfortunately, fingerpicking is the one and only technique that I excel at. Not bending, not shredding, not sweep picking, neither tapping nor slapping, but fast and steady patterns plucked by hand on a clean electric guitar. I use up to nine fingers when I play, not counting the thumb that is pushed against the back of the neck.
Hanne: How many fingers do you use on your bass? And does he have a name, too?
Noah: I don’t name male instruments, but I do finger them, too. He is a five-string Ibanez with active pickups, and I play him with up to eight fingers.
Hanne: What other instruments did you record? There, behind you, is that an electric piano or an ironing board swamped with raggedy t-shirts?
Noah: A little bit of electric piano on the album opener, but the rest was programmed. I don’t even have a MIDI controller, instead I mouse-click the notes one by one, with a little bit of copy and paste plus variation. I’m eager to make a new drumkit for every track because I love my plug-in Addictive Drums, really the only quality sounds in my mixes. For synthesizers I usually stick with the defaults and presets. Helps with the compatibility, because I basically have to reset them every time I open up a project, a minor nuisance. Most notes are developed through trial and error, as I never really bothered to learn how to read sheet music. For Imperfektionist, I write nothing down except lyrics, so that I don’t have to learn them all by heart.
Hanne: Tell us about your workflow. How do you begin?
Noah: I’d like to say it’s always different, but over the years I developed a certain behavior: Either I feel in the mood, or I stress myself out counting the months until new year, my personal deadline for finishing a mixtape. As soon as I sit down with my guitar and loop station, which I call Lupin, I decide for a tempo, a meter, and a drum loop, then I jam until I have something that I like. The rest of the magic happens somewhere between Lupin and my desktop computer.
Hanne: When do you do the lyrics?
Noah: After I have at least three guitar parts pinned down and practiced, but always before I take to the computer. I’d love to convince you, for me it’s only about how the lyrics shape the melody rather than how they convey a message, but actually I spend a lot of time on trying to be as honest as possible. During this interview, I might tell a lie or two, but my lyrics are nothing but exaggerated personal truth. Usually, I try to obfuscate the vocals just enough to not ridicule myself.
Hanne: That sounds all very complicated, but so does your music, at least the first and last quarter of your album. To the middle part I could totally see myself dancing, if the clubs ever open up again.
Noah: You don’t need to be in a club in order to dance, there it’s just the only sensible thing to do. But I’m glad you sort of found out that my album follows the natural cycle of the year, starting in January. During winter, I think; during spring, I feel; and during summer, I dance. In the fall I travel, and come winter again, I rethink. Ever since I discovered what Lupin is capable off, thinking can result in odd meters such as the stomping 7/4, the almost casual 7/8, the premature 11/8 or 15/8, the addictive 21/16 – this one without Lupin, though – and even the quite old-fashioned, yet underrated 3/4, which I had honestly never used before. The middle part of the album is very much four-on-the-floor, as you may have counted yourself.
Hanne: Your album is one song short. How do you explain the missing month?
Noah (pauses): I once read that a musical album should have an odd number of songs, but I’m a little bit superstitious about the number thirteen. A former rival of mine was born on October thirteenth, until he traveled away forever. Also, eleven is my lucky number ten, extended by a bonus track. There is always one that’s underdeveloped or overproduced.
Hanne: Which of the songs are you least satisfied with?
Noah: Luckily, I replaced it just in time by a brand-new composition. Not going to tell you which one, though.
Hanne: And which song makes you especially proud?
Noah: Always the one I am currently recording. I have this delusion that my next song is always going to be better than my previous work. It doesn’t work out that way because I’m constantly trying to do things differently. It might be a coincidence, but the two tracks that matter the most to me both belong to the gloomier kind.
Hanne: Are they the two tracks with durations 1:41 and 3:19?
Noah (laughs): Certainly not, and will you stop guessing, Hanne! Alright, you asked for it plenty enough. Ready for the full concept? Five minutes, I promise.
Hanne: I’m on the edge of my seat! Please, go on!
Noah (reading from his screen): So, living in the winterly vastness of fictitious megacity Tektopolis, a young protagonist, referred to as “the Thinker,” embarks on the journey of finding true love. He is a character so vain that he has trouble being around other people for the fear of being challenged for his vanity, which makes him withdrawn, a homebody. While he tries to mathematically calculate the chances of meeting a thinker girl who could outsmart him, he realizes that Tektopolis alone is home to 10,000 people who meet his criteria, half of whom are female.
Hanne (hesitantly): Are we still on the album opener?
Noah: I figured it would be best not to do this thing track by track, to respect the privacy of my influences. The readers can do a little brainwork if they’re keen. So, in the company the Thinker works for, he supervises a South American engineering intern. She is cute, chatty, curious, and able, hence having a great time in Tektopolis. Also, she introduces him to mild drugs. While the Thinker is not attracted to her sexually due to her bearing his mother’s name, he is intrigued by her confident, yet friendly intelligence. As he begins taking mild drugs on his own, he becomes jealous of the brainless machine tool he makes her operate. Too soon she returns home, but her spirit rubbed off onto him and leaves him a little wiser.
Hanne: According to Freud, one directs his or her sexual preferences towards the parent of the opposite sex, in the Thinker’s case towards his mother.
Noah (irritated): Alright, the Thinker doesn’t have a mother. But he doesn’t funk around for fun, he is looking for true love.
Hanne: Please, Noah, language.
Noah: You can later replace all my “funks” by “funks,” that’s how I’d do it.
Hanne: Now, the Thinker . . .
Noah (searches his screen): Well, there! Just as the Thinker prepares to finally overcome his social anxiety during spring, he finds himself facing a sudden setback: Just like every other megacity on earth, Tektopolis is struck by the Corona Pandemic of 2020. Ironically, years of solitary life have prepared him for the total lockdown, making him somewhat less unhappy than his fellow citizens. Since he taught himself to make music years ago, he now decides to call out true love by writing songs for attractive local girls he meets online. As the virus passes him by physically, but affects his psyche nonetheless, he faces difficulties making music, which naturally is as easy for him as breathing, similar to the virus affecting the respiratory system of the infected.
Hanne: Admittedly, that’s also how I felt at first, unable to be creative. It took a while for me to understand that things have changed, and that I had to change, too. But how did the Thinker get out of there? Whom did he meet online?
Noah: He didn’t get out of there, instead he got deeper into it. The Thinker’s first active attempt to find true love results in a massive failure because the girl he decided on producing a song for does not respond to it at all, like radio silence. He is devastated and seeks the fault in his production, identifying it as too sad and unsuitable to convey his feelings for the girl. Her looks matter a great deal to him, and her being a fellow engineer proves she is also intelligent. As he runs out of possible solutions to win her heart, he slips deeper into depression.
Hanne: Sounds a lot like winter to me. What track are we on right now?
Noah (unmoved): Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey. In that song, the Thinker recovers to his former level of happiness, meaning emotional indifference, after he comes upon a theoretical model dividing human psyches into three caste-like categories: He learns that there are not only thinkers but also doers and feelers. By default, every person associates with one of them stronger than with the other two, although spiritual perfection can only be achieved by people developing their weaker categories as well, in case of the Thinker by doing things and socializing with others. Same goes for an ideal true love relationship, where one category should be present in each partner, the third being accounted for by their mutual activities.
Hanne: Now I wonder, which category I myself fit in.
Noah: Classic thinker. A feeler would have said “thinker” instantly, and a doer wouldn’t have wondered about it at all.
Hanne (wonders about that even more): Is the model applicable in any other way than limiting the size of your pool of potential partners?
Noah: Actually, it’s supposed to boost your self-confidence, nothing more. No rocket science. Meanwhile, our Thinker – feeling boosted, summerly, and scientifically on top of the world again – quickly realizes he needs to write songs for doer and feeler girls. He begins meeting with old friends and is introduced to a girl so stunning, that to him she appears to excel in all thinking, feeling, and doing, making him discard the model without giving it an afterthought. They take drugs together and quickly become close, eventually promised to one another. But soon he finds himself challenged by her stubbornness, until her severe texting problem uncovers her unfathomable drug problem. Before they can even make love for the first time, he calls the whole thing off, thinking of finding a better match, unknowingly missing out on true love.
Hanne (startled): How very sad! Not even once?
Noah (tongue-in-cheek): I’ll do the Bill Clinton on this one: “The Thinker did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Hanne: So, he did, at least. Good for him.
Noah (emphasizes): No, fair for him. He was simply too vain to accept her the way she was, meaning in transformation, just like him. But soon after, again through friends, the Thinker is introduced to a girl from outside Tektopolis, whose first impression on him is that of his former promised one. He admits to her being gorgeous, creative, and entertaining, noticing all the while how desirable she and her bright red hair must seem to almost everybody else. Feeling intimidated and below her league, he retreats after two and a half encounters, never having been alone with her for more than thirteen seconds. Somewhat inspired by the girl and her ability to catch the vibe of the moment, he takes drugs on his own, then recalls the most precious of those moments and fantasizes about turning himself into a song, which she can turn on and off whenever she feels like it, realistically considering never.
Hanne: It would be nice to have something like that, or rather somebody. Also, now I finally know which song you are talking about. How did it go again? “Just turn me on, and if you stumble, hum along?”
Noah: Something like that, yeah.
Hanne: I think your stream features the lyrics, I’ll look it up later. Right now, I’m only concerned: Will the Thinker ever find true love?
Noah: Patience, Hanne. Through friends, again and again, the Thinker is introduced to another girl, this time a fellow singer who shows pleasure in performing his work. Her beauty is of a rare completeness, eluding his volatile memory, and she carries a certain dignity about her, making him feel comfortable in her friendzone before her song is even finished. With indifference he notices her natural spontaneity, underlined by her last-minute cancelling of a joint trip to the ocean, despite having paid for the flights. He goes nonetheless, takes drugs on the beach, and fantasizes about her fleeting figure in the clouds and autumn-colored trees.
Hanne: Lovely, but not truly lovely yet. Quite a lot of drugs, your Thinker is taking there, don’t you think?
Noah: And it gets worse: As winter closes in, the Thinker finds himself alone again, this time fearing for his own sanity. He takes all the drugs he can get hold of, even the hard stuff, in order to punish himself for being vain and bitter as opposed to openminded and charming. At least willing to determine a second culprit, he fails to find reasons for his inherent evilness, having had a childhood straight out of a children’s book, free of worries, instead full of model true love. The realization that no harm had ever come to him makes him afraid of nobody but himself, ultimately fearing for his own life.
Hanne: Well, that’s a change of seasons.
Noah: Hold on, it still gets worse: While drugs slowly turned the Thinker psychotic, they also gave him a certain stability. Since he has never been short on money, drugs always provided him with options to either boost or dampen his confidence, his energy, his feelings, and most importantly his thoughts. Largely undetected, drugs creeped into his life, until they took over. The conclusion that having wasted true love by accusing his promised one of drug abuse, makes him a hypocrite and lastly an idiot – not so intelligent after all, what he’s well aware of. Hence, because he’s still so vain, he decides to quit drugs once and for all, to deserve another chance, but not before taking a good last sample of his beloved stash. He takes drugs all alone and fantasizes about the life without drugs. However, he underestimates his final cocktail and overdoses in his Tektopolis apartment.
Hanne: Oh, ship!
Noah: You can later replace that by “ship,” I do it all the time.
Hanne: Does he die?
Noah: Not quite yet. In the ambulance, the Thinker is briefly brought back by the paramedics. The drugs in his system distort his perception of reality up to a point where he evolves into a super-organism due to intelligence explosion. Scientists want to hold him captive to study him. In order to remain unharvested by humankind, he escapes Earth to a recently finished space habitat, destined to provide permanent housing for 10,000 former citizens of Tektopolis. Onboard, he takes over the habitat and sets course for the eternal void, turning the defenseless passengers into blind, almost prehistoric creatures by slowly bereaving them of their light, freedom, technology, and lastly their common knowledge. Still not satisfied, the Thinker dies trying to blow up the space habitat, recognizing that the inhabitants were crucial to his very existence. As he ponders how he might have found true love in them, his spirit ascends from his body and leaves the ambulance to come down on a group of three street musicians, as well as a little girl, providing them with hope, virtue, and creativity for life.
Hanne (unconvinced): If he was alone taking drugs, who called the ambulance?
Noah: Fate.
Hanne (suspiring): So, he does die. I hope the street musicians will find true love for him.
Noah (laughs): I hope not in the little girl! But yes, that was She’s Suspiring, lyric-wise in a nutshell. Any questions?
Hanne: Thank you, Noah! As you went way over your time: No questions.
Noah: Don’t you want to know my musical influences? Or what I’m going to do with the album, now that it’s released?
Hanne: What are you going to do with the album, now that it’s released?
Noah: I have no idea. I was hoping, you could help me promote it.
Hanne: I’ll do what I can, I promise. Now, give us a few of your musical influences, but only the most important, I have thirteen more interviews today. Got Corona to blame for that as well.
Noah: Hold on, that would be Opeth, Ozric Tentacles, TR/ST, Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Oomph!, David Maxim Micic, Plini, Massive Attack, Knorkator, Infected Mushroom, Pink Floyd, Nerve, The Alan Parsons Project, Alt-J, HGich.T, K.I.Z, Nightwish, Apoptygma Berzerk, ASP, Die Prinzen, Röyksopp, Flight of the Conchords, Muse, Tame Impala, Trentemøller, Agnes Obel, The Beatles, Rings of Saturn, H.I.M., Heart, Rush, White Lies, DIE!, Dead Can Dance, Grimes, Periphery, Revocation, Meshuggah, Tool, Infant Annihilator . . .
Hanne (interrupts): Basically, all the artists that you listen to.
Noah: That’s how it works when you do what you want and don’t have any ears to please.
Hanne: I don’t know about that, but as we talked about your vocals before, I heard the Massive Attack influence. And Tool does a lot of odd meters, as far as I know. But Heart? No, no more questions.
Noah: I have trouble picturing my listeners.
Hanne: If it helps, you may picture me from now on.
Noah: I’ll try not to make too much metal or lowercase music then. By the way, please make sure to remind the editor that lowercase is spelled in lowercase letters.
Hanne: Thank you again for talking with me, Noah Entroy of Imperfektionist.
Noah: Can I perhaps offer you a song, Hanne?
Hanne (exasperated): This is not a dating portal. Goodbye, Noah.
Noah (suspiring): No, this is only as natural as suffocating. Bye, birch.
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