Have you ever wanted to just, you know, completely
erase your professional past? Oh, wow. Like fake
your own death kind of thing. Kind of. Like wipe
the whiteboard totally clean, walk away from
massive, well -documented success, and just become
a total beginner again. I mean, most of us wouldn't
dare. It's terrifying. Right, it is. But today,
we're tracing the digital footprints of someone
who did exactly that. An artist who essentially
committed career suicide. on Instagram. And then
fled across the Atlantic. Yeah, and started selling
yoga mats instead of CDs. So welcome to today's
deep dive. We are unpacking the bizarre, brilliant
metamorphosis of the American experimental artist
Fred Wormsley. And we're doing this armed with
a really comprehensive Wikipedia roadmap of his
2016 album successor. Spelled with a dollar sign,
by the way. Which is a brilliant piece of irony
right out of the gate. I mean, considering how
aggressively he was trying to dismantle his own
commercial viability. Oh, exactly. So our mission
for this deep dive is to explore this radical
artistic metamorphosis, we're looking at what
it actually takes to tear down the house you
live in just so you can build something entirely
unrecognizable on the foundation. Right. And
what that teaches all of us about creative evolution
and really taking risks. So before we can understand
the album's successor, we kind of have to understand
the very public death of his previous identity.
Because before he was making experimental noise
music, Fred Wormsley was known to the world as
Lee Bannon. Right. And Lee Bannon was not some,
you know, underground guy trying to pay rent.
No, not at all. He was a highly sought after
producer. He was working with the hip hop collective
pro era. He was a very known entity in jungle
music, drum and bass, and EDM. I mean, he had
absolute critical validation. Yeah. The source
material notes his 2014 debut studio album under
that moniker Alternate Endings was just a massive
success. Rolling Stone ranked at number 15 on
their list of the 20 best EDM, electronic and
dance albums of 2014. He was catching the attention
of heavy hitting labels, too. Warp Records, Sacred
Bones. And Ninja Tune, who actually signed him.
Right. So by every traditional metric of the
music industry, he had won the game. He had made
it. But then we hit. May 26, 2015. The turning
point. Yeah. Warmsley goes on to his Instagram
page and posts a handwritten note. He announces
he is completely dropping the name Lee Bannon.
Just out of nowhere. Out of nowhere. But he doesn't
even replace it with a new name right away. He
changes his moniker to a symbol. Right. It was
the mathematical logical negation symbol followed
by a lowercase b. So literally not b, which translates
to not Bannon. He is defining his new artistic
self entirely by what he is refusing to be. He's
kind of weaponizing his own absence. OK, let's
unpack this because I read his rationale on this
note and it left me scratching my head a bit.
He wrote that his upcoming release at the time
would be his final one as Lee Bannon because
the name had, quote, reached its limits. Reach
its limits. He actually said, and this is a direct
quote from the source. The future can no longer
exist in the same realm with music I created
when I was 17, fickle and still developing. But,
like, let me play devil's advocate here. To a
lot of people, throwing away a career that pays
the bills and has the backing of Ninja Tune just
because your older music feels fickle, That sounds
incredibly pretentious. Oh, absolutely. It sounds
like self -sabotage. Right. So how do we know
this wasn't just, you know, a quarter life crisis
masquerading as high art? It's like a tech giant
abruptly scrapping a highly profitable flagship
product just because the founder had a late night
philosophical epiphany. Well, what's fascinating
here is the underlying psychology of creative
limitation. and why this isn't just a crisis,
but it's actually a survival mechanism. A survival
mechanism? Yeah. Shedding the Lee Bannon name
wasn't a PR stunt. When you achieve massive success
at a young age, and he specifically points out
he was 17 when he made some of that foundational
music. Yeah. The market expects you to freeze
in time. Oh, sure. They want what they know.
Exactly. The audience, the critics, the labels,
they all want you to act as a vending machine,
just dispensing the exact same dopamine hit that
made you famous in the first place. They want
the drum and bass they already know they like.
Precisely. For Warmsley, the name Lee Bannon
had morphed from a brand into a cage. If he tried
to release a weird ambient noise album under
the name Lee Bannon, the audience would reject
it. Not because it was bad, but because it wasn't
drum and bass. Right, because it violated their
expectations. By literally killing off the persona,
declaring himself not Bannon, he was giving himself
psychological permission to fail. Wow. He was
insulating himself from the expectations of his
teenage years. It's really the only way a creator
can return to a state of total unapologetic experimentation.
You listening to this right now, think about
the one thing you are most known for at work
or even in your friend group, you know, the thing
people rely on you for. Now imagine the sheer
terror of walking into a room tomorrow and declaring
you will never ever do that thing again. It's
a huge leap. That is the cliff edge Warmsley
jumped off, and by the summer of 2015, that freefall
settles into a brand new moniker entirely, which
is Betta Cain Cut. Which brings us to the actual
mechanics of the music. Because, you know, dropping
a name is just a PR move unless you actually
change the sonic palette. And the geography of
how he built this new sound is just as disjointed.
He actually started the early recording for this
project way back in December 2014 in his personal
studio in Brooklyn. Oh, right, when it was tentatively
titled ANA. Yeah, exactly. But... He hits pause
on it to finish up some final Lee Bannon obligations.
When he finally resumes recording under the new
Dedekind Cut identity in 2015, he doesn't go
back to the Brooklyn studio. He travels to Dublin,
Ireland. Yeah. He sets up in the Gresham Hotel
and gets to work. Which is brilliant. Changing
your physical environment is a classic method
for breaking cognitive loops. I mean, you can't
make the same old music if you aren't looking
at the same old four walls. Here's where it gets
really interesting for me. The shift in the actual
genre is staggering. We're talking about a producer
known for highly structured, fast -paced rhythmic
EDM. And he completely pivots. Completely. Into
new age, ambient, and harsh noise. It's like
a famous architect who used to build perfectly
structured skyscrapers, suddenly deciding to
build houses entirely out of fog and glass. That's
a great analogy. He's painting with textures
instead of drawing lines. But how do you actually
engineer that in a studio? Well, you had to fundamentally
change your tools. Like you said with the architect,
you cannot build a fog bank using a hammer and
nails. Right. The source notes that Warmsley
leaned heavily on a piece of software called
Max developed by Cycling 74. I saw that in the
article but what does that actually mean? Is
it just a different recording program like Pro
Tools or something? Not at all. A standard digital
audio workstation or DAW gives you a timeline
and a grid. You place a kick drum on beat one,
a snare on beat two, you have total control.
Max is completely different. It is a visual programming
language. Instead of placing audio on a timeline,
you were patching together virtual cables to
create custom algorithms. Wait, algorithms? For
music? Yeah. Wormsley was building looping rigs
in Macs that generated sound unpredictably. He
was essentially surrendering his direct control
over the rhythm. So he's just letting the software
make some of the decisions for him. He's setting
the parameters and letting the machine breathe.
He also utilized a specific piece of hardware
called the Roland Integra 7 synth module, which
is famous for its incredibly dense, complex sound
modeling. Wow. And importantly, he didn't mix
this alone. He co -produced the album with Al
Carlson. Right, and Carlson is a highly influential
producer in the experimental space. He's known
for his work on Oneutrix Point Never's album
Replica and St. Vincent's Marry Me. Bringing
Carlson into the mix was a crucial architectural
decision. Carlson really understands how to take
these wild algorithmically generated soundscapes
and shape them into something that actually impacts
human emotion. And the music press immediately
recognized how jarring this shift was. The Pitchfork
Review gave successor a very strong 8 .2 out
of 10, and they praised the albums, and I am
obsessed with this phrase, productive discomfort.
Productive discomfort, it's so good. They noted
its willingness to just abruptly crescendo or
screech. to a halt. Another outlet, Tiny Mixtapes,
specifically pointed out that the album places
texture and relationship and sound high above
rhythm and melody. Which is exactly what we were
talking about with the Fog Bank. But hold on,
productive discomfort. Those two words feel like
they shouldn't go together. Usually, discomfort
makes people turn the music off. It does if you're
looking for background music. Right. But productive
discomfort is a vital mechanism for active engagement.
How do you mean? Well, comfort is static. When
a beat is predictable, your brain goes on autopilot.
You stop actually listening. Right, it just becomes
wallpaper. Stepping into productive discomfort,
where a lush synth pad suddenly turns into an
abrasive screech, or where the rhythm completely
drops out and leaves you on a sonic freefall,
that forces the listener's brain to wake up.
It demands your attention. It demands that you
question what you are experiencing. Wormsley
and Carlson weren't just in the studio making
beats. They were engineering sonic environments
that feel alien and unsettling, but ultimately
reward the listener who is willing to sit patiently
in that tension. So we have this new philosophy,
these algorithmic tools, and this goal of creating
tension, but an empty canvas is terrifying. What
actual source material is he feeding into these
looping rigs to create this fog? Because the
list of influences cited for this album reads
like a surrealist mad lib. It really does. The
contrast in his inspirations is arguably the
most fascinating part of the entire project.
In a 2016 interview, Warmsley cited the minimalist
downtown music pioneers, people like Philip Glass,
Steve Reich. OK, that tracks for ambient music.
Right, that makes sense. But then he explicitly
cites 90s New Age markers. We are talking about
Yanni. With Yanni. Yes. Yanni's track, One Man's
Dream. The quintessential mall kiosk relaxation
music. Exactly. He also cites Moby's 1995 track,
When It's Cold, I'd Like to Die, and even Michael
Creech's project Enigma, specifically the massive
global hit Return to Innocence. Oh, wow. And
just to make sure the blender is fully broken,
he was heavily influenced by the English experimental
group Coil, who are known for very dark, industrial,
sometimes abrasive sounds. So you have classical
minimalism colliding with highly commercialized
90s new age, colliding with aggressive experimental
noise. My question is, how does someone combine
yanny and harsh industrial noise without it just
sounding like a garbage disposal? Because he
isn't copying their song structures. He's extracting
their sonic textures. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, Warmsley is treating his influences
as raw decoupled tools he coupled yeah he might
take the emotional swelling resonance of an enigma
synth patch strip away the pop melody and the
catchy drum beat and just stretch that single
chord out for three minutes until it becomes
an imposing wall of sound He's removing the context
of the original genres. Oh, speaking of context,
we cannot forget the French composer Eric Sadie.
Sadie, right? Sadie had this avant -garde concept
way back in the early 20th century called furniture
music. The idea was to compose music that was
specifically designed not to be actively listened
to. It was supposed to blend into the background
noises of a room, like a chair or a table. Yeah,
exactly. Wormsley said this directly inspired
the piano part at the very end of the album's
track 46 .50. turning it up with noise and turning
it down with ambiance. But the Sadie influence
didn't just stay in the music. It bled out into
the real world. When Warmsley announced the album,
he didn't drop a standard line of t -shirts or
hoodies. He released limited edition yoga and
meditation mats. Wow. Taking the concept of furniture
and physical environmental interaction quite
literally. And the actual release strategy is
where the absolute madness peaks. This album
was officially set to release on November 11th,
2016. But on November 9th, two days early, he
executes a move I am still struggling to wrap
my head around. He streams the entire B -side
of the album on Wikipedia. Yes. And the unused
bonus tracks, which have these incredibly cryptic
titles like Ayahuasca, Binary, Zero, Ten Zero.
He doesn't put those on Spotify or Apple Music.
He dumps them on Mediafire. Mediafire. Yeah.
For those who don't remember, Mediafire is just
a bare bones file hosting drop site. It's where
you used to go to download sketchy zip files
in 2008. So streaming on an encyclopedia site.
dropping files on MediaFire, selling yoga mats.
Was this album rollout just a giant, pretentious
piece of performance art? It's easy to dismiss
it as a gimmick, but look at the mechanism of
what he's actually doing. It is an exercise in
context framing. Context framing. Wormsley knew
that if he put this slow, beatless, uncomfortable
album onto a standard streaming platform, people
would consume it with a pop music mindset. They
would listen for 30 seconds, realize there was
no drop, and skip to the next artist. They treat
it like Lee Bannon music and get mad. Exactly.
But by placing his music on Wikipedia, a website
your brain associates with deep reading, research,
and patience, he is forcefully shifting your
psychological state before you even hear the
first note. Oh, that is brilliant. He is forcing
you, the audience, to completely reevaluate how
and where art is consumed. He's taking the music
out of the commercial pipeline where music is
treated as a disposable product and placing it
in spaces meant for deep meditation or factual
archiving or raw data transfer in the case of
MediaFire. It short circuits your standard consumption
habits. That is the real aha moment here. If
you want people to engage deeply with your work,
sometimes you don't just change the work itself.
You have to radically alter the environment where
you deliver it. Spot on. So we've seen the metamorphosis
from the cage of Lebanon. algorithmic texture
-heavy method in the studio, and we've seen the
wildly disruptive Wikipedia rollout. How do we,
as listeners, actually sit down and process a
40 -minute and 56 -second album that actively
refuses to be put in a box? Well, even the professional
critics grappled with that exact question. They
really did. There's a review from a publication
called The Drainage. They gave the album a very
high 8 .4 out of 10, but the reviewer expressed
some real palpable skepticism about the album
constantly hovering between several different
genres. Which is a completely natural human reaction
to having your expectations subverted for 40
minutes. And the reviewers quote perfectly captures
the duality of this record. He wrote that the
album hovering between genres shows off Warmsley's
taste and creative dexterity but he says this
album is bound to be perceived as a quote what
the f is going on Eric Andre show set. That analogy
is so incredibly sharp. So what does this all
mean for you listening right now? I think that
Eric Andre Show Comparison unlocks the whole
project. If you've ever seen that television
show, at first glance, it looks like utter destructive
chaos. The host is literally screaming, breaking
his own desk with a baseball bat, and the celebrity
guests are terrified. It looks like a mess. Right.
It looks totally unhinged. But if you look closely
at the editing, the pacing, and the camera work,
it is actually a highly orchestrated, painstakingly
produced comedic performance. The chaos isn't
an accident. The chaos is the point. Oh, I see.
Data Can Cut took all these disparate pieces,
the algorithmic loops, the harsh noise, the yanny
synths, the Wikipedia drops, and orchestrated
a masterpiece of intentional, organized chaos.
And the broader community agreed. Pitchfork named
it among the best experimental albums of 2016.
Tiny Mixtapes ranked at number 17 and The Vinyl
Factory put it at number 5. Which are huge accolades.
They really are. And this raises an important
question for everyone listening to this deep
dive. Where in your own life or your own career
are you demanding neat easily digestible melodies
when you should actually be exploring complex
textures. That is a great question to ask. We
live in a society that is desperate for labels
and categories. Lee Bannon was a highly profitable
category, but dedicated cut is a texture. Sometimes
being truly well -informed or truly innovative
in your field means you have to sit comfortably
in the gray areas between defined boundaries.
You have to embrace the productive discomfort.
Exactly. That same productive discomfort that
warms Lee chased all the way to a hotel room
in Dublin. You have to be willing to be thoroughly
confused in order to actually learn something
new. You have to let the desk get smashed, so
to speak. So to wrap up this incredible journey,
we've followed Fred Wormsley as he burned down
his successful persona, isolated himself, embraced
visual programming over traditional beats, blended
minimalist classical with 90s New Age, and dropped
a sonic puzzle onto an encyclopedia website just
to force us to pay attention. It is a profound
testament to the courage required for true reinvention.
It really is. Thank you for coming on this intellectual
and musical exploration with us today. It's been
a fascinating deep dive. But before we let you
go, I want to leave you with one final lingering
mystery from the source material that we haven't
even touched on yet. Oh, there's more. There
is. If you look at the track listing for Side
A of Successor, there is a track, Track 3, titled
Conversation with Angels. It's an eight and a
half minute epic. But what is truly wild about
this track is the writing credits. The list of
collaborators is staggering for an album that
is supposed to be about personal isolation. Exactly.
The track credits Fred Wormsley, Chino Moby,
who was instrumental in bringing the album to
a label, Al Carlson, Mason Youngblood, and Joshua
Davis. Now, if you know anything about electronic
music history, Joshua Davis is the legendary
producer DJ Shadow. Right. He is arguably one
of the founding fathers of instrumental hip hop.
Having his fingerprint on this track is massive.
So I want you to ponder this paradox in an album
born entirely from an artist wanting to isolate
himself, an artist wanting to brutally sever
ties with his commercial past and strike out
on a completely solo, unpredictable journey.
Why does the centerpiece track of the entire
album require five different brilliant minds
to write it? Are these diverse collaborators?
DJ Shadow, Carlson, Amobe, Youngblood. Are they
the very angels the title is referring to? I
encourage you to seek out track three, Conversation
with Angels, and decode the textures for yourself.
Think about what actually happens when you erase
the whiteboard of your past. Sometimes you don't
end up drawing alone at all. Sometimes clearing
the board just makes room for a completely different
kind of collaboration. Until next time.