Emperor X – Unified Field | Album Review
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Emperor X, real name Chad Matheny, is an incredible example of how algorithms fail us. Look anywhere in his discography and be amazed. Uncategorizable, extremely versatile, massively talented, and underplayed. Seriously, you could pick any work from his Bandcamp and be treated to a completely new idea that doubles as a masterclass in DIY music. Until today’s release, my favorite work of Emperor X was his EP on transportation infrastructure improvements, although his 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories was a strong runner-up. If we all lived our lives half as intentionally as this guy does, we very seriously might solve our problems.
In addition to being a long-time musician in the indie-punk-emo-DIY scene, Matheney is an accomplished producer and oversees a jazz club in Berlin. Earlier this year, he produced Brian Sella’s debut solo album (reviewed right here by yours truly), and both bands hit a five-date run of shows together in March. The two originally toured together way back in 2013, laying the groundwork for this rekindling over a decade later. In one final tidbit, when Emperor X and Sella announced their respective albums, they dropped their first singles on the same day. On both LPs, you hear fully actualized artists wielding years of sharpened talent and percolated thought.
Unified Field is devastating, exhilarating, and ultimately hopeful. The majority of the album was written and recorded in Ukraine, spurred by what Emperor X calls an “aesthetic emergency.” In the release announcement, he explains, “I had a strong instinct that the record would come out better, and be more meaningful, if I did it with my friends who also lived their lives under fire.” It’s safe to say that instinct was correct. This album is one of Matheny’s most produced public-facing works and comes at a time when we need clear, strong voices in art and the world.
Before talking about the tracks, we’ve got to talk about the album title. Emperor X says the name “Unified Field” is a loose reference to David Lynch and Transcendental Meditation. It’s important to point out that the album is bookended by songs named “Unified Field” and “Also Unified Field.” In the first, Emperor X brings us into the scope of this work and in the chorus insists “in the unified field / materials collapse / into a unified field / materials collapse.” In the final song, we hear a portion of the opener, but without Emperor X. This last song is the world we leave behind, the echoes of our impact in life.
Matheney uses “unified” in the sense of being globally connected, having a shared future on this planet, and eventually being reduced to the same raw materials. It took me a lot of listens to internalize why that’s important to the album, but ultimately it boils down to the pointlessness of conflict. Seriously, we are more technologically advanced than we’ve ever been before, more “productive” than at any time in human history, and more entertained than at any point in the past. And still, we fight, we militarize borders, and we underreact as we slip into more extreme climate change. To me, that’s what this album is about—that slip, that apathy, that impending destruction. More than that, it’s about the possibility to change, to rally together, and to encourage one another. All of that AND awesome instrumentation—what a bargain.
Photo by Carly Hoskins
When Lynch evoked the idea of a “unified field” in Twin Peaks, it was used to emphasize two things: one was the Greek idea of the muses—revelatory thoughts brought to individuals seemingly from nowhere and nothing, much like Dale Cooper’s sometimes ridiculous investigative methods. The other is the balance of light and dark. Lynch was told by a “scientist” that these concepts are intrinsically related to quantum fluctuations in a field permeating the universe, which anyone can reach through meditation courses at the low, low introductory price of $1,000. That “scientist” was Dr. Chris Hagelin, who, despite having serious mathematical proficiency and a legitimate work history, believes you can literally connect your mind to this field and influence the world by meditating. What Emperor X is singing about is something different. You can tell because the refrain “In the unified field / materials collapse” uses some language that doesn’t appear in Lynch’s public remarks.
Right about here, I should mention I’m graduating with my Ph.D. in experimental particle physics this fall. In popular culture, when someone says “The Unified Field,” they’re typically referring to a theory of everything, i.e., a single equation that governs all fundamental particles. That’s what Transcendental Meditation is about: paying some bizarre company to teach you how to connect your mind to that equation. If you can’t tell from my tone, that equation doesn’t exist, and they’re using scientific language to grift.
The idea of everything coming together is beautiful and has broad artistic license, but it is extremely difficult to test. If you want some more science background, you can check out my blog post here. The part of that artistic license that Emperor X is using is indistinguishability (unification) at high energy. At the end of “Feeling Nothing,” we get the line “hold my hand as we vaporize / feeling nothing.” This preoccupation with destruction and technology is interwoven with religion, responsibility, and citizenship throughout the album. Some examples include: being gifted a religious icon, burning a passport, staring at screens, mistaking radio signals for the voice of god, and on and on.
In the lead single “Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan!” Emperor X uses this fiery energy to call out the zealotry of pseudo-religious churchgoers who unthinkingly rebuke the teachings of their prophet in favor of Reagan’s beliefs. Improvements in technology, such as radio, television, and the internet, have made it easier to spread all kinds of messages, including propaganda. This has led to, among other types of grifters, televangelists running pay-for-salvation models of remote worship. Transcendental Meditation follows this same model, and the main message isn’t for anyone to actually do anything, because, as Emperor X sarcastically sings in an adapted worship song, “my feelings bear the weight of moral sanction / and that all we have to do / is praise Jesus, spread the gospel.”
An important component of Emperor X’s presentation is his sense of humor, found in the mocking guitars of “Ostrich Toss,” the premise of “Pissing with the Flashlight On,” and the browser game accompanying “Superbus.” I personally can’t get further than the WFMU stage, but I keep trying because I love the lo-fi instrumental version of the song that plays in the game. In the actual song, I’m like 90% sure the piano you hear at the end of Superbus is the exact same one used at the end of Well I Mean. Together with “Cybertruck,” these songs transition the album from religion into technology and the human cost of it all.
SCREENSHOT OF SUPERBUS GAMEPLAY
On “A Mouthful of Increasingly-Dangerous Substances,” we get drowned in two ways. First by ever-stronger toxins, and then by rising water levels. None of this should be easy to swallow, yet year after year, we let glaciers melt and sea levels rise. In some ways, climate change would be easier to deal with if it weren’t so gradual. If the water weren’t boiling so slowly, maybe more of us would try to hop out of the pot.
Emperor X describes tracking this song while vacationing in the Netherlands: “In idle moments, I found myself imagining what creeping sea level rise in a country that has always been half underwater would bring, and I began to believe with both hope and nausea that humans would adapt. There will be chaos and death along the coastlines and in the floodplains, but also something like a new normal in the lucky places that were prepared with bikes, dykes, windmills, and power pylons that could absorb the impact of the rising brine.”
The hope and nausea that Emperor X describes are evident across the whole album. It’s difficult to see how bad climate change has already gotten and to know how much worse it will get if nothing changes. But what do you do with this knowledge? Who do you turn to? How do you put this anger into something that makes the world better? The rising lake in this song connects very neatly to the stock market in the following track, because market output is currently directly connected to global warming (thank you, industrial revolution and data centers).
Photo by Akhil Kodamanchili
“Line Go Up Line Go Down” is a biting, scathing, acid-boring critique of all of us, everyone. Everything in the world could fall apart tomorrow, and half of the American public would still try to go to the office. This track perfectly captures the public apathy at our own destruction, guided by the waxing and waning of the stock market. “To the middle of the Earth,” we will let business leaders destroy the world if it seems to be the will of the market. As a U.S. public, we are too polite. France whips our ass at protesting, and it’s because their government understands that its people hold the power, not corporations. We—you and I personally—need to shout as loud as Emperor X. This is the answer to the question asked in the previous song. We are not powerless, “not me, not her, and not you.”
Following up that political dirge with a palette cleanse, "Ostrich Toss” is my favorite track on the album. Silly as it may seem on first pass, if you pay attention to the dialogue, it’s not really lighthearted at all. The song starts with roommates bickering about climate change and has a really cute mocking guitar in the chorus: “If you’re so mad, what are you gonna do about it?” Among the roommates’ escalating aggressions, one brings an ostrich home, and the other throws it off the roof. A week later, we realize the ostrich is the main character, setting a car on fire and driving the two terrified roommates together. The best lines of the album are “THE THINGS YOU BUILD ARE USELESS / AND THE THINGS YOU BURN ARE GOOD / YOU PUT YOUR FAITH IN CONCRETE / WHEN THE WORLD IS MADE OF WOOD.” The all-caps come from the liner notes, giving the ostrich the voice of an almighty entity as opposed to an animal, because it’s a stand-in for Mother Nature. We talk about global warming as though it will end the world, but really, all it will end is human civilization. The Earth does not care whether you, I, or any society lives to see tomorrow, and one can easily view global warming as the Earth sweating out an infection. In the infinite complexity of the natural world, the ostrich says, “I CHOOSE NOT TO DESTROY YOU / I CAN SEE THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT / AND MY FORGIVENESS WILL ANNOY YOU / SO I FORGIVE YOU / FUCK YOU / FUCK YOU.”
This album makes me feel cataclysm and optimism. Despite this, I don’t hear any alarmism in Unified Field, just an honest artistic reaction to a heating world straining under “market forces.” There is as much global conflict today as there was during World War II. Part of this album is a relief valve for the frustration of waking up to new conflicts, new propaganda, and new lost futures. The other part is hope—the hope that we, as a species, are smart enough to read the past and predict the future. If we keep going like this, destruction is our future, but we have the choice for something else. And it is as simple as a choice. I’m not saying quit your job, abandon your family, or sell everything and find a bunker. I’m saying make a choice to do good in your community. The only control we have is in our communities, so you damn sure better be using it. Emperor X has been leading his own revolution for decades, and this album is an invitation to start yours.
Braden Allmond is a particle physicist and emo music enthusiast. He anticipates graduating from KSU in December with his Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics. When he isn’t writing his thesis, he’s data-scraping articles and books about emo music, making tables and graphs to interrogate and understand the genre.
