“Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution,” from Father John Misty‘s Pure Comedy, is a post-apocalyptic fable set against an arrangement of piano and stormy orchestra. Like much of the album, it derives power from a tension between the bleakness of its subject matter and the beauty of the music itself. For the official remix, Josh Tillman hooked up with a producer whose ear for sonic detail equals his own, but whose aesthetic goals are very different. The British musician Bobby Krlic, better known as the Haxan Cloak, creates rich and alienating textures that draw equally from 21st-century club music and the thumping, shrieking sound design of modern horror films. Accordingly, Krlic’s remix strips “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know…” of much of its musical irony, placing Tillman’s words in a frightful landscape much like the post-civilizational world they describe. Hear it below, with a new video from director Matthew Daniel Siskin.
