Experimental music often pushes at the edges of the unlistenable: the assaultive skronk of free jazz, the relentless, undifferentiated roar of harsh noise wall, the breakneck ceiling-fan-to-the-face tempos of death metal. Across genres and traditions, artists work toward the same goal: creating sound worlds so intolerably loud and dissonant that listeners collapse with their brains oozing from every orifice in their skulls.
“A really important part of this project is this idea of sensory overload,” Kaplan says. “Not just with the amount of content that’s being blasted at you, but the length of the album—it’s important for us that the album is a kind of a transportive marathon listening session. It’s meant to push you into the furthest zone possible.”
The collective endurance experiment that our culture conducts with its approach to Christmas music has begun earlier and earlier over the years—the holly jollies and inescapable bells routinely begin on Thanksgiving. For Kaplan and Allison, creating It’s Christmas Time! involved submitting to holiday cheer even sooner. They started the project early in the fall, and Kaplan says that when he woke up to snow on Halloween after working on Christmas music all night, he thought he’d somehow slept through several months. “One major side effect of the Christmas album is deep temporal confusion for both of us,” Allison says.
