I appreciate the very kind and thoughtful review from Grayson Currin at Pitchfork, thank you :). I’d like to claim one aspect of the narrative presented, which is that when we first came on to the scene, what set us apart was that the music was so heartfelt, wide-eyed

and sincere - black metal that would make you cry with tearful joy and feel connected to other humans. It was unprecedented (along with our Brooklyn DIY-looking presentation in thrift store streetclothes), and everyone could feel it - we were not just one among

many fledgling USBM bands. And it was this sincerity, not the radical experimentation in the music nor the philosophy, that made the black metal scene recoil. The genre of black metal is literally a safe space for

‘elitist’ people who declare that their music has philosophical meaning and seek to sound challenging (which is a big part of what attracted me to it). The precise moment the metal scene rejected Liturgy was when a metal festival put on YT an interview of me speaking in

my soft and shy way about the affirmative spirit of the music, highlighting my softness and shyness. And it was this same sense of emotional fulfillment in the music that made the non-metal music press hugely interested in Liturgy - Pitchfork, the New York Times,

the New Yorker, the Washington Post. They weren’t totally sure of what to make of us, but it was palpable that there was a window open to us in 2012 for a unique crossover breakout. I just looked at Jayson Greene’s 2011 review of Aesthethica, which is

very positive, even if laced with uneasy comments exemplified best by the tagline: “The world's best hipster black metal band unsurprisingly crafts a great crossover-friendly black metal album.” The idea of being the band they were expecting us to be was something

that *I* recoiled from, because I felt there was a risk of betraying the meaning of the music to a culture industry where complacency is manufactured in the form of familiar superficial emotions, packaged for each new generation with signifiers from some edgy, dangerous

new styles to spice it up (to the detriment of collective agency and personal self-realization). I’m not saying that's all the music industry is or criticizing anyone who works within it or tries to have a smooth career inside of it, I really mean that - people are

good, and are doing their best, and not everyone’s goals are the same. For me, pursuing my authentic vision instead of what would be popular was important in itself, but it was also in the spirit of the emancipatory current I was seeking to remain a part of (what I later

named The Ark Work), to hold a space that is heartfelt, monstrously inventive and receptive to new subjectivities that convention instinctively abhors. I think of this as a space that is neither blue-pilled (conformist-consumerist mind-control) nor

red-pilled (contempt for modernity as such and retreat to even more conformist conventions). I would never expect either the music industry or the black metal scene to fully embrace a project like this, because it is alien to the cultural logic of both domains,

neither of which I see as enemies, but both of which I see as *materials* that I’m interacting with, rather than discursive spaces in which I’m seeking a place. And thats why I think the critical re-evaluation of Liturgy was only really possible because I was able to

begin speaking for myself on Twitter and YouTube, in spaces where it’s not totally clear who’s in charge. Obviously the ongoing disintegration of the mainstream media’s hegemony has mostly benefitted right wing voices like Joe Rogan, for whom unfortunately

everything that is *good* about secular liberalism is thrown out and replaced by conservative sophistry. In my opinion that’s why hard-hitting critical philosophy is so important in this space. To some extent this can be found in breadtube and the urbanomicsphere, though

neither domain is open to the combination of God-consciousness and civil rights that I think is crucial, which a thinker like Cornell West so perfectly emblematizes, though he himself gets unfortunately pigeonholed as a spokesperson about race and class only. In

other words, their is radical philosophical content being produced in this world (by people smarter than me), but it mostly ends up siloed and only able to reach people who’re already interested in it, which is why the music-philosophy-drama synthesis is so important

in my view. This is one of the most important if less intuitive senses in which Origin of the Alimonies is an opera: it’s not just that a story is being told by the album, it’s also for the music to touch people and find a place in the attention economy on its own terms,

and then for the ideas, whether legible or not, to sneak in as well, not in order to influence anyone but on the contrary to perplex people. And I’m happy because that’s what I feel like OotA is more or less doing - and I appreciate the time anyone takes to grapple with it