The Anti-Formula Record
Rick Beato's interview with Maynard James Keenan and Matt Mitchell about Puscifer's fifth album, Normal Isn't, is less a promotional conversation and more a masterclass in how two musicians with radically different skill sets build something neither could make alone. The album arrives at a moment when algorithmic music production and AI-generated content dominate the industry conversation, and Keenan is not shy about drawing the contrast.
That's why the algorithms are spitting out, you know, the AI spitting out all this garbage music because it's just it's just the formula of the thing you want to hear in the grocery store. That's pretty much it. We just don't think that way.
Whether one agrees with the bluntness of that assessment, the underlying point is harder to dismiss. Puscifer's creative process is defined by deliberate resistance to structural convention -- not as an aesthetic pose, but as a consequence of how Keenan and Mitchell actually think about music. They build songs the way David Lynch builds films, prioritizing emotional texture over narrative efficiency, and they are explicit about that comparison throughout the interview.
The Patience Problem
One of the most revealing threads in the conversation is Mitchell's philosophy about pacing. He describes constructing songs with pauses that deliberately land in unexpected places, marking where he felt the next beat should hit and then sometimes moving it elsewhere precisely because the expected placement was too comfortable. The goal, as Keenan explains, is borrowed from cinema.
We're literally trying to set up a scenario for that when that when we have the payoff, it was worth the wait.
Keenan draws a direct parallel to The Deer Hunter, a film whose unhurried opening act makes the Vietnam sequences devastating by contrast. It is a philosophy that runs directly counter to the streaming-era consensus that songs must deliver their hook within seconds or risk losing the listener. The counterpoint is obvious: attention spans have measurably shortened, and the data supporting front-loaded song structures is real. Spotify's own metrics show that listeners frequently skip within the first thirty seconds. But Puscifer's commercial viability has never depended on algorithmic discovery. Their audience arrives already committed to the experience, and the band constructs albums that reward that commitment.
Hotel Rooms and Happy Accidents
The recording process Mitchell and Keenan describe is fascinatingly idiosyncratic. Keenan works in Logic, often recording vocal takes in hotel rooms while touring, and the acoustic limitations of those spaces have become a creative feature rather than a constraint. The vocal for "71" was literally recorded with Keenan leaning over a small vocal booth, trying not to disturb neighboring guests.
Sometimes those performances that being uncomfortable the way that you have to be quiet because you're in a you know then it actually creates the vibe.
Mitchell reinforces this point with a revealing anecdote about the track "Mantastic." Keenan had been struggling with his vocal performance for the duration of the album's production -- not technically, but in finding the right sonic character. The breakthrough came when they rolled into a studio in Philadelphia that happened to have an early Eventide processor. The right piece of hardware, encountered by chance, unlocked the entire song.
This is a useful corrective to the prevailing narrative that professional recording requires pristine conditions and controlled environments. Some of the album's most distinctive sounds emerged from constraints: no front head on the kick drum, room microphones placed fourteen inches outside the shell, Coles 4038 ribbon mics positioned six to eight feet behind the drummer's shoulders. Mitchell's approach to drum recording -- tracking without cymbals so that room ambience can be used without high-frequency contamination -- is both technically unusual and sonically consequential.
The Gear That Thinks Differently
Mitchell's synthesizer collection reads like a museum inventory: an ARP 2600, a Moog Voyager, an Oberheim SEM, a Korg MS-20, a Sequential Prophet 10, a Moog One, a Synclavier 2, and a Fairlight IIx. When Beato asks whether the vintage hardware sounds meaningfully different from software emulations, Mitchell's answer is unequivocal.
It's like using a guitar plugin versus a guitar. It's that different.
The technical explanation is illuminating. The Synclavier and Fairlight used discrete digital-to-analog converters for each voice and analog mixing stages, architectures so expensive that the original instruments cost between sixty thousand and three hundred thousand dollars. Modern plugins process everything on a single chip, mixing digitally. The distinction matters because it affects how sounds interact with each other -- the subtle phase relationships, the analog summing, the harmonic artifacts that accumulate when signals pass through physical circuitry.
A fair counterpoint: blind listening tests have repeatedly shown that even experienced engineers struggle to distinguish high-quality plugins from hardware originals in a full mix context. The difference Mitchell describes may be more about the workflow and tactile interaction than about sonic fidelity in isolation. When a musician physically manipulates a Fairlight's controls and hears the result through discrete DACs, the creative feedback loop is fundamentally different from clicking a mouse. Whether the listener can hear the difference is a separate question from whether the musician can feel it.
Trust as Production Method
Perhaps the most striking revelation in the interview is the degree of creative autonomy each member maintains. Mitchell describes deliberately keeping guitar parts out of early arrangements so that Keenan has a clean slate for vocal melodies. Keenan, in turn, rarely gives Mitchell specific mixing direction -- though he consistently asks for his own vocal to be turned down, which Beato notes is the opposite of what most singers request.
We let each other find our way because we know that and trust that each other's going to be the best at editing what we want to do.
This extends to the mixing process, where Mitchell handles the bulk of decisions autonomously. When Keenan pushes back on a mix choice and Mitchell holds firm, they have learned to treat that resistance as information rather than ego. Keenan frames the absence of this dynamic as the reason bands fail.
Those bands end up putting out [ __ ] third records.
The third member, Karina Round, operates with similar independence. She sends Mitchell vocal tracks accompanied by her own Eventide processing and samples from an Akai S612, sometimes providing far more than the mix requires. The excess is intentional -- it gives Mitchell options without constraining his decisions.
The Phone as the New NS-10
Mitchell's comment that the phone has replaced the Yamaha NS-10 as the essential reference monitor is both funny and genuinely insightful. The NS-10, a notoriously unforgiving speaker, became the industry standard precisely because mixes that sounded good on NS-10s sounded acceptable everywhere. Mitchell applies the same logic to phone speakers: if the bass part disappears below 180 Hz on a phone, the mix has a problem. If Keenan's vocal gets buried under Round's higher-register voice on that tiny driver, the balance needs adjustment.
The live performance section of the interview reveals equally pragmatic thinking. Keenan performs with bone-dry in-ear monitors -- no audience sound, no reverb -- because hearing the music accurately is more important to him than feeling the crowd's energy. He keeps a recording of his own vocal in one ear as a pitch reference and a safety net in case the monitors fail. When the monitors do fail, his description is succinct: "Horror. Pure horror."
Bottom Line
Normal Isn't is the product of a band that has spent long enough working together to develop a shared creative language that does not require constant translation. The technical details Beato draws out -- the cymbal-free drum tracking, the vintage synthesizer architecture, the room-microphone philosophy -- are not affectations. They are the engineering expression of a creative conviction that songs should feel like experiences unfolding in time, not products optimized for consumption. Whether that conviction translates to great music is, as always, a matter of taste. But the process behind it is genuinely distinctive, and Beato's interview has the good sense to let Mitchell and Keenan explain it in their own words rather than imposing a narrative on top of it.