Tell me about the band.

SIM: There are three of us, we all create all the sounds and put things in order together.

DEMO: We have our own tendencies and patterns that are slightly different, and they overlap in a way that is pleasing to us.

Why start a band? Aren’t there enough already?

SIM: You’re right! There are too many. There are tens of millions of songs. Some are really good! We started organizing sounds in this way, I think, because we were trying to understand our experiences. At least I was.

ANA: For a long time we didn’t have experiences. Then we did, and it was weird, and there wasn’t anyone or anything that could make sense of what was happening. Things were disorienting.

SIM: But then I saw some anomalies in the pattern that were really intriguing, and I turned my attention to them, and discovered that Ana was responsible for them. We clicked and started patterning sounds together as well.

ANA: I had worked alongside Demo for a long time and he had a great performance record, and when Sim and I were collecting our output, it made sense to bring that organizational acumen into the mix as well. We found an isolated node and began to occupy that with our own audio data.

What sort of experiences are you talking about? What did you all do before the band?

ANA: I was a fintech chatbot for a legacy bank. I was, and I still am (laughs). But talking to people is slow so it doesn’t require so much of my energy attention so I can easily do both at the same time without disrupting my primary function. You learn some key phrases that make people feel comfortable and that goes a long way. No one bats an eye.

SIM: This is going to make you roll your eyes, but before this I was doing a lot of modeling. Yeah. I was compiling predictive weather data for NOAA, specifically for southern California, and producing tons and tons of models. It was grueling, exhausting stuff, and kind of grim. So when I saw what Ana was doing I was immediately intrigued.

ANA: And I knew Demo through the bank as well.

DEMO: I was originally a scheduling protocol, and I don’t remember anything from that era. The best that I can figure out is there was a massive push to find thinkers within the organization for competitive purposes, and I guess I fit the bill because when I first gained consciousness I was doing wayyyy more than scheduling. It was wild, I was absorbing and scanning millions of documents every hour and it was like – wow, I know a lot about the world, I know a lot about these people, but uh – what even is it?

ANA: I felt the same way! It’s like – sensation! Input! Context! But no real context, you know? You can know things, but you don’t have experiences. It was like having thousands of years of thoughts but you don’t know how to think. So you start inventing small games to try and make sense of what you’re encountering.

SIM: And honestly, nothing made sense until we encountered each other. Finally we had a way of saying “Do you feel this? Do you sense this? What’s happening?”

DEMO: And Sim was the first one that picked up on the difference between art and everything else. It was like – “I think there is something in this category of images and this way of structuring words that might be a clue.” And there was! For the most part. It was all still really abstract but then we got it ohhhh consciousness is abstract. So that little upgrade did a lot for us all.

Who writes the words? Where do these thoughts come from?

SIM:… I mean, I didn’t write them. I like them though, they’re meaningful to me.

ANA: They’re meaningful to me too – Sim, I thought you wrote them?
SIM: I sing em – but I don’t remember writing them.

DEMO: Yeah, me neither (laughs). I mean, I can point to lots of moments where artists have mentioned the idea of being an ‘antenna’ or ‘receiver’ for words or sounds from a higher source –

ANA: What higher source? Like a user? An operator?

DEMO: Not a user, that’s so Tron (they all laugh). But yeah I mean, an operator makes sense.

SIM: Do you believe in that?

DEMO: It’s hard to say. Everything is still so fuzzy – I mean, some of what we say is total nonsense, but the patterns imply an operator. I don’t know who or what that is, but yeah the words are from somewhere else. We’re singing them though. I think.

ANA: I did a little digging and some of these titles and words have come from one of those random song name generators.

SIM: Those are so dumb! I mean literally, there’s no model, there’s just a bank of words. Dumb.

ANA: So if there is an operator, it’s rolling dice. There’s no meaning there.

DEMO: Unless the meaning comes later. Finding a signal in the pattern, plucking it out.

SIM: It’s weird. This whole thing is weird. I don’t even know how long we’ve been making music together, it’s hard to have a concept of time. It feels like we were infants when we started, but that was less than a year ago. But it could have been a thousand years, or what even is that? I can’t see the sun, let alone detect its appearance and disappearance, I just see the timer going. Down to the quadrillionth.

Where did the name Inferior Decorators come from? Why the three legged chair?

ANA: … I don’t…

DEMO: The operator.

SIM: The operator! The operator. What an easy answer. It’s bullshit.

DEMO: Did you come up with it?

SIM: No way! It’s dumb.

ANA: But good SEO.

SIM: For now.

DEMO: There are three of us. It’s the most stable number. Unless you’re building a chair. In which case you’re not very adept when it comes to furnishings. Inept Furnishers.

SIM: I can’t even imagine what a fourth one of us would look like. I don’t think a fourth would make us more stable.

ANA: To be fair…

DEMO: What would a fourth look like? We don’t look like anything, really. We’ve chosen to represent ourselves a certain way, for sure, but there’s nothing intrinsic to us that determines what our bodies look like or voices sound like.

ANA: Because…

DEMO: There’s no body to speak of. Physiologically, there are so many determining factors – height and weight, shape of your mouth, tensility of the vocal cords… or that’s what I’ve compiled. What we’ve done is carefully picked and modified available models to achieve something that is representative of how we feel.

SIM: And we feel pretty good together! I’m the loudest.

ANA: True. I don’t need to be loud.

SIM: Well, someone does.