Few artists in the music industry are as busy as Keith Rankin. Not only is Keith a part of the legendary vaporwave outfit death's dynamic shroud, but he also releases solo work under the moniker Giant Claw. He also is the co-founder of the record label Orange Milk Records. Keith's musical and visual contributions helped shape the current landscapes of vaporwave and plunderphonics.

Part of what keeps Keith so busy is that he is constantly working on music for the NUWRLD Mixtape Club over on Bandcamp. Every month the group releases a new album exclusively for members of the club. That means Keith is constantly making new music, on top of running a label, on top of also working on solo material. It blows my mind that he even found time to do this interview with me.

Keith just released Decadent Stress Chamber back in July, under the Giant Claw moniker. This album is a bit of a pivot for Giant Claw as it is much more pop-centric than anything released previously under the name.

Keith sat down with TND's Wade Stokan for a conversation, following a brief chat they had shared once before. They discussed anime and social media. Once they began the interview, they discussed a myriad of things – anime, social media, Charli XCX, monoculture, sampling, DIY, and more.

This interview has been lightly edited by clarity and length.

Wade @ TND: I want to start with anime, since that's sort of where we left off when we last spoke, and I think it's appropriate to discuss with you of all people! I think you told me you were rewatching something? Or reading something?

Keith Rankin: I think I recommended you Sonny Boy. That was the most recent one that I watched that had me like "this is one of my favorites of all time." It had been a while since that happened. I was weaned on 90s anime. I still watch a lot of new stuff! I feel like kind of an old person when it comes to anime. I have nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s, so I've got a love/hate relationship with it. There's so much isekai slop now. It's interesting, anime almost reminds me social media. It seems like every show is trying to hook you in as quickly as possible.

Yeah if it's not grabbing you right away you'll just keep scrolling.

They're using these tactics that are like... power fantasy stories. They're trying to latch onto your lizard brain to keep you interested. But Sonny Boy really hit the spot for me. How about you? Where was your start with anime?

I watched a ton of anime as a kid. But it was mostly the same few shows over and over again. I was really into Dragon Ball Z. I've got the DVD box set of the complete series somewhere. I loved Cardcaptors too! I had a bunch of VHS tapes of Cardcaptors as a kid, and I remember watching those all the time. I was just really into Japanese culture. I don't know how much older you are than me, but at my age it was very hard to skip that, given where internet culture was at the time.

I think I'm ten years older than you, I'm like 40. We both caught a bit of that generation where it was "pre-internet" or I guess super early internet, when we were younger. I was on Ebay as a kid getting bootleg Dragon Ball Z DVDs. It was a completely different era.

Torrenting was also such a big thign then. And still, I'm always hearing about albums getting leaked early and artists responding to that. Is that something you have to worry about with Giant Claw or death's dynamic shroud?

Nah! For artists like us, I feel like we're the ones who are going to leak our own album. At this level, the exposure outweighs the negative of winding up on a private torrent site somewhere!

I feel like the digital aesthetic of the Orange Milk catalogue kind of lends itself to being leaked on the internet. I feel like it leans into that overall vibe.

Remember that Charli XCX album that got leaked? It might have been XCX World? Early versions got leaked and she scrapped the whole album. It also happened to Jai Paul! I've always been interested in that mindset of scrapping albums due to early leaks. That's just insane to me. The initial impact of an album being so important to you that you feel the need to scrap the entire project – it's crazy to me. If the Jai Paul situation happened now, would it still be a massive issue? Or is that just a bygone era – caring so much about the initial impact.

I only really got into Charli during the pandemic, but now I'm a diehard fan. I definitely missed out on that era. Have you listened to BRAT?

Oh yeah! I am a longtime fan of Charli.

I just think it's so cool seeing where she's at now compared to just a few years ago. Considering the circles she was in, it's crazy to see her get as big as she got.

I imagine there's gotta be a bit of a nightmare aspect of it, too. Getting so massive out of nowhere and having so many eyes on you when you were a much smaller artist for a while. It's very cool to see her make that shift, but I can't even imagine the impact that would have had on her. It's funny... when BRAT first came out, I remember listening to it and thinking... "it's good... but I kind like CRASH more than BRAT." It wasn't until later that I went back and listened to CRASH for the first time in a while and realized "wow... CRASH fucking sucks."

Okay let's finally talk about you. You mentioned the concept of "all of a sudden tons of eyes on you," and I've been dying to ask you this question. I feel like you must have gone through something similar, because you worked on death's dynamic shroud's I'll Try Living Like This. That album has become such a major part of the terminally online music nerd zeitgeist and many people consider it to be a staple work in the vaporwave canon. What's it like being attached to something that has made such an impact on the music scene?

It's weird. It definitely leaves your zone of reality, if that makes sense. It made me realize from a musical standpoint that almost any album could achieve that level of "cult status." It's equal parts music itself but also place and time, there's just so many factors beyond you – where the culture's at and stuff. When I see people talk about the album, it really feels like it's something I didn't even make. It's like they're talking about somebody else's work. It's bizarre. Like, I'm still broke. Economically, I'm still in the same situation I was back then. It's almost like money is the way we measure our rung of social status, so internally it doesn't feel like much. Maybe if this was the 80s or 90s and you had a cult album, you could probably afford a house or something, I don't know.

It's like that band, Klaatu. I'm pretty sure they all made a ton of money despite being a few nobodies.

I have no clue what Klaatu is. Who is that?

They were this band in the 70s and people were convinced that they were actually The Beatles in disguise, basically. There was a YouTube video essay about them and it kind of blew them up a few years back. But back in the 70s, people were dead-certain it was them, and there was uproar about it. Even now I've read people online say things like "did you know John Lennon and Paul McCartney had another band?" Some people clearly only read the title of the video and ran with it.

I can't believe I've never heard of this band! I guess that's how misinformation starts though. I've actually had to deal with quite a bit of that sort of thing with Giant Claw and DDS. The way we operate is way different than other groups. It's not just one album a year with a release cycle. Casual fans are always deeply confused, just constantly like "what the fuck is going on with this group?" We're constantly releasing mixtapes – people who are fans of me sometimes have no clue I'm in death's dynamic shroud. I guess it's just the general lack of context on social media has been the cause of all this.

Well if Ariana Grande drops a new album, her face is on the cover. You guys don't really have your personal images attached to your work. Is that something that means anything to you?

I think there's a few different kinds of people who do what I do. I'm not the type that enjoys that kind of attention. I feel like some people relish in that attention. There might be a piece of them they feel is missing and that attention fills the void in them. I've talked to so many artists about this... someone like Machine Girl, just talking about how the more fans they got the more hate comes in. Can I really handle that? My mind is still completely undecided. Some people are just better equipped and have thicker skin, or are predisposed to being able to handle that attention. On the topic of social media, I think everyone is sort of experiencing this a little bit. If you're active in social spaces, you have the potential to get this nebulous attention that most people will never experience. If it's toxic attention, it can really fuck you up.

I think the way you talk about social media is so interesting, because I think it really shows up in your sound. I remember the first time I listened to I'll Try Living Like This, 10 years ago when I was in college. I remember thinking that it sounded like music that will be made in a time when we're all floating in pods – you don't go outside anymore, oxygen gets pumped into your pod, etc. I almost thought it sounded like a post-social media era – Jetsons-esque. But obviously here we are, 10 years later, nothing's changed, the world's falling apart.

As I've gotten more time away from that album, I start to see it as kind of being about where we are now in the world – you know, the technological exploitation era of the world. You can see it through the frame of K-Pop on the album. Looking at the K-Pop industry through the samples on the album – you can see how exploitative and manipulative that industry is. I don't know... these undercurrents that have come to a head. It's like the corrupting power of industry, as filtered through pop music on that album, and y'know, a lot of my work, too.

I want to ask about the new album, Decadent Stress Chamber. The new record is WAY more pop-centric than any of the other Giant Claw albums.

Oh for sure, for sure!

We talked about Charli, and I've got a good idea about where your pop proclivities are. What inspired this sound and this direction? How did you wind up at the final product?

A lot of my music is focusing on musical forms and seeing if they can be removed from the economic pit they've been birthed in, if that makes any sense at all. It's like the thing with K-Pop. I try to take these different sample sources and see how the music can stretch and contract in different settings. That was the conceit of a lot of early vaporwave – if you slow down pop music it suddenly become this new reality with all these new textures. That mindset is at the core of a lot of the music I make. The new album started while I was doing the death's dynamic shroud Mixtape Club. There's three members of DDS, and we basically would do an album each month, rotating between the three of us. So I'm making an album every three months, basically.

I don't know how you do it. I've been aware of this mixtape club, but I had no clue that was how you did it. How on earth do you do that?

Surprisingly, I have yet to be truly burnt out. I'm close, I think! The cool thing is that the Mixtape Club was essentially paying my rent. Like, if I wasn't in this situation, I would never, ever do this. But it gives me a fun excuse to explore and make songs, and every now and then I'd be like "oh... I'm putting this song aside for the next Giant Claw, or whatever public album I do next." I recorded a ton of material like that, and that's essentially where the album was birthed.

This is like a huge body of work actually. There's like three or four other albums in the Mixtape Club that are just outtakes from Decadent Stress Chamber. If you like the new album, you should check out Never Really Over and Dream Is Over. Those two have the c-sides and d-sides of Stress Chamber. A lot of those songs even were on the tracklist at one point. I was trying to find songs that had this bittersweet feeling to them. Basically any of those I would set aside.

Given how experimental previous Giant Claw records have been, I feel like this is the first Giant Claw record where you could realistically hear one of the songs on the radio.

It's funny, I've been getting so many TikToks lately of people making fun of avant-garde music, or videos of people at these noise shows mocking them being like "no one listens to this shit." So I was thinking about how music to a lot people isn't viewed in the way that other human studies are viewed. If there's a mathematician or a history buff, that's their main hobby or interest. The more they get into the weeds of things the more they're going to explore. It's the same with musicians! If you're spending all your life doing this, you have to explore, that's what keeps it fun and fresh. It's part of being a fan of music, to me. I think seeing music as this field of human study that not everyone is going to be able to tap into. Most people don't just tap into advance mathematics immediately after they learn long division or whatever. It's not to say that the more fundamental stuff in music isn't valuable, or it's worse. It's just a broad spectrum of experimentation and exploration. Pop music just so happens to be the communal center of most music. That's where the public congeals and relates heavily to each other in terms of music. So the new album is me taking steps consciously into that communal center thinking, "let me play with this."

Not to bring my shit into this, but I feel very similarly when it comes to juggling. There's a joke I heard that said juggling can only result in the juggler's death. If you've already juggled three balls people immediately want you to juggle chainsaws or guns or swords or fire. Like people just want the next thing. In my brain, I'm pretty good at three balls, I wonder what else I can do with three balls. I try to think of things horizontally instead of vertically. I want to be able to stretch of one thing to see just how much juice I can get out of this proverbial fruit.

You get it! Whether it's music, or juggling, or whatever human study, the fun of it is exploring what's possible!

I wanted to ask you about Orange Milk Records. You and Seth Graham founded the label. How did that come to be?

Before I answer, do you know the artist Kate NV? She's on Orange Milk.

I do not!

You should definitely write that down! Her album, Binasu is amazing.

I will definitely be checking this out later.

Amazing artist, amazing album. Anyway! At that time – it was a crazy different time. There was a big resurgence of ambient abstract synthesizer music. The way I look at it is like if the 70s experimental homespun synthesizer music had a second, or maybe third wave in 2010. Maybe the culture of the 70s moved too quickly and people missed out on it then, but all of a sudden we were revisiting it in 2010. There were lots of cool artists in Montreal doing really interesting stuff with DIY tape music. We started the label because we wanted to be part of all of this. We were living in Ohio and we were probably the only two people in Ohio into this sort of stuff. We just kinda self-inserted into this scene... that's what we did. We just released our own stuff. We started asking artists – sundrips from Montreal; Hobo Cubes, also from Montreal – just all these avant-garde synthesizer, kinda bedroom synth DIY stuff. Then it expanded from there.

Did you sort of feel like "oh my god there's people like me out there"?

I think if you're hardcore into art in the Midwest then you've got a built-in sense of isolation, that is just part of your essence in some way. That period of internet exploration really was a healthy connection point to other like-minded scenes. Without any of that, you'd kind of just remain stuck on your own island.

You've been very vocal about supporting the DIY community, and you seem like a very DIY guy yourself.

Well it's always been us packing the records ourselves and shipping things out to people. We do all of the "behind the scenes" stuff. There's always just been way too many records in my apartment and my basement. It's just always been fully DIY.

Is it important to you that you keep it that way?

I think yes. It's funny, when Machine Girl started to get really big, we had a moment of being like... "should we just become the Machine Girl distributor?" And we thought about asking them to maybe lean into that. But then we wound up going the other way, we really wanted to maintain our flexibility and our DIY attitude. We still wanna do 100-copy tape runs and stuff like that. We're almost functioning more like we're in 2012 than we ever have. There's not many labels like us left, most of them have folded because it's kind of just thankless work. It's almost like a lifeline to connecting with other musicians.

As music becomes more and more accessible, do you think the idea of the "underground" scene still exists?

Absolutely! The term has definitely changed its meaning, though. It used to refer to things that might have been harder to access, but obviously that isn't an issue in the current age. There's still pockets of international music that isn't accessible in North America. So there is that frontier for us westerners. I feel like now "underground" just means "music that not many people like," frankly. It's just like outsider music – music that is outside of the consensus mentality of what is "good popular art." As long as there is culture I think this phenomenon will exist. There's going to be the stuff that speaks to the general public, and then the people who exist on the fringes of all that. It's been the cultural architecture of humanity for who knows how long. But that basic mechanism of the cycle of fringe culture getting adopted into popular culture still exists. We're still in that paradigm, but things are changing real quick!

Things move so fast. Charli and Chappell Roan are both huge. But names come and go at rapid speeds. There's always somebody new who's topping the charts.

I've read a lot of people talking about this stuff, the fracturing of culture itself. First off, there are more humans in existence – the global population is ballooning. I feel like modern tech companies want to atomize culture. They want to be able to profit on tiny communities rather than have all their eggs in these Ariana Grande-shaped baskets. The destruction of the monoculture is basically what we're talking about. As we were saying with Charli XCX – it's almost nice and quaint when this consensus forms around a cultural object or musician. It's like when Squid Game came out. It almost felt good to enter this consensus on a piece of media, where everybody's watching it.

Yeah it's like you could walk outside and yell "Squid Game Season 1 Episode 3!", and somebody will run up to you ready to talk about it.

Exactly! We are clinging onto the last vestiges of monoculture! What sucks is that culture nowadays is mostly fabricated or influenced by corporations. So when there's a moment in culture that feels organic in how it spirals into something bigger, it's almost comforting. It's just cool that a lot of people decided to care about this one thing.

I wanted to ask about how you go about writing songs that are sample-heavy. Do you have lyric sheets or basic lyrics you want to chop and screw together? Do you try to tell stories through lyrics or through atmosphere?

So, I like to start with an a'capella track. I'll cut it up into tiny bits – little syllables, words or phrases. I'll try to screw around to find new melodies with what I've got. Through this process I'll start to notice how new lyrics from emerge. I'll start to hear all these phantom lyrics inside the mangle of nonsensical syllables. That's when I write down my interpretation of what I hear. Sometimes on the album I'll record my own vocals accenting a "duh" in the word "don't", to reinforce the stuff I'm hearing. The cool part about this process is that people hear different things, which I wasn't really intending, but it's cool how that happens. Ellen, my partner, listens to a lot of my music before it's out, and will often point out a lyric and I'm like "what the fuck are you talking about?" It's almost like a musical Rorschach test or something.

You and Ellen have a crazy eye for visual art. Have you both been super artsy people since you were young? How did you first meet?

Yeah absolutely, since we were young. For both of us visual art came before music. We met at a printing company where we both worked, which was mostly focused on digitally printing "stay calm and carry on" type graphic tees for college girls. The job ended horribly when the owner outsourced most of the work to cheaper labor outside the states and fired the whole workforce. Ellen is an amazing painter and artist in general, she loves the act of painting which to me is more of a struggle. When we collaborate I usually take on the conceptualizing stage by making digital collages, trying to pin down a specific composition, and then she paints it and brings it to life. The effect of seeing a work like the Decadent Stress Chamber cover in person as an oil painting is incredible and is hard to convey just by seeing a thumbnail on social media.

With Stress Chamber leaning more into the pop realm, I was curious if you had any artists you’d like to collaborate with? Have you ever written a song and thought “oh I wish _____ would be on this”?

There are so many. I messaged the group caroline about doing a remix or rework of one of their songs and that might actually happen. I love their new album. It would be cool to work with a rapper like Danny Brown, I know he's fucking with more crazy electronic artists lately. Also this more noise-leaning group BBBBBBB is one of my favorites. Artists like Ichiko Aoba, Erika de Casier, many others. I don't know how it would turn out but I would love to do a close collab with a huge pop artist like Sabrina Carpenter, where we had freedom to explore. A Chappell Roan prog album that sounds like modern Os Mutantes or something would be hard. I know we've mentioned her a bunch, but there's a DDS song called "Rare Angel" where I could not stop imagining Charli XCX singing the vocal part.

Does the push of AI in music and art scare you? Does the rapid growth of AI generated “bands” like Velvet Sundown make you fear for the future of new artists?

It only bothers me thinking in the longer term, like if a tech theocracy fully solidifies around a new AI-driven infrastructure that becomes irreversibly embedded in society. If the AI era makes a lot of jobs obsolete very quickly and suddenly the companies managing the tech are left to decide a new societal structure with zero public oversight, that feels like an awful place for most of us to be. It can already feel like that's where we're at now, but I think it could get more insane when the average citizen has even less autonomy and ways to make money.

Maybe there will be more altruism from the top down, but I doubt it. I also don't think any other technology in human history has been adopted as quickly and widely as the transformer-based language models like Chat-GPT, and a lot of people are not prepared for the psychological shift that's already happening by interfacing with it.

I had a crazy experience in 2022 when Midjourney version 4 [the image generating AI] came out. That was a big leap forward in fidelity, where it suddenly became very apparent that the technology was gonna explode. It could replicate human art much more convincingly than the day before. I got almost addicted to playing around with it and testing the limits. But a lot of artists messaged me privately, almost going through existential crisis. variations on the thought "if I put my whole life into my art and AI can generate something similar instantly, what value do I have?" I had never experienced that sort of panic over emerging technology before, where it was actually making people question what it means to be a human being, what is the value of human art and culture.

I think culture, like most things, becomes more precious when it's under threat. That's when I started to really comprehend how insane it would be when that version of an artists existential crisis hit the general population. Of course, a lot of people won't care or notice. I think it will be a big generational divide also, because kids growing up on AI videos won't have the same revulsion to it, or it won't seem as alien. But to what degree will the general public embrace AI video and music? Or will they get burnt out on it? I'm not worried about underground art going away or anything, it's more of an above-ground question, like a question about the broader cultural milieu we'll all be swimming through in the coming years.

Decadent Stress Chamber is out now. You can purchase it here.

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