Camus’s central rule is so stated everywhere that we no longer hear it. It is this: consolation is the lie that lets us avoid the work of seeing things as they are. The cure for despair is not the consolation that says it isn’t really that bad. The cure is the recognition that says it is exactly that bad and you are still here.
This is a hard sentence to hold. Most of culture is in the business of selling consolation. So is most of music. Even the bleakest production conventions — the minor key, the slow tempo, the haunted vocal — perform a kind of consolation by making the bleak feel handled. We have a name for the feeling. We have a sound for the feeling. The feeling is delivered in a familiar package. You do not have to encounter it raw.
This essay is about what changes when you stop letting the production package the feeling for the listener. It’s about Camus, in his actual rigor, in the studio.
The first decision: against the build
The standard arc of a track — call it the AABA arc, or any of its modern variants — sets up an expectation, develops it, climaxes, and resolves. The form itself is consoling. Whatever the lyrics say, the form says: I am structured. I will take care of you. I will deliver you to the end.
A Camus-ian production decision begins with refusing this. Not always — there are tracks where the form has to do its work — but often, and especially in tracks where the lyrical content is about something the form would otherwise contradict.
Concretely, in madness was sad, this meant cutting the climax I had originally written. There was a section, around minute three, where the bass dropped out and the vocals went up an octave and the whole thing built back into a final section. It was a great climax. It worked. The reason I cut it is that it was wrong. The track is about a state that doesn’t resolve, and giving it a climax was a way of letting the listener off the hook. The track now ends in the same texture it began in, with the same unresolved attention. It is harder to finish listening to. It is more honest.
The second decision: against the named feeling
In production school, you learn to label feelings. Melancholy. Wistful. Nostalgic. These labels then suggest signature moves: a minor seventh chord here, a reverb tail there, a vocal that catches in the throat at the end of a line. The labels make the work efficient — you can communicate with collaborators, you can troubleshoot a mix.
But Camus is suspicious of the labels. The label melancholy is already a consolation. It says: what you are feeling is a known thing. Other people have felt it. There is a name for it. The honest version, the rawer version, is that what you feel often does not have a name, and reaching for the name is a way of making the unknown into the known so you can avoid the unknown.
A Camus-ian production decision is to resist the named-feeling shortcut. To not reach for the minor seventh because the minor seventh is the chord for melancholy. To find the chord that does what this track needs and risk that no one else will have a name for what they’re feeling when they hear it. This is harder. It is also the only way to make something that hasn’t been made before.
The third decision: against the gesture
A production gesture is a small move that signals a feeling without containing it. The pitched-down vocal that signals darkness. The vinyl crackle that signals nostalgia. The reverb-drenched piano that signals contemplation. These are not bad in themselves. They become bad when they replace the work of producing the actual feeling.
A track full of gestures is consolation in concentrated form. It tells the listener: I have done all the work for you. Here is darkness, here is nostalgia, here is contemplation, in pre-packaged sonic form. You don’t have to feel any of it. You only have to recognize the gestures.
The Camus-ian alternative is: commit to one or two gestures per track, and earn each one. If the vocal is going to be pitched down, the rest of the track has to be structured so that the pitched-down vocal is doing something the listener could not predict. If the vinyl crackle is there, it has to be there for a reason that doesn’t dissolve into atmosphere. The gesture has to cost something. Otherwise it’s a consolation.
The fourth decision: against the safety of length
Most tracks are too long. A 5-minute track usually has 3 minutes of music in it; the other 2 are filler that exists to signal I’m a real song by hitting the runtime conventions of the genre. The runtime is itself a consolation. It promises the listener a familiar experience-shape.
Camus would have produced shorter tracks. The Stranger is 130 pages. The Myth of Sisyphus is 120. He didn’t pad. The Camus-ian production rule is: end the track when the track is over, not when the runtime says it should be. Blood Tape the EP is 20 minutes long for this reason. None of the tracks are full pop-runtime. The opening track is 3:20. The longest is 5:13. The form is built for the content, not for the streaming algorithm.
This costs you on the streaming side — Spotify’s algorithm prefers tracks that hit certain duration thresholds for skip-rate calculations. I am paying that cost on purpose. The cost is the cost of refusing to console the algorithm.
The fifth decision: against the resolution
Most tracks end on a chord, a fade, or a final hit that says I am over. This is a small consolation. It tells the listener: the experience you have just had is over and you can return to your life. It cleanly closes the experiential bracket.
A Camus-ian end refuses to close the bracket cleanly. The track might just stop, mid-texture, without any signal that it is ending. The track might fade out at a level so slow that the listener doesn’t realize it has ended until the silence has been there for a few seconds. The track might end on the sound that began it, looped back without resolution, the way the absurd returns to the same question every morning.
Blood Tape the EP closes with Storm Clouds Gather, and Storm Clouds Gather doesn’t end so much as run out. The listener notices, after a beat, that the track is over. There’s no satisfying button at the end. This was a deliberate decision and it is the most Camus-ian thing on the record.
The deeper rule
What unifies all five decisions is one underlying rule: don’t help the listener avoid the work of being a listener. Don’t pre-package the feeling. Don’t structure the experience to deliver them safely to the end. Don’t earn the climax cheaply. Don’t end with a button.
This sounds like cruelty. It is not. It is the opposite of cruelty. It is the recognition that the listener is capable of doing the work — capable of sitting with an unresolved texture, capable of finding their own name for what they are feeling, capable of noticing when a track ends without being told. The producer who refuses to console is not abandoning the listener. The producer is respecting the listener as someone who can hold their own.
This is the most Camus-ian sentence I can write about production: the listener is Sisyphus. Imagine them happy.
What’s next
This is the third in a series. The first was Camus in the bass, Cioran in the reverb — the manifesto. The second was Cioran and drone — the case for sustained texture. The third (the previous one in chronological order, but the one I wrote between these two) was The phenomenology of tape — the case for tools that change the producer.
The line of inquiry will continue. The next essay will be about silence as a parameter — the most underutilized element in dark electronic, and the one Cioran cared about most. After that, something about why I find Tarkovsky a more useful guide to production than any musician.
For now: listen to a track you love and notice how it consoles you. Notice the moment of consolation. Then ask whether the track would survive without it. That is the question. That is always the question.