Complete Insanity Mode: PerfectLoop's Looping Worlds

By @JustinWetch

When PerfectLoop was in kindergarten, the teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. He said “a dog!” She told him he couldn't be a dog.

"Man, I don't like school anymore," he remembers thinking. "This is not cool. Like, you already sucked my brain out."

After that he wanted to be Michael Jordan, then a professional skateboarder, then a rock star. His dad was a lifelong working musician, so a strange unscheduled income never seemed impossible to him the way it might have to other kids. The whole personality is already in that first story. Contrarian, funny, completely uninterested in being told what's allowed. The work he'd make decades later, looping animations stitched together from old computer interfaces, is in some quiet way the brain coming back online.

For about twenty years, PerfectLoop did audio. The first ten were punk bands, singer-songwriter stuff, guitar work, and a stint as an entertainment technician at a Florida theme park. The next ten he spent as a composer and sound designer for indie games, while also doing sound design at a Colorado university, building audio for blind-accessibility simulations. Sound was the dream, the thing he worked relentlessly to get good at.

He found crypto through Reddit during a Bitcoin runup, went looking for the conversation on Twitter, and found mania and shitcoins and, slowly, art. The problem was that the indie-game world he worked in despised it. He floated the idea to friends in private chats. Wasn't this an interesting way to transfer ownership of a sound library, an album? The response: "You shouldn't bring that up, dude."

He had around a thousand followers on his real account, hard-won, especially slow for a sound guy. To talk about this new thing without getting barraged, he made a brand-new anonymous handle and started over from zero. No cachet, no network, nothing carried across.

"I had to kind of start from scratch, which is a bummer."

What he actually wanted to make was a concept album. A computer, cut off and left floating in space, trying to communicate, somehow making music out of beeps and printer sounds and synthetic android EDM. He went looking for an artist to make the cover he could see in his head and couldn't find one who matched the picture.

So he tried it himself. One of his first mints on Objkt was a song with a moving image, the computer reaching out to touch the escape button, trying to get out. Then he made a logo, learned some After Effects, and something detonated.

"Oh my gosh, this is a lot of fun," he says. "Its like when you try a new delicious food and it just clicks with you like,... was I, you know, Italian in a past life? Like, how do I like this so much?"

He's a serious Joseph Campbell reader, and he took the man's instruction literally. Follow your bliss. He started turning down video-game developers offering him sound work, which was insane, because that work had been so brutally hard to get in the first place. He just wanted to do the weird new thing more. He never set out to be a visual artist. The visuals were scaffolding for the music, and then they ate the whole practice.

PerfectLoop keeps a running list in an app called Things 3. Hundreds of ideas, most of them misspelled because he's too impatient to check, many of them incomprehensible when he reads them back. "Goku getting ready to Kama Kama, but the whole world is feeding back into his ore hands." PaRappa the Rapper skeletons rigged in Mixamo and made to dance.

The first couple hours of every working day go to the list. Whatever is the stupidest, funniest, or weirdest. He has a rule for picking.

"If it's not a fuck yes, it's a no."

It would be easy to read this as not caring. It's the opposite. It's a position he arrived at the hard way, through art classes and museum field trips as a kid, looking at work that felt to him like people "blowing smoke up people's ass," a culture of artists "trying to out-deep each other with their deep thoughts about the meaning behind stuff." He reaches for music history to explain it. Hair metal got too pretentious, so grunge showed up in regular clothes and that became the thing.

"It's almost like a defense mechanism," he says. The meaning still arrives. He just won't stand in front of it pointing. Some pieces are flatly intentional, social media icons blasting someone in the face until their head goes fuzzy. Most of the time, if it ends up meaning something to you, that's like a lyric meaning something to you that the songwriter never put there. He's fine with that. He just isn't going to do it on purpose.

The toolchain is a small pile of software doing different jobs. Blender for the parts that are pure math, where a shape has to rotate exactly this much over exactly this many frames or the loop breaks. TouchDesigner for feedback loops and glitches, where things go off in their own direction. Cavalry for motion design and generative elements, a phone app called Retrospecs for ASCII and pixelization.

Underneath the retro-computer look is one real idea, the closest he comes to an artist statement, delivered like it isn't one. Old interfaces are stuck in a time and a place. That fixedness gives them weight, something you can hold. Newer ones haven't settled yet.

"It's still kinda floating out there in space," he says. "It's not pinned down to any specific feeling or moment."

He'll build a running figure inside a modern MIDI interface, but because that software just came out, it isn't pinned to anything. Windows 98 is. There's a wrinkle he finds funny: green-screen terminals are his nostalgia. Windows 98 isn't old to him at all. He only learned it reads as deep retro to most of his audience, and the feedback loop of the space nudged him toward it.

"It's retro for a lot more people than me. And for me it's very familiar and comfortable."

He makes this frenetic, interface-saturated work from a house forty minutes outside a small Colorado town, where you can see the Milky Way and need a backup heat source in winter. He likes both. He doesn't think one has to sound like the other.

Asked what he wishes people understood about him, he sees himself as a dad doing dishes for the millionth time, driving his kids to swim class while his son reads him dinosaur books from the back seat, walking with his wife while she talks about repainting the living room. A cozy, comfortable, very regular life. 

PerfectLoop's collector shoutout: @absurdeity, a long-time supporter who believes in the space. @CozomoMedici, who holds some of his favorite pieces and whose visibility brought a wave of new people to the work. And @anloremi, great to work with at SuperRare, who collected two of his 1/1s. He also named the artists he leans on as friends, @5tr4n0, @0009ine, and @hazedlockdown, and the first artists who pulled him into a group and made him feel seen, @0x3y3 and @Xer0x_XYZ.

Artists inspiring him lately: @haydiroket, the original reason he thought any of this was possible, video-game pixel art and interfaces as an art form. @nbswwit, a generative artist whose animations feel like a futuristic UI. And @ayenwhyay, always surprising, always somewhere new.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, PerfectLoop recommends @5tr4n0, @absurdeity, and @RJ16848519.