Karl Fagerstrom handed Myla Profitt a beat so relentless she sat on it for two years. Not because it didn’t work – because she couldn’t figure out how to match it. “When Karl first showed me this track I was completely blown away by how utterly hard it went,” Profitt says. “It took me 2 years to write vocals for it because I had no clue how I could add my 2 cents to the chaos or if I could even improve the song.”
What eventually unlocked the track was dying โ at least in her head. Profitt wrote the vocals from the perspective of someone freshly dead, suspended in a black void, terrified of what comes next. “I was reflecting on the meaningless things I put on a pedestal through my life like money, people’s admiration, convenience, and influence,” she explains. That headspace pulled heavily from Gaspar Noรฉ’s Enter the Void, a film that ended up informing the entire album’s concept โ specifically the monologue on The Book of the Dead, the idea of a spirit unable to communicate with the living, drawn toward lights it doesn’t want to follow, the whole thing curdling into a bad trip.
The timing was worse than fiction. Profitt watched the film alone just before slipping into a two-week psychosis triggered by bipolar disorder, complete with her own hallucinations of an afterlife. “If you’ve seen this movie, you can imagine what a terrible idea it was to watch at that time.”
“1040 RPM” is streaming now ahead of “Hyper Chasm,” the duo’s full-length for Corporat Records, due June 5th.
Flesh Produce has been making noise in Seattle since 2018, when Fagerstrom โ somewhat fed up with playing in conventional bands โ started building beats with zero prior experience, sampling and mimicking the weird stuff he liked with no rulebook. He met Profitt, who became the voice.
The result sits somewhere between electronic, synth punk, noise rock, digital hardcore, and whatever you’d call a live drum performance layered over chopped-and-screwed samples from guitars, video games, and synthwave, reassembled until they’re unrecognizable. KEXP once described their sound as “highly original and thoroughly engrossing noise rock that fuses glitchy digital bleeps with sludgey punk for a caustic fever dream of an experience.” The Stranger put it more bluntly after catching their late-night Capitol Hill Block Party set: Flesh Produce “woke us the fuck up.”
Profitt, for her part, calls “1040 RPM” quintessential Karl โ “resampled chopped and screwed guitars, syncopated to hell, in odd time signatures, in a modal key signature. Basically a music college graduate’s wet dream but instead of overplayed white boy funk, it’s noise rock and digital hardcore. Chef’s kiss.”
Fagerstrom explains his end of it with characteristic directness: “I took some samples from guitars, video games, and synthwave beats, chopped them up into fine bits in a way that pleased my ears, and just followed what felt natural. To match the end result, I needed to lay down drum grooves that genuinely pushed me past my abilities, which is the type of challenge I crave.” He adds that the duo’s live approach pushes things even further โ Profitt gets into Ableton mid-set, chopping and looping in real time, turning tracks into improv jams that drift into random time signatures as BPMs shift. “We’re trying to add as much as possible to the live performance to separate ourselves from most electronic artists, even within our niche. Outside of that, our live approach is simply ‘more is more.’ If nothing else, we want to disperse as much kinetic energy at shows as we possibly can.”
That energy has a sharp political edge on “Hyper Chasm.” The album’s themes are rooted in Profitt’s psychotic episode, but equally shaped by the city they live in. “Seattle has unapologetically screwed over its artist class, lower income community, and especially the homeless,” the band says. “This city is the epitome of that meme with genocidal bombs covered in ‘#BLM’ stickers โ everyone in ‘power’ is deep in the pockets of the .1%. Seattle runs on Reaganomics, but everyone’s got pronouns in their bios.” They describe an economic pressure cooker hurting everyone around them โ even the tech workers losing jobs to corporate greed โ while local institutions bend the knee to billionaires and developers. “MAGA figureheads tell their followers that it’s the immigrants robbing them blind, but at least they have some lie to tell their people. All we get from ‘our’ leaders are spam texts asking us for political donations after they’ve already priced us all out of a livable existence.”
The track “Liquid Chrome,” they say, is a direct call to action. “For every cringe lord Musk needing attention online, remember that fifteen much-smarter (but equally evil) billionaires are moving in silence, ruining your life through pathological hoarding.” They close it with a nod to their friends in Help: “CLASS WAR NOW.”
Still โ Profitt and Fagerstrom insist the scene itself is alive. “Our city’s music scene is vibrant โ it’s eclectic as hell, with everyone mixing and mashing up genres to create entirely new things. We’re no exception: our goal is to fuse together everything we like, including the non-musical inputs in our lives.”
Catch Flesh Produce live:
May 1 โ Seattle, WA @ The Landing Strip
May 3 โ Boise, ID @ Realms
May 7 โ Kansas City, MO @ Howdy
May 9 โ Birmingham, AL @ Firehouse
May 23 โ Denver, CO @ 7th Circle
Jun 3 โ Reno, NV @ Holland Project
