“We do not make music because we like music that's been made.”

It is an audacious sentence, perhaps obnoxious, and useful partly because it refuses the standard promotional grammar of resemblance.

The contemporary pitch is usually an equation: familiar name plus familiar name plus one adjective equals a safe reason to press play. The equation is efficient. It is also the language of a system whose principal question is what previously consumed object predicts this one.

Scaled Alps' production notes contain influences in abundance. The issue is not purity. The issue is whether influence is a destination or a material.

Scott Walker can inform a bass movement without turning the song into Scott Walker tribute music. Three 6 Mafia can sit beneath “Pink Diamonds.” Swervedriver and The Chameleons can appear as coordinates for “Setagaya.”

The boast becomes more interesting when read literally: the reason to make another record cannot merely be that one enjoys the records already present. Something must remain unresolved.