The first time I dropped the needle on my vinyl copy of Have an Existential Crisis, guest vocalist Spencer Moody kicked off the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra album with “Pick ‘Em Up.”
“I’m picking up the pieces/Of my belief system,” he sang in a voice that’s instantly recognizable if you ever listened to Murder City Devils.
On my second listen, the same song played. This time though, Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra’s usual lead singer lamented the loss of core beliefs.
“It’s crumbling apart,” the robotic SPO-20 declares, “Fact/By fact/By fact”
San Diego-based Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra has released a slew of high-concept albums, but Have an Existential Crisis, the 10th in an intended series of 20 themed full-lengths, is particularly compelling, both for its theme and its presentation. To start, there are two versions of the album pressed onto a single slab of vinyl. Thanks to parallel grooves, a vintage vinyl novelty used for hidden tracks and stories with alternate endings, the version you hear depends on where the needle lands. If you have the vinyl, you also have a double-sided jigsaw puzzle, a maze that asks, “Which is your timeline?” and a set of decoder glasses that reveals secret messages in both.
“I wish I could just keep writing albums about the grocery store and stuff like that, but that’s just not the world we live in,” says Professor B. Miller, the mastermind behind Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra. “As you’re creating art, you’re influenced by whatever you’re living in at that time. This is the world we’re living in at this time.”
Released in 2023, Have an Existential Crisis is an album about alternate realities and parallel universes. It’s also about the soul-crush that comes with existing in an era where few people seem to be living in the same timeline. “Even if you take some of the politics out of it, which is hard to do, how can we just not objectively have two people look at the same thing and agree on whatever it is that we’re looking at? I don’t understand it at all and it still makes no sense to me,” says Professor B. “So, the record is sort of about trying to come to terms with this bizarro world that we’re living in where no two people experience things objectively the same way anymore.”
Offstage, Professor B. is a graphic designer who has been experimenting with robot rock since he first came across a “very primitive text-to-speech software” in the mid 1990s. He knew he wanted the first Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra album to be a box set. “I wanted to skip a demo tape, skip the full length album and just go straight to debut box set, just because the absurdity of it, I thought, was worth the effort,” he says. It took about ten years to get together enough material for a box set, during which time Professor B. also ran an indie music magazine, designed concert posters and album art, was the music director for San Diego State’s radio station and graduated college. The box set, which is actually titled Debut 4 CD Box Set, was released in 2007, around the same time Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra began playing live. A follow-up, Experiments with Auto-Croon, came out in 2014. Four years later, Professor B. launched the themed album series. “In classic fashion, I just announced to the world that’s my plan, I’m doing 20 albums without really having a plan for how I get to number 20,” he says.
The series began with Stop by the Supermarket, a collection of songs about the grocery store. Since then, Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra has released albums about ice cream, money, fear, the internet and other topics. The style of music changes from album to album as well. Have an Existential Crisis is “robo-rocksteady.” Previous albums have delved into metal and surf music, amongst other genres. And, even though the theme albums are available digitally, they’re designed for physical releases. “These days, you can listen to pretty much anything on Spotify and I don’t want it to be that,” says Professor B.
Years ago, Professor B read an article about an old horse race album where each parallel groove led to a different outcome. “That article had always stuck with me and I always knew that I wanted to figure out a way to do that,” he explains. “So when I had this existential crisis idea, that idea came back up. I thought it would be fun to build a whole album around that conceit. The songs were already about alternate realities or parallel universes, so I took that idea and ran with it, so you have the physical manifestation where the album has two completely different experiences and you can’t control which one is which.”
Professor B reached out to a handful of singers, some he knew, some he didn’t. Spencer Moody had previously collaborated with Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, as had Marie Haddad, best known as part of Baby Bushka. Also featured on the album are Pall Jenkins (3 Mile Pilot, Black Heart Procession), Pat Beers (The Schizophonics), Jacob Turnbloom (Mrs. Magician), Elena Fox (PLRLS) and Sean Tejaratchi (Crap Hound). Finding someone who could cut parallel grooves took some time. Then, Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra released a 7” just to see if the trick would work. It did.
I first saw Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra live at Exotikon in early June. It was the same weekend that ICE raids triggered protests downtown and, a big reason why I’ve gravitated towards Have an Existential Crisis is specifically because of that Sunday. During the show, Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra played songs from various albums, but the Existential Crisis portion of the show, where we wore decoder glasses that revealed one of two different on-screen images, was particularly relevant that day. The person next to me in the audience might not be seeing watching the same video that I was. Outside, I had a view of downtown Los Angeles that was quite different from the one people were watching on socials.
At San Diego State, there’s a class that teaches Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra and, as part of it, Professor B. and SPO-20 perform live for the students. The Existential Crisis portion of the show was designed, initially, for that. “I figured out how to splice two sets of footage together and code them so that whichever colored glasses you have, you can only see one or the other version of the video,” says Professor B. He made sure the select videos that are quite different from each other, one video is revealed through red lenses, the other through blue ones. “I felt like that’s a great way to try to communicate what’s happening in the world today and blow it out to this extreme and make it a little humorous as well,” he says.
The next six Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra albums are in various stages completion. One that’s getting closer to being ready for release is a video game-themed, chiptune album called Press Start. Professor B. is just finishing up work on an actual video game to accompany it. Yes, an actual, playable video game. “I’m always trying to outdo myself and I’m only as good as the last thing that I did,” says Professor B., “so I’m always trying to up the stakes every time.”
Have an Existential Crisis is available now on vinyl or digital. Head to the Satanic Puppeteer Website and sign up for mailing list to keep up on future releases.
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Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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