The album was his first set of newly-recorded music since We Should Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011). Recorded in two years at his Austin, Minnesota home, most of its subject matter concerns apocalyptic themes impressed by the newsfeed of world occasions he garnered whereas making the LP. Some of its song buildings and melodies have been created with the help of an synthetic neural network. The album received typically favorable critiques from critics, and was honored on quite a few year-end lists by publications comparable to Uncut, The Wire, Fact, and Clash journal. Commercially, the album peaked quantity 14 on Billboard's American Heatseekers Albums chart. Music videos have been created for its three singles ("The Combine", "Teenage Witch", and "Touchdown"). Artwork was designed by Lia Sued Cabral. It features a typeface known as Shatter, designed by Vic Carless. After the favorable response to Maus' previous studio album We Should Turn into the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011)-which was unprecedented for him-he turned extra widely accepted as an outsider artist.

He did not release any new music for the following six years. Two years had been devoted to ending his dissertation, whereas one other two had been spent learning how to construct modular synthesizers. His 338-web page thesis "Communication and Control", MemoryWave Official which mentioned the influence of technology on social control, was completed and submitted in 2014, MemoryWave Official and he was thereby awarded his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii. Throughout Maus' absence, numerous contingents of popular music began indulging in throwbacks to 1980s tradition. I believe largely the details that I’m most centered on are exactly the sort which are going to be lost on most people. Maus wrote and produced virtually all of Screen Reminiscences by himself in his Austin, Minnesota home studio, nicknamed the "Humorous Farm". All the devices Maus used for the album had been manufactured by himself. The album builds upon the 1980s-inspired lo-fi of his earlier albums. What I did was prepare a neural network on a bunch of harmonic sequences after which saw what it spit back out to me.

I also messed around with Markov chains by feeding them thousands and hundreds of chants. I messed round with a easy course of the place you are taking an integer sequence and let the numbers one-through-six designate the size diploma of a mode after which I added the additional factor of collapsing every consecutive, every I-iii-V I-IV-V triad into it. I put in place. The chaos just type of shook the little machine that I made. I by no means heard the chaos as such, however I saw the in any other case invisible frame that I made being shook by the integer sequence. Display Reminiscences was completed shortly earlier than the November 2016 US presidential election. He had deliberate for the music to be guitar-oriented, but he "may by no means get it to work." In the end, the album's only guitar-heavy songs had been "Find Out" and "Bombs Away". The latter is the one track on the album that he didn't write alone