Hey, what’s your favorite Christmas song? Doesn’t matter, here they all fucking are at once:
Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” and every other one of Billboard’s top 100 holiday songs: done. For almost five minutes, the track drones on, a choir of the damned moaning dissonantly. There’s a swarming sense of unease about the whole thing, not just the atonal drone but the indistinguishable cacophony of sleigh bells and individual voices that cut up and out of the mix only to descend once more into the burbling sea of sound.
While it’s not that far from a Scott Walker track, it is intended to be unpleasant. Creator Petter Rudwall makes no bones about his disdain for Christmas music in an essay about the track’s creation on Medium:
I’ve always had a hard time wrapping my head around Christmas Carols. I dunno, might be something with the joyful, yet plastic, tone to the songs, or simply the happy-go-lucky vibe. Can’t stand it. Save me.
Thus, to adequately recreate the hellish train of Christmas cheer that circles through his head each holiday season, Rudwall imported all of Billboard’s top 100 Christmas songs to Ableton. Each song is placed in the mix proportional to its place on the list—thus you will hear a bit more Mariah than other vocalists—and its length is actually the average of all the songs. He followed a similar method to create the track’s equally chaotic artwork, where, as is meet, Mariah reigns triumphant.