The kinds of art you and I and many of our peers are pursuing, specifically art that functions in a way that’s largely subliminal …you essentially need to give yourself over to unknowing, and allow yourself to make choices that are intuitive and divorced from rational frameworks.
For the third and final post about my collaboration with Full of Hell I figured I should talk to (and credit) the person who inadvertently gave the album its title, author B.R. Yeager.
The edited DMs look like this:
B.R. Yeager re: art capturing the ineffable, not to get all woo woo, but i think of that almost like scraping the divine. was talking to my theology-head friend about the literal physical impacts of sound on the body, and i think dub/dub-influenced music (and fuck, lots of hardcore) is at the frontline of that - pushing extreme sounds against the body to force a sort of transcendence
Andrew Nolan Music is really just mathematic relationships between what we hear as notes. It’s all timbre and hertz cycles.
The idea that music can convey anything at all - anger, sorrow, joy - is something we’ve decided it does because it doesn’t really.
And yet it does manage it.
For me the juxtaposition of the right sounds can create a friction in me that is the scraping the divine you identify.

I first came across the work of B.R. Yeager when i picked up his 2020 book Negative Space on a whim and was immediately a fan. Negative Space is a psychedelic tale the occult horror of teenagers living in a world that never seems right. I quickly followed it up with Amygdalatropolis from 2017, an unrelenting nosedive in to the seductive hellscape of online life and for me is the only post-The Sluts (Dennis Cooper 2004) that has been successful in it’s use of message boards and internet posts to carry a story.1
Scraping the Divine is out now on Closed Casket Activities.
B.R. Yeager’s 2023 Burn You The Fuck Alive is available from Apocalypse Party.
The album title Scraping the Divine comes from a conversation that we were having about music and writing. I said I place no value in the facade of catharsis through art and that in both my own creation and consumption of art I’m chasing this fleeting notion of capturing something ineffable. I mentioned reading Quentin S Crisp’s Morbid Tales that awakened something in me that I found hard hard to verbalize.
B.R. Yeager I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this particular topic with you, specifically because it can be so fucking challenging to discuss, because the moment you’re talking about the divine, you’re talking about qualities and states of being that are inherently beyond the realms of human perception and articulation. But it’s an important topic because I think it undergirds the kinds of art you and I and many of our peers are pursuing, specifically art that functions in a way that’s largely subliminal. And in order to accomplish that, you essentially need to give yourself over to unknowing, and allow yourself to make choices that are intuitive and divorced from rational frameworks. A simple way this manifests in my work is the inclusion of details and depictions of events that hold tremendous personal importance to me, even when that importance is invisible to the reader. So my hope is that these details act as sigils, creating a cumulative subliminal effect to transfer nameless meaning from myself to others, but to also (ideally) clear space for a deeper, more divine meaning to enter. But what that is or whether that actually occurs, I don’t know. That brings us back to the beginning—it’s inherently impossible for us to know. I can maybe sense when that is happening, but there is no way for me to definitively know. I have a better handle on it when I experience those states in another’s art—I can feel something happening to me even if I can’t put words to it.
Would be very curious to hear your thoughts on this, especially with regard to your solo instrumental work. Are tones and rhythms sigils? Do you ask questions with your beats? What are some things you were exploring with this latest collaboration?
Andrew Nolan I like to reach towards an internal disconnection through working with sound to the point of exhaustion. I like to hit an oneiric state through music creation and then later use my work as a short cut to retrigger those states, either in meditation or something a few steps away from that.
Music and audio can absolutely be a form of sigilized intent and communication and I’ve done it repeatedly throughout the years, the difficulty is that you can inadvertently give literal life to something quite unpleasant if you’re being too fast and loose. For example, if you intentionally build a monument to ill-will of some kind, when you revisit that work years later you can suddenly be engaging with something you never really buried and still lives on; I suspect most underground artists have at least one of those golems in their catalogue.
For this collaboration I was putting myself in the producer role and thinking how I could make an alternate reality version of Full of Hell; make an album that sounds like them, but it comes from somewhere else. The challenge was achieving balance; I was trying to infect the base material, but not entirely overwhelm it with disease.
You wrote lyrics for the new Uniform record, you’re tabling at music fests instead of literary and small press conventions (like your contemporaries are), I took an album title from a conversation we were having, you’re making zines containing short fiction (Knife Wives). Let’s acknowledge what’s happening here; you’re a writer stepping outside of the traditional areas of promotion, distribution, networking where you’d expect to see writers.
B.R. Yeager A big piece is that I’m extremely disinterested in standard promotion and networking. It’s corny and annoying, but I get why it’s necessary and I’m not at all above it. I definitely play the game, I even enjoy aspects of it, and it’s fun watching the numbers go up. But ultimately it’s a distraction from the actual work.
But I enjoy doing in-person readings and tabling at events, not because I have a hard-on for self-promotion, but because I want to bring the work into real, physical spaces and engage with people who have parallel interests. So much of the literary scene I find myself in is online, and this isn’t specific to literature, or even reflective of the community as a whole, but social media is inherently only going to reflect the worst version of yourself. Those spaces are engineered to prey on your narcissism and your snitch tendencies, which naturally lends to a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. You build a persona and end up living the gimmick. It becomes exhausting and distracting and not at all about the art.
The reason I’ve been operating in these musical realms is simply because it’s the stuff that makes me most excited and really cuts me open. At this point, music is probably a greater influence on my writing than other writing is. I feel at my most intuitive when I’m listening to music, and I have insane admiration for people who hone their instruments and voices, who go out and live the fucking pirate life bringing their art to real people in real, physical spaces, through processes that pose genuine material risks. It could never be me, curled up in bed scribbling my dainty little thoughts while the edibles kick in. Writing fiction is easy mode compared to being a musician.
Where do you land on this? From what I can see your social media presence is more or less the platonic ideal—not too personal, no cartoon persona, and mainly a hub for information on new records and live events. Behind the curtain, is it a struggle to balance, or is it just a natural extension?
Andrew Nolan One of the reasons I decided to start working under my own name was to remove an artificial separation between aspects of my life — “now I’m being a musician” — and to openly live with the fact that everything bleeds into every other area and makes the whole.
My social media presence is noncommittal at best. I’m hopeful that somewhere on the near horizon Generation Alpha will spearhead a kind of Digital Straight Edge and we can get back to having parallel streams of cultural endeavours that aren’t measured against the same criteria that all cultural products are now. Leave the idiots to their shitty Intellectual Properties and the resulting debates, shut the door on everyone —regardless of capacity or ability — being able to have access to a voice in things that they aren’t a part of, set fire to the word community being used instead of consumer.2
One thing I’m confident in is that underground art will put its thumb on the butchers scale of future cultural historians because collectively we’ve been so determined to keep physical media alive, so a lot of the major cultural products will exist largely as secondary sources in the future.3
There is not one single youtube video essay with millions of plays that will be accessible within ten years, yet extremely niche zines and noise tapes will frequently have a life that far outlasts their form and availability. Jarett Kobek’s How to Find Zodiac (We Heard You Like Books, 2022) is convincingly predicated on early 60s and 70s science fiction fanzines that were often released in micro editions.
I think Bret Easton Ellis recognized the way to win the long game regarding social media was to write and publish White as a book.
Congratulations on selling over 30,000 copies of Negative Space - which was the first book of yours i read - it’s well deserved but i have absolutely no context whatsoever for the figure.
Thank you. The figure I always hear is that 500-1000 copies sold is a lot for an indie novel, so as far as I know, 30,000 is incredibly rare. It’s significant supplemental income, but I’m strictly treating it as supplemental income. I have a day job, and am not considering writing full time, because even with an overall large number of sales, those are spread over the course of four and half years, quite inconsistently. Negative Space started slowly, selling primarily to the hundred or so people who had liked my previous book, and that accelerated very gradually over the next two years. Then, when we hit ten thousand sold, for whatever reason, that triggered a massive acceleration in sales, where we ended up selling another ten thousand in only a few months. But from there, sales have gradually decelerated, and it’s taken around a year and a half to reach 30,000. So my income from sales has been pretty inconsistent, ranging from “quit-my-job” money to “if-I-quit-my-job-I’d-be-barely-scraping-by-and-would-absolutely-need-to-supplement-with-a-day-job-or-freelancing” money, often within the span of months.
There is also the very real possibility that Negative Space has long past its tipping point. Which isn’t a bad thing—infinite appeal is an insane thing to desire, and even more so to pursue. But Negative Space is the only book that has ever earned me enough money to conceivably live on—my follow up hasn’t cracked 2,000 sales in its first year and a half—meaning I can’t depend on future work to compensate for Negative Space’s declining sales. I’m also not particularly prolific. It takes me at least three years to write a novel, so if the next book doesn’t make much money, it’s another three years of work to see if the next one will.
All of this is to say: even though I have had immense material success (by the standards of an indie author), it is still not enough to live off on its own. This is not a complaint. I am objectively very, very fortunate. There are far better authors who sell far less than me (Gary J. Shipley and Charlene Elsby4, to name two), just as there are far worse authors who sell more than me. Nobody knows why a certain book will take off, and even if it does take off, that does not guarantee a living, and it is certainly not guaranteed to last forever. Is it still worthwhile? Absolutely. But it’s important to talk about the reality of it.
What are you working on currently? How do you want people to see BR Yeager?
Currently working on the next novel, which is probably two years out from completion, but the first chapter will be published in a cool anthology next spring that I probably can’t talk about yet. I’m also co-writing an opera headed by this fantastic modern classical composer Samuel Garrett—it’s called God Rot, and he describes it as “a three-act eschatological opera performed by witnesses to an aging, unspecified mythic entity that resembles a god—but isn’t. The confusion around and consequences of this tragicomic character come to define three distinct time periods, chronicled by a historian at the end of time.” Very stoked on this. I recommend checking out this record for a taste of what he does.
I’m at a point where, honestly, I just want people to see the work rather than me as an individual. Me, the individual, is for my friends and family. The art is for everyone else. I’m happy to talk and correspond with people who appreciate the work (as well as those who don’t), but I’m not interested in having a public persona.
B.R Yeager recently read
Mirror Translation – Meghan Lamb
Was recently able to read an ARC of Meghan Lamb’s Mirror Translation, a collection of three stories set in an unnamed Eastern European country, where people encounter mirror versions of themselves, or people they suspect to be mirror versions of themselves, which may in fact be just their own narcissism spiraling out of control, or something else entirely. Nothing is answered, as it should be. But essentially it’s a book playing with ideas surrounding doubles and doppelgangers. It’s brief and great. Meghan’s a fantastic writer period. I think her approach to horror and speculative genre is akin to mine, in that she’s more interested in playing with the aesthetics and ideas generated by those realms, and not at all interested in paying respects to genre conventions and traditions. But she’s much smarter than I am. Great stuff, I think it’s coming out either later this year or sometime in 2025.
B.R Yeager recently listened to
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… - Raekwon and Ghost
For the first time in probably a decade, I’ve been revisiting the first wave of Wu solo records, and it has really highlighted how my initial teenage encounters with them were pearls before swine. I loved those records then, but I can see now how shallow my appreciation was. Another major shift has been my turn from believing Liquid Swords to be the superior record, to my recent (and correct) realization that it’s Cuban Linx. It’s always been Cuban Linx. That’s maturity.
One thing I’ve been ruminating on is how Cuban Linx and Liquid Swords each present the aesthetic of a fully-realized, cohesive, album-length narrative, but neither record actually provides one. Sure, there are tracks with rich and vivid storytelling, but they exist as thematically coherent snapshots. If you read the lyrics in order, there is not a clear, overriding story arc across the albums—but it feels like there is. And the use of film dialogue works kind of inversely, in that they’re derived from narratives with traditional structures and story arcs, but they’re stripped of context, chopped up, and rearranged into the tapestry, which also gives a sense of continuous narrative without there actually being one. That’s endlessly fascinating to me. It’s like the idea of a story, or the ghost of a story, and I’d love to figure out a way to adapt that into what I do. Christopher Norris’s books (Hunchback ’88 and The Holy Day) work similarly for me, where there is a narrative happening in the background, but the actual text is focused on the objects in a room, or a piece of paper in a character’s pocket. Remnants and traces of narrative, but gaps where they should connect.
I’m always happy to receive book recommendations, but don’t send me a list of shit books that are told via tweets and message board posts.
Video Game Community versus video game consumers, Modular Synth Community versus modular synth consumers. You get the idea. It’s parasitic.
Gentle reminder for you to read Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production.
I can vouch for Charlene Elsby’s The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty and Violent Faculties, both are books I read on tour this year. Violent Faculties was particularly relatable as someone who left his Ph.D program because honestly fuck all of those people.
Another fascinating and informative read. My book's to read/buy list just got way longer!