Seeland Records is pleased to present Poptastic’s “The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus,” in which a deranged production team has meticulously composed and recorded an entire catchy teen-pop album, only to destroy it with electronic effects. This uniquely unusual project, like the band itself, was spawned from the warped minds of experimental producers Chris Fitzpatrick and Thomas Dimuzio. At the core of their debut release are twelve intricately mangled songs, but in the spaces between, there is much more.

Fitzpatrick assembled Poptastic as a coed “boy-band,” conjuring the spirit of Lou Perlman, who manned the helm of the millennial teen-pop wave. Accordingly, Fitzpatrick wrote and performed pop music and enlisted random friends to sing the sappy break-up-to-make-up lyrics he wrote from an imagined teenaged perspective. Once complete, the process had really only begun, as the production team of Dimuzio and Fitzpatrick set out to obsessively destroy the album masters with electronic effects until the music sounded as if a virus had infected their studio. Although the producers suggest the album still vaguely resembles the original, all of the original masters have been destroyed; only the remix remains.

Poptastic’s alien sound has found a welcome home at Seeland Records. Influenced by and aligned with the spirit of Negativland’s music and philosophy, Poptastic has applied similar methodologies to itself. Poptastic was created for the sole purpose of sampling itself into a collage—a version of a version of something unknown and inaccessible.

Poptastic’s basic concept is accessible and humorous, yet buried in the layers of sound is a complex web of mixing, remixing, editing, re-editing, arranging, and de-arranging that continues to reveal something new with each listen. It was also designed so that in CD shuffle play, only the “hits” play, yet when in continuous linear play, the entire album is a single interwoven work; the spaces in between songs are arenas in which fragmented elements of each song collide and blend discordantly. With a smile, Dimuzio, the man of a thousand FX plug-ins, sums up the entire project: “Poptastic is just plain wrong.”