You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Tom Fek is released four albums under the name Tobacco since 2008.

He's also the frontman of the band Black Moth Super Rainbow and he created the theme music for the HBO show Silicon Valley.

In this episode, Tom breaks down his song Gods in Heat from his newest album, Sweatbox Dynasty, recorded entirely on cassette tape.

Tom Fek from Tobacco?

I don't know any instruments. Like I never learned, but my parents got me a four track when I was in high school and I just played around with it so much until things started making sense.

I borrowed a mini-boot synthesizer and I came up with that bass line. I think I was just trying to hear how dense it could be.

So I was trying to find the best, the coolest bass sound I could get out of it and that was it and that was hitting record right away because I didn't want to lose it.

The drums are MPC straight into tape. I have this Tascam cassette recorder and I play the MPC straight into the cassette without quantizing sequencing anything like that because I like the sound. It's real as possible and because I'm not a drummer, it usually does sound pretty human for better or worse.

The drums have that crunch mainly from the tape machine because I just run everything really hot. But they also get some of that too when you're on an MPC and you lower the pitch.

That's what I like about MPC so much. It gives you that nasty, it puts like digital dust on it.

The past few years I've been listening to a lot of this weird low-fi, I guess it's like black metal.

There's this guy Il-Jun. He's like one of the innovators of whatever this style is.

To me it sounds like it's almost recorded on a boombox and the tape is like another member of the band almost. It's like so important.

I probably listened to a little more texture these days than I used to. I'm getting old I guess.

I pretty much always am recording on a cassette deck. I think in electronic music you're dealing in stuff that's usually clean and clinical.

Anything you can do to make it breathe just helps so much. It's an all over him.

Cored synth just sounds really powerful. But the wobble in the chords is the tape machine.

I didn't want there to be any guitar on this album at all at first.

Because that guitar was supposed to be just a placeholder. I wanted the album to be slimy synth funk. But that changed pretty drastically.

The fuzz bass just because I didn't want it in there doesn't mean it wasn't perfect for the song.

So the vocals that's always one of my sticking points.

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