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Chris Corner of IAMX on UNMASK, IAMIXED, imperfection, and learning how to frame the future

When Chris Corner speaks, the old binary oppositions that still shape too much music journalism, authenticity versus performance, intimacy versus theatre, vulnerability versus control, begin to look embarrassingly simplistic. Across IAMX, he has spent years proving that a mask can reveal as much as it conceals, that dressing up can be a form of truth, and that unfinishedness is not necessarily failure, but a deeply human condition. That tension felt especially palpable at the Leipzig date of The Artificial Innocence Tour, the opening night of a new chapter and the first live appearance with Gözde in the line up. From the audience, the show felt raw and exacting at once, instinctive but tightly held together, as if volatility itself had been rehearsed into form. Corner, as it turned out, experienced it rather differently: less as a triumphant unveiling than as a highly charged exercise in concentration, adjustment, and trust.

That divergence says a great deal about IAMX. What often reaches the audience as intensity, elegance, and emotional coherence is, on the inside, bound up with doubt, pressure, revision, and a refusal to accept the idea of the fixed work. With UNMASK and IAMIXED, Corner returns to the world orbiting Fault Lines, not to close it down neatly, but to test what survives when songs are reopened, displaced, and handed to other instincts. Our conversation moved from the discomfort of festivals to the cultural fragmentation artists now face, from perfectionism and neurodiversity to the peculiar freedom of theatrical self construction, from remixing as creative release to the question of how an artist survives, aesthetically and materially, in an age of acceleration, categorisation, and artificial intelligence. What emerged was not a promotional conversation around two releases, but something more revealing: a portrait of an artist who is still suspicious of completion, still wary of his own past, and still trying, in his own words, to learn “how to frame the future.”

IAMX interview

Karo: Hi Chris, thank you for taking the time. I saw you at the Leipzig show at E Only Festival, the opening of The Artificial Innocence Tour, and it felt like a very particular moment. There was something raw, but also very controlled about it, and seeing you perform with Gözde for the first time added a different kind of tension and elegance. Before we go deeper into discussing your new work, how did that night feel from your side, as the starting point of this chapter?

Chris: It was interesting because I’m known for hating festivals. It’s always very uncomfortable for me in that situation. I was very preoccupied with making it work. It was the first time I performed with Gözde too, so I think my mind wasn’t really with the audience, which is rare, because I’m usually very connected. I was very much concerned that everything was working. Mentally, I was kind of somewhere else, which is rare because I’m usually quite present. Saying that, I was very relieved and happy to have her integrated in such a cool way, because it was a super cool thing, and I love the space. The sound was great. It was a little stressful setting up and things like that, but what a way to introduce her. Overall, I’d say it was a very special moment, as you’ve said. I’ll probably look back at that at some point and enjoy it more, but at that point I was kind of stressed, to tell you the truth.

Karo: These two releases, UNMASK and IAMIXED, both seem to resist the idea that a body of work ever really ends. One gathers material still emotionally adjacent to Fault Lines, while the other allows that same world to be reinterpreted, even dismantled. Do you experience this moment as a form of closure, or as proof that your work continues to evolve beyond your control?

Chris: That’s a brilliant question. It’s an interesting moment. Privately, culturally, there’s so much going on for artists, and I digest that stuff. It can be quite confusing sometimes. As an artist, you’re constantly not just questioning your own work, but your place in the world. Culture is so fragmented and wild. It’s like a Wild West out there. What do you do? Do you make an album? Do you release a song? Do you release a video? Do you not do a video? Do you do an Instagram post? What do you do? What’s going to help you survive? A lot of the time we’re preoccupied with that more and more these days, as opposed to just having a lot of focus on creation. And in a way, it’s interesting because you take something like IAMIXED and UNMASK, and they are musical orphans. They don’t really exist as part of a bigger piece. I kind of like that, because it reflects what’s happening culturally anyway, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to try something like that that doesn’t necessarily have to be part of an album. To me, it feels okay. It’s like the starting point: do I lean into that? Do I do little fragments of art now? Is that how the world is? Or do I always fall back into this larger piece, the album, the traditional? Is that old fashioned? I don’t know. Or is that just a format that describes a certain time in your life perfectly? Does it have to be like that? Is that just a proven thing? So I guess I’m just trying things out, and IAMX has always been quite a multidimensional project anyway. I’ve never felt that my art is ever complete. I’m always interested in revisiting and trying to improve, and it’s never really done. I’m never fully happy. I know how to complete, and I know how to accept the defeat of that kind of completion and just go with it. This is what I can do at this time. I know there’s something in me that tells me this could be much better, but I cannot achieve that right now. That’s not who I am, or maybe I’ll never be that person. But I can accept it for its flaws and its beauty at the same time. So it’s quite nice for me to come back to things and correct what I felt was missing, or add what I felt was missing. I grew up in the culture of remixing and sampling and all of those things, and it’s just part of the way that I do things. I like to throw things around.

Karo: You’ve often pushed back against the idea of a final version. Listening to these releases, it feels less like a production choice and more like a philosophical stance. Do you resist completion because identity itself remains unstable, or because the finished work risks fixing something that is still in motion?

Chris: Fascinating. There are so many layers there. There’s this idea of perfection in creating something that I’d like to say was a philosophical choice, because that would make me sound like it was intentional. But I don’t think it is. If I’m truly honest, I feel like there are certain things I just can’t achieve, and it’ll never be good enough. That’s just my place in the world. I hear things that I don’t particularly like, but I’m impressed that people can make it so complete. I think it’s just a reflection of my nature. It’s not an intentional philosophy. I think I’m going to be less harsh on myself maybe. I’m aware that that’s okay. And then I’m a bit of both. I do lean in and say, in this world of perfection, and now artificial intelligence and all of these things, where human incompleteness is going to be an attractive thing, maybe that is now what makes it interesting, as opposed to trying to achieve something that is beyond you. I think I’m just starting to accept that there are certain things I’ll never be able to do, and that’s just my place. And that’s okay.

Karo: You mentioned perfectionism, and almost instantly this quotation from your lyrics came to mind: “and I was carrying the weight of the universe, the typical brittle perfectionist.” I think you are kind of accepting that now.

Chris: Yeah, I do. I think I used to place myself in that. What’s ironic about perfectionism is you can’t achieve it. You may perceive yourself to be a perfectionist, but it’s nonsense. You can never perfect anything. But you do hold on to this idea that you can be better, and it’s self flagellation. It’s very much a self destructive attitude. I used to hold on to that a lot. There’s a certain drive, or a certain engine, in that that does keep you going, but with a bit of distance now, and seeing how burnt out that would make me, often I see how, if I look at my body of work and the things that I’ve done, it didn’t help. It didn’t change that much. It was an inner feeling that now that I have much less of, it doesn’t really change my work. It just changed the stress feeling.

Karo: The word UNMASK feels especially loaded in the context of IAMX because your work has never treated masks as simple concealment. They’ve been tools for transformation, survival, seduction. When you use that word now, does it feel like exposure, or more like a shift in how consciously you construct what is seen?

Chris: The unmasking thing is loaded. It’s full of levels. You’ve got the theatrical performance level, the inner authentic, the yearning for authenticity level, and they all play off each other. The odd thing about IAMX, or me, I guess, but let’s say IAMX because I’m a little bit more than IAMX, is that it likes to play with that stuff. Depending on its mood, it can flip between playful theatrical stage performance and very serious mental health issues. What’s so interesting to me is how fluid that is. I feel very comfortable going between those two worlds. If you look at what could appear to be a very false, constructed thing like a stage performance, I don’t see it like that at all. I see it almost like a tribal moment. There’s something very liberating and beautiful about dressing up and escaping the self. I always yearned for that. It confused me why people would think putting on makeup and dressing up is not authentic. You have to be very serious, you have to wear a T shirt, these cultural things that are impressed upon us. I always felt this drive to fight against that and to dress up and to say, I don’t give a fuck, I’m going to look like a girl, I’m going to do these things. I’m not sure why, but I know I’m fighting against something that culturally says that I’m not an authentic artist. So it’s definitely been a battle, but it always felt right, and it always felt like there is nothing saying to me why these things can’t coexist and be completely meaningful at the same time. So the idea of unmasking, it’s not that it feels like ripping the mask off and saying, that was wrong and now this is right. It’s not that at all. It’s a symbolic reference to the idea of just being an authentic thing, whatever. That freedom of expression, of thought, whatever that is, however you want to express yourself, is what’s important, and pressure will come and go and say this is right and that’s wrong. But if the inner feeling is always there, and if the inner feeling is unmasked, I feel like the outer can be anything. It can be dressed up, whatever.

Karo: IAMIXED also suggests a kind of surrender of authorship, not polite remixing, but real reinterpretation. When you hear your songs filtered through somebody else’s instincts, do you recognise yourself in them, or do they reveal something you didn’t know was already there?

Chris: I don’t know. Because I’m a producer too, I kind of start as a producer. I recognise decision making in them. There are things that I hear and I think, oh yeah, I get that, I see why they’ve done that. So it’s not like I’m coming from an unknowing, raw point of view. I’m aware. But it’s still a nice moment. I wouldn’t say I’m massively surprised by things, but I still love it. If somebody does some kind of nasty, weird, distorted techno version of an IAMX song, I love that. I like anything that’s good.

IAMX’s genre bending has always been like that. I don’t really care where it fits. If it fits there today, great. If it’s there tomorrow. That’s gotten me into trouble because people like to label things. The world likes to put things in boxes. It makes things easier for people. It probably would have had a lot more commercial success had I done certain things, but it’s not interesting to me. It’s not a choice anyway. It’s just what I am. So this idea that all of those things can coexist, again, a little bit like the theatrical and the serious, different kinds of genres, different musical interpretations, are very natural to me. So I do like it. It’s the kind of thing I would do myself. I wouldn’t do exactly what they do because that’s them and I want them. But it is really nice. I’ve always liked it. I do like to hear myself mixed up, mashed up. And I do like it when I can hand things to somebody else because it can be quite isolating and exhausting, constantly doing you again and again in one room by yourself. So it is nice to hand it away.

Karo: Were you searching for artists who would understand the songs, or rather disturb them in an interesting way, challenge you in a way?

Chris: I prefer that. I prefer when it’s very, very different to what I would do. I do like that. That’s often what I’ve chosen if I’ve done collaborations or things in the past. I’ve had managers who say, well, you’ve got to do this with this artist and you’ve got to go on support with that artist because we can get their crowd. Every time somebody tells me that, it just makes me want to do the opposite. Maybe that hasn’t helped, but it’s definitely interesting when unexpected things happen. It brings me joy, I guess, when it’s outside of what I would do myself.

Karo: Your work often moves through intense psychological states like compulsion, shame, fragmentation, at least this is how I understand it, but it rarely feels like raw confession just for confession’s sake. It feels processed and shaped. How do you recognise the moment when personal experience becomes something that you can communicate rather than simply expose? For me, you have always been a translator of emotions into words. States like these are very difficult to communicate, and you have always done that perfectly. How do you do that?

Chris: Thank you. That’s very kind. It’s an interesting thing because there is this feeling where it’s almost like trying to tame this wildness, this overwhelm. I think a lot of it comes down to trying to understand myself. I’m pretty neurodiverse. I’m pretty on the spectrum of autism. I deal with a lot of overwhelming emotions, with lots of ups and downs in terms of my reaction to the external world and people. I’m constantly trying to figure out what’s right and wrong, how do I need to edit myself to make things right, or why did that happen. Trying to form a theory of mind of others is often like a life goal, and through the work I feel like I’ve been able to process certain things and to understand people, or at least to describe them fully to myself. It becomes a real challenge because it takes a lot of time, the lyrical content takes time to process, to be able to start with something, to understand what it is I want to be talking about, then to understand how to correctly talk about it without sounding too intellectual. It’s an interesting form, a song, particularly for me, because I do feel like I want to go very deep, but I also need to keep it at a certain level that’s understandable for people to consume as a song. So there is a certain framework in songwriting that is quite nice for me, because I need to simplify it to a certain degree, but also have a little bit of depth. So it’s a challenge. Emotions are so much a part of our daily lives, and we have so much reactivity to things, that when I nail something with a few words, it elevates me, and I think it allows me to understand the world. It brings me peace, I guess, and to be able to offer that doorway into something to others feels like it gives me purpose too. That’s the meaning of my life, in a way, to give people access and understanding through my words, through my music. It’s not always necessarily about the words too, and trying to put that into music is a challenge. But I think you’re right. There’s something about the lyrical side of things that I often forget that I’m doing. I don’t think about it until I’m in it, and then I realise how much work it is. Because I can’t just do that “hey baby” thing. It’s not an option for me unless that’s relevant to a certain emotion in the track.

Karo: For me, this music helps to understand human behavior, but you also give it a language. I think it’s both. And I think one reason your music stays with people is because it avoids the simple narrative. Desire, cruelty, tenderness, self destruction, they coexist without resolution. When you write now, are you still trying to understand those contradictions, or have you accepted them as something that can’t be resolved?

Chris: I think if I get to that level of acceptance, I don’t know if I’ll feel like writing so much. That’s a bit of a cynical view of myself. I’m being hard on myself there, which is a natural place for me to go. But I feel like the overwhelming feeling of depth comes to me often just in daily life. It’s not when I’m writing necessarily. It can be amplified when I’m writing and it can be resolved. This emotion can be resolved when I’m doing something and I don’t need to intellectualise it. It just comes out and permeates my being, and then it feels like it’s resolved a little bit, like sex with stress or something. Without words it can be resolved. There’s a lot of that going on. But when I’m out in the world doing life, there’s a lot of things that, if I’m not careful, I can often just be overwhelmed by the depth of things, or the seeming depth of things. That could be anything. I can be caught by a cactus or a little animal or something. It can drag me in very quickly if I’m not careful. So I don’t think I’ll have a problem with material. I think that feeling isn’t going to go away. It changes. I think it transforms. Maybe what I direct it on might be different. I don’t know if it’ll always be directed at other people, but I think that’s the duty of an artist, to access that depth in whatever it is. I feel like it’s everywhere. I don’t feel like it’s just in other humans. It’s a special kind of depth in humans, but I think it’s everywhere.

It would be interesting to see where you can take it. Are we all just so preoccupied with relationships and emotional interaction that anything else might not be that interesting in pop music? I probably will always settle on the idea of interpersonal relationships. It’s such a concern for the human condition that I don’t think that will ever go away. But I do feel a little bit, I’m coming out of quite a turbulent private time in terms of relationships. I’m going through a divorce, all these kinds of things. I feel like an era is coming where my focus is going to be a bit different. I can’t fully promise that, but I’m interested to know because I’m not fully in control of myself. I’ll be interested to know where I’m going with all this on the next round.

Karo: Looking back at earlier phases, like The Unified Field or Metanoia, identity always felt fluid, unstable, but urgent. Does that fluidity feel different to you now? More grounded, or more deliberate?

Chris: No. It doesn’t. I’d like to say that there’s a certain sort of wisdom that’s come with getting older, and I think it just changes. There are certain things that get in the way more. Priorities change a little bit. Life stuff happens, and you get a bit distracted by that. But I think the essence is the same, definitely. You mentioned the word urgency. Fluidity and urgency. Urgency has been a thing from as long as I can remember, and that need to express how short life is to the world, and how we need to grasp the beauty of things all the time, and not necessarily try and hold on to things, but at least recognise those things, and even recognise the impermanence of things. Even if you have access to that way of thinking, which I do constantly, I don’t think that’s going to change. I still feel as urgent about life as ever, maybe more. With age, you start to understand you’re getting on the other side, so maybe the priorities might change a little bit. Do I want to keep doing this thing specifically, or would I like to tweak it? For years I’ve been interested in mental health gatherings and expanding IAMX into different ways of doing things, possibly because there’s lots of different layers to IAMX, and maybe going into installation art. I would like to experiment a bit more with the format. But time, it’s all about time. Where is the time gonna come from?

Karo: Last question. We’ll be wrapping up, although I would probably like to keep you a bit longer. But we’ve got a scheduled time, so my last question will be kind of rounding up. If UNMASK and IAMIXED both deal, in a way, with reframing of material, of authorship, of perspective, what are you currently reframing within yourself? Not what you are releasing, but how you think, create, how you relate to your own work.

Chris: I’ve always had a slightly schizophrenic relationship to my work. I’m scared of it in a way. I don’t listen to old stuff very often unless I have to focus on it, like live music or remix or rework or whatever. I’m a bit scared of the past. I don’t like nostalgia. I don’t really focus on it because I feel like I’m going to criticise myself. It’s my go to feeling, and I don’t like that, so I do avoid my work. But then again, sometimes, as I said, it’s a bit of a schizophrenic feeling, because sometimes I’ll hear something accidentally and I’ll be really pleasantly surprised that I was able to do that thing. And it’s like, oh my God, that’s me. That thing’s actually quite good. How did I do that? It’s an odd feeling. So it’s a bit of an engine. This engine is to correct, to be better, to think I can do this better, and I don’t want to hear that shit because if I hear it, I’ll just be like, oh fuck, I fucked that up. But I’m okay with it. I don’t feel like I’m suffering necessarily from that. I just have to be careful how I filter my world and how I view myself. I’m always more preoccupied with doing something new because I think there’s a comfort in that, there’s a joy in that, there’s a sort of safety in being able to put something in the world as opposed to analyse what’s already there. So it’s not a healthy relationship that I have with my work. I’d like it to be healthier, but we’d like all sorts of things, right? We just have to make peace with a certain way of being. And that’s just how I am.

I do think a lot about how to go forward. I’ve always been like that. What is my place? How do I survive as an independent artist? It’s not easy necessarily, trying to find income and ways to survive and balance life with work. There’s a lot of that going on. There’s a lot of thinking about the future of what format music is going to be. Artificial intelligence, what do we do with that? Can it help? Is it going to take things away? There’s a lot of turbulence going on. It’s not much different. But I think if you bring something like that culturally into the mix, where it’s actually quite a big, obviously toxic subject for many people, for me it’s more like, what does that really mean to me? Is it something I want to get involved in or have to get involved in? Am I going to be forced into this, to use this? Or do I fight against it? Do I make the human frailty attractive? Do I lean into that? Or do I say, well, everybody else is making their lives easier, why do I have to suffer and watch all these people do this thing and nobody cares anyway? What do people care about? How do I fit in that?

A lot of the time I’m thinking about those things because I want to be efficient, I want to be effective, I still want to get to people and I want to produce things that people can connect with and all of those things. So I guess I’m working on how to frame the future right now.

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.

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