It feels like they're sullying the kind of single-minded purism that would be lauded in a more experimental act.
"If you have one mad experimental act and one pop act, the one you're going to push for is the pop act," explains the industry source.
For the sullen young man at the center of "Student," directed by the Kazakh filmmaker Darezhan Omirbayev, an experimental act of violence seems to yield moral clarity.
A few weeks ago, Maria Bamford, another alternative comedian, took a similar plunge, but, unlike Louis, who fills stadiums, Bamford is a comic's comic, with a stylized, experimental act that lingers in the mind, full of riffs on her struggles with anxiety and depression.
Left unexamined amid the usual online table-thumping about this or that business model is the rather remarkable – and encouraging – expectation that an experimental act such as Atoms for Peace would make much money on recorded music in the first place.
But it doesn't have to be this way, as the two remaining heads behind the Manchester-born experimental act 808 State Graham Massey and Andrew Barker are keen to point out.
