Artist Statement

Rat City Enterprises, a Rochester/Minneapolis based art collective and band, have released their debut album, “We Are Employment.” The album is available on all major digital downloading and streaming services including iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and YouTube. Physical CD copies can be made available upon request and free digital versions can be downloaded here.

The band poses as a successful but vaguely dubious global corporation and performs all songs in character as employees of the business. The concept of the album is that the company, in a stroke of hubris, is attempting to spread the message of their superior corporate culture to the world by way of a radical new form of alternative marketing. The band was formed in Rochester and speaks to the live-to-work attitude of the town as well as the opportunistic, business-centric atmosphere that is so present there, especially since the formation of DMC.

The sound of the album draws its influences from many other bands with a conceptual focus, including Kraftwerk, Talking Heads and Radiohead. Like those bands, Rat City Enterprises wishes to continue within the framework of the pop song and album format while subverting it with experimental techniques. The album is an atmospheric day in the life of an RCE employee that still manages to be catchy, creating earworms through the repetition of mantra-like business clichés and aphorisms.

The band was previously seen performing the songs on the album at their own multimedia art show, “The Corridor Principle,” in June 2016 but remain intentionally shrouded in mystery, choosing to interact with fans mainly through their online presence.