I dunno if you’ve listened to these records in question but it’s very, very obviously for artistic effect. They’ve discussed it in interviews and stuff. Low wasn’t looking to get radio play with fractured collages of distorted noise. The “vinyl can’t reliably reproduce these waveforms” explanation someone else suggested makes the most sense.
That's just not true. I just had my band's album mastered; we weren't in the room or anything but the mastering engineer asked us directly questions about how we wanted the record to sound and we got final approval on it.
I dunno if you’ve listened to these records in question but it’s very, very obviously for artistic effect. They’ve discussed it in interviews and stuff. Low wasn’t looking to get radio play with fractured collages of distorted noise. The “vinyl can’t reliably reproduce these waveforms” explanation someone else suggested makes the most sense.
Artists usually aren't involved at the mastering stage, at that point the music is already recorded and mixed.
That's just not true. I just had my band's album mastered; we weren't in the room or anything but the mastering engineer asked us directly questions about how we wanted the record to sound and we got final approval on it.