Production
Xtort was pre-produced and tracked in Seattle at Hole in the Wall Studio, and recorded and mixed in Chicago at Chicago Recording Company. Konietzko brought in a number of Wax Trax! alumni, such as Chris Connelly of Revolting Cocks and Bill Rieflin of Ministry, to help with the album's creation, along with assistance from more than a dozen studio musicians. Konietzko required all the album's contributors to be on call thirteen hours a day during production, saying "I don't care what they do on their own time, but when they do KMFDM, if they don't comply with the schedule, they're out."
Konietzko has stated that the ideas for songs began with individual sounds, which he then modified until he created a looped rhythm. "Craze", for example, Konietzko called "an homage to Atari Teenage Riot, a band with two guys, one girl, a couple TR90S drum machines and a bass machine." After creating the base tunes, the songs went to Günter Schulz, another longtime member, to add guitars. With the completed songs, Konietzko then allowed guest artists, such as Connelly, to pick songs that they wanted to contribute to, and added their vocals or other instrumentation. For Xtort, Konietzko used Macintosh products to do all the synchronization.
Connelly contributed to four tracks, including "Blame", which also featured the horn section from the Oakland, California based group Tower of Power. Nicole Blackman, KMFDM's publicist at the time, contributed spoken word vocals to the track "Dogma", which was adapted from the ten minute live performance she provided while touring with the band. "Power", meanwhile, was made to fulfill a request by the band's label, Wax Trax!, for a radio promo song. Konietzko said he'd heard that "radio didn't like big female choruses", so he got voiceover commercial singer Cheryl Wilson to help with the song, which he called "dumb and catchy". The hidden track of the album, "Fairy", is a story narrated by Jr. Blackmail, who had worked with the band previously in the 1980s. Konietzko said it was inspired by Blackmail's "dirty fantasies". He also said it was not a serious track, and that "it was more like kids at play". For the background sounds, the group did things like roll screws on the floor while Schulz played piano.
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