Fresh off releasing his first solo record, Zone Black, for Drag City Records, Emil Amos takes a break to talk about his production philosophies, home recording in the '90s, and what still keeps him curious. Amos has made over 50 records and is launching into 50 more as we speak. Born of the lo-fi movement, but having traversed just about every genre there is, Emil is mostly known for his bands Grails, Om, Holy Sons, and Lilacs & Champagne. His podcast, Drifter’s Sympathy, catalogs outsider music and explores the pitfalls of growing up.
I listened to Holy Sons' 2006 album, Decline of the West, today.
Has your take on that record changed over the years?
Well, I’m still blown away by how young you were at the time and that you played every instrument on the record.
I would’ve been about 25 years old. I don’t think I could make that record again. When I moved to Portland in 1999, I had a lot of insecurity about having spent the entire decade of the ‘90s recording strictly on 4-tracks. No one was listening to that cassette-based, lo-fi style anymore. It felt like I was its last, lone practitioner, still fully engaged in a dead language. [laughter] Cassettes were my entire canvas. Then, when I heard Will Oldham [Tape Op #40] make I See a Darkness [as Bonnie "Prince" Billy], and Smog do something similar with Knock, Knock, I was like, "Oh no, everybody's leaving me behind."
Did you feel a pressure that other lo-fi artists were moving into a mid-fi recording space, and you weren’t sure if you were going to go along with it?
I’d been living up near the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina for four years before moving out to Portland, so I’d been completely outside of the music world. When I came down out of the fog, I realized that everybody had already abandoned lo-fi, and I started sweating. I wasn’t totally comfortable in the studio yet. Becoming a true "studio musician" was still a psychological frontier I had to surmount.
Was that because you had to deal with another person in the room watching you perform all these vulnerable songs? Maybe you needed to be alone to create those projects.
That's a good guess. I definitely couldn't imagine operating on drugs in the studio in the same way that I’d grown up recording at home. I wasn't going to be in my own world anymore. The late ‘90s were a strange time for the underground, because the new trend was to try and make extremely digestible music. I was pretty aware that there might not be a place for people like me anymore. The Mountain Goats had abandoned the boombox for the studio and Guided By Voices [Tape Op #6] were no longer out on this weird, schizophrenic planet. I was going to have to learn to adapt quickly if I didn’t want to be left behind.
But you weren’t left behind. How did you find your footing while moving towards the world of hi-fi?
My dad was close with Fred Neil and David Crosby when I was a little kid in Coconut Grove, Miami. Somewhere underneath all my punk brattiness, there was some deep folk vocabulary stored up in my unconscious mind. I’d never reached into that bag to fully dive into the "mature" aspects of my style.
You eventually figured out how to record in hi-fi settings in an authentic way. Did it feel as cathartic to you as recording had been in your early stages?
Not at first. It took a couple years of practice before I got comfortable. Cassettes just sounded the way I imagined a human being sounds in a room. Switching over to the new digital workstations that were coming out in 1999 was going to require a complete shift in the material I was bringing. I’d loved Pavement [Tape Op #15] in their earliest incarnation, and was I was especially impressed with Stephen Malkmus’ aesthetic jump from Slanted and Enchanted to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Crooked Rain… was a big moment because it meant there was going to be a legitimate way forward in translating our lo-fi culture into the larger world.
Did it feel like you’d be losing some level of integrity by moving into a more digestible sound?
The world was going to move on without me either way, and there was going to be a new technological paradigm whether I liked it or not. The idea of punk music continuing on in the underground at that stage barely felt like a reality if you turned on MTV or remembered the whole Woodstock ‘99 vibe. Aggression and "rebellion" had been fully commodified by then,...
