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, so the underground was trying to differentiate itself by moving in the opposite direction, developing slow-core and much softer sounds. I still wasn’t comfortable presenting myself yet… I was only comfortable in my own world, recording alone. But you’re seduced by your idols to believe in the dream. Malkmus had such an effortless persona, and I didn't know if I could find that kind of grace within me. I still felt extremely angsty, and had been making this kind of schizophrenic, psychic-voyaging music in basements across America for what was bound to be an extremely small audience.
I listened to your first official record Lost Decade [1999] today, and it's still so strong. How does it feel to be firmly in a more hi-fi realm now?
I’m honestly still kind of doing the same thing I always did. It's not me who’s changed as much as technology itself. The best art that’s made in the crest of any artist's career is usually made in transition when they're not exactly sure where they're going. Where they end up in the end isn’t usually what most listeners were even looking for. I still see myself in a constant technological transition, and still hungry, changing, and learning all the time.
What gets you excited when you’re approaching a new record?
The more leeway and opportunities I get, the more I’m going to try and make stranger records that may only satisfy myself. For some artists, that might be like trying to break inside the prison instead of trying to get out of it. But anywhere I see a kind of true freedom in music, I’m always drawn in that direction.
Your recent solo record, Zone Black, was a "library record." What do you consider library music, and why are you interested in it?
"Library music" generally means that it’s music composed for use in television or film. As a field of sound, it’s one of the most lawless, bizarre areas of record-making. Over the years in Grails, I came to the realization that certain library composers were allowed much more freedom than any rock band generally is, and I’d grown really jealous of those freedoms.
Because you felt like your band was stuck inside of a genre?
Yeah. There are times when you get the feeling that the rock band format hasn’t really been updated from its original inception point in the ‘50s or ’60s. And just because you're in a rock band doesn't really mean you're an artist. That seems like a title that has to be earned in some kind of Sisyphean way. For Zone Black, I was looking for a sonic concept that had no ceiling. A place where I'm allowed to explore extra dark feelings without worrying too much about what kind of audience I'm courting. A band like Goblin got to go to some very bizarre and beautiful places, and their records still stand tall as a totally unique contribution to film music. There's a total freedom in library music, and that seduced me towards the realm the classic film composers got to inhabit.
It seems like you've been fighting a world that wants to pigeonhole you into a genre, which probably explains why you have so many different types of bands.
My love for other people's music is out of my control. It's so rabid that it leads my own music in directions that may not be very wise, in a business sense. It seems pretty obvious that moments of brilliance in music occur when people don’t give a fuck about what's in fashion. But it can be a very lonely island to uphold that world view. Music that exists outside of social scenes doesn’t reach people with the same efficiency as music that’s located upon very obvious genre shelves. I’d set out with a love of outsider music from the age of 13, before realizing how the music business really worked. I couldn’t grasp that most people are only drawn to the glossy recreations of art that come way after the inventive moments that’ve generally occurred in obscurity. The true success of an artist is to create a world in which you can keep experimenting. That’s the goal. Not some plateau where you make so much money that you don't have to perpetuate the art anymore.
Do you call yourself an engineer?
I don’t, even though that’s what I do every day and night.
But you've recorded almost all of your own records.
The reason I don’t call myself an engineer is because I don’t necessarily want to be in a professional state of mind when I’m mixing. I’d rather have the leeway to be completely instinctual, and able to do things the wrong way consistently. I don't want to do what's right. I feel like it's part of my job to make something that’s hard to replicate. I want to go to a place that’s so strange that I can't get back there myself.
Has it always been that way? When you first pressed record, did you want to be innovative, or were you just recording without any of that context?
In the beginning, I spent a lot of time imitating my lo-fi heroes to learn how they achieved those sounds. The way Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney [Sebadoh] used broken instruments and broken tape recorders to basically reflect their inner experience was the most exciting, anarchistic thing I’d heard. It's like they were doing everything wrong in the technical universe, but doing everything right, in terms of reflecting their inner emotional field. Kids around me were using the 4-track as a sketchbook towards becoming someone in a famous rock band, while I saw it as the whole thing.
Do you still use old tape machines like that?
For the new record I’m working on, I’ve gone back to splicing up damaged sounds on cassettes to sort of counter the fact that a lot of music you hear now is all beginning to sound the same. I hear a lot of good ideas on new records, but because they are so quickly rendered using Ableton [Live], they don’t stand out sonically and often don’t offer any great psychedelic depth. The ease of all the gear available now is making it so that everything sounds so completely on the grid, as well as sort of ignorable in ways.
You’re a drummer, which naturally gives you an advantage when using drum machines. I know you’ve used the Akai MPC heavily in your previous work. Do you have a favorite machine you're using for this new record?
I’ve recently been using the Roland Rhythm Performer [TR8S] to work fast. But the heart of a lot of my songs comes back to the Akai MPC 2500 because that's where I keep the library of records I've sampled from. As a selector, I get to reconfigure these arbitrary sounds and replace them into a sequence that satisfies the part of my brain looking for something it hasn’t heard before. I guess it's my recapitulation of music history. If I kept writing folk songs, I could end up sounding like Stephen Stills making a bad digital blues record in 1998. So, I try to regularly change up the equipment I use, as well as my approach.
When I listen to your earliest recordings, they feel very private.
Those early songs have this character of entertaining myself on a whim with my most caustic feelings, and – because I’m so aware of my current solitude – there’s a bizarre level of self-confidence that gets captured. That solipsistic world created a playground I don't think I’d be able to recreate. There’s barely any punching in on those early performances. Each take was a quick, intuitive interpretation of that instrument’s role, but when I put it all together it sounds like this inspired, organic band playing out on a lonely, claustrophobic planet.
How did you wind up with John Agnello [Tape Op #14] to create the Holy Sons album, In the Garden?
Partisan Records hooked me up with Agnello. They’d loved the work he’d done with Kurt Vile, and essentially wanted to commission us to make a kind of epic The Dark Side of the Moon-type record. John and I clicked immediately, because we’re both '70s music freaks and feel an intense kinship for that era of production. There's something about those beige LPs that sound so perfect late at night, next to a fireplace with a whiskey. We had a shared aesthetic idea to make a re-imagined "Poco record with big hooks" together. John had seen Humble Pie live a hundred times when he was a kid, and he understands that entire frequency. I sent him demos of a batch of bigger-sounding songs I'd been keeping to the side for a circumstance like this. While I was living in New York, I’d been playing for all different kinds of audiences and needed some new songs that people could understand quickly in any random circumstance. I wrote that batch in standard tunings and went for slightly more obvious payoffs, because I knew no one would ever give me a budget like that again.
Did Agnello understand the way you work, in terms of simulating a band by yourself?
Yes, and because of the expense we tried to move as quickly as possible. We were holed up in Water Music in Hoboken, [New Jersey], for a couple of weeks – a beautiful studio that’s sadly gone now. I slept upstairs every night and charged down every morning to go back at it again. It was an insane amount of performances. Running to the grand piano, running to the drum set, and running to the vocal booth. I’m sure people might hear a record like that as somewhat scripted "traditional" music, but even a very organized record can still be made in an experimental way when you’re moving fast and playing various roles on different instruments quickly.
Multitracking is a natural process for your mind.
I've been using the same method of recording instruments for so long that it's all automatic. John was the perfect partner, because his approach is so refined that he doesn't really talk about what he's doing either. He's just following his instincts the entire time. If I did ask John any technical questions, he was usually just like, “Do you think it sounds good, or do you want it to sound different?” That was a great confirmation for me, to see one of the great engineers at work and realizing that we’re basically doing the same thing.
You’ve created a long-running and well-loved podcast with Drifter’s Sympathy. Does doing the podcast give you a similar release as writing and recording an album?
I guess making records wasn't completely presenting the whole artistic picture I’d originally had in my mind. When I was growing up, there was such a strong mythology around the characters in underground bands. There was a semi-religious feeling to being a fan as a kid, and that feels like it's been fading away for some time now. Music can be regarded as just sound, not seen for what it means, and that’s always bothered me. I like getting down to the bottom of things, ideologically. So, maybe I was slowly coming to the realization that I needed to write a book if I really wanted to explore bigger concepts. My friend, Duncan Trussell, started podcasting during the ground floor era in the mid-2000s [The Duncan Trussell Family Hour], and he demonstrated to me that the podcast format could reach a lot more people faster than an obscure book would. Music can sometimes come off like you're trying to sell something to someone, whereas Drifter’s Sympathy felt like it established a more communal vibe and met listeners halfway.
Did it end up conveying more of what you’d wanted to say with music?
Totally. I’d originally understood songwriting from a Minor Threat approach. A podcast is allowed to exist outside of all the signifiers and fashionable attitudes music is often clouded with.
Does Drifters Sympathy provide a backbone philosophy that supports all of your music?
Completely. I would have loved it if my heroes had delivered a "road map" to life outside of music when I was a kid. I loved reading interviews and getting closer to the ideas behind everything, instead of just going to a show.
In a sense, the podcast is a good tool for your fans to dive deeper, but also stands alone without needing one to know your music.
That's the beauty of it. I'm not Elton John. You’re forced to hear an anonymous human being extremely transparent, which creates the kind of trust underground kids like us were looking for from the beginning. 
