Dread Zone: In Conversation with Emil Amos

Where outliers are concerned, Emil Amos is leader of the realm. The underdog that is never deterred; his creations constantly provoking thought and reaching every corner of the mind.

From the grainy, bone-raw recordings of early-era Holy Sons, as the project progressed through the years, Amos began to intersect Sebadoh-inspired lo-fi with a.m. tinged songcraft and the doom balladry from his endeavors with Grails and OM. The results were high-watermark, defining Amos as a thrill-seeker constantly driven by the dare. An artist whose mission is to always shine the light on new recesses others are too afraid to explore.

Away from music, the fact remains. Take Drifter’s Sympathy; the long-standing podcast that existed long before the artform was saturated by every man and his dog parting with insipid stories for the likes of streaming services to milk the discipline for all its worth. While Drifter’s Sympathy sees Amos untangle a story like no other, alongside his music a distinct pattern emerges. All aspects are intrinsically linked in one of most enthralling tales in modern music.

It continues under Amos’ own name with Zone Black: his follow-up to 2017’s Filmmusik and first for Drag City.

While recorded in tandem with Amos’ defining Holy Sons LP, Raw and Disfigured (also Sun 13’s inaugural album of year in 2020), Zone Black is a different proposition. Always on high alert to create something outside of the conventional paradigm, Amos delivers a drug-inspired body high album that reaches new emotional depths.

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It’s where the worlds of hip-hop, psychedelia and krautrock entwine in something meticulous, absorbing, and meditative. While Raw and Disfigured was deep in the ire of crisis, despite what its title suggest, Zone Black operates on the fringes of the blast zone. In that sense it’s very much an escapist record. New world, body music in its purest form, and while billed as a library album initially pitched to London’s KPM, again, Amos maintains the mirage and mystique, delivering something wildly different to anything in this space.

It starts with the multi-dimensional moodscape of Moving Target, and from here Amos pushes and pulls us through different portals. From the narcotic echoes of Theme From A Personal Prison and Realistic #1, to the languid meanderings of the title track and Interloper #1.

Meanwhile, the hyper inventiveness of Bad Night at Cowboys is like a searing lightning rod that electrifies dreams. Then there’s Static Mist II, which is closely aligned to the crippling dread that dominated Raw and Disfigured, arriving like a low hanging cloud from hell.

And while the dark, morose textures of Red Palms and Zone Bleu wouldn’t look out of place on a Grails record, it’s the panoramic dreamscape of Blue Palms that ties the story of Zone Black together. A subversive-hearted series of bliss-scapes that will become one of the most potent forces in the Emil Amos canon.

Zone Black is an album for solitude. An album where natural tendencies for human interaction dissolve. In many ways, it makes Zone Black an out-of-body experience, and who better the architect than the chief underdog himself?

At the beginning of June I caught up with Amos via Zoom. Since our last conversation back in September 2020, in some peculiar way, it was like we’d picked up where we left off from all those years ago. Again, this conversation was lengthy, clocking in at over two hours, where we talked about the state of music, creative processes, and Zone Black.

S13: Where in the world are you today? 

EM: “I’m in North Carolina, sitting at home in the room where both Raw and Disfigured and Zone Black were made. They began at the same time a few years ago when I’d moved back to my childhood neighborhood and was feeling little freaked out to be back where I’d originally started.

“Listening back, there’s an unmistakable sadness in the melodies that might not have been there otherwise. But it was an opportunity to take stock and put all those semi-morose feelings into those two records. They were made alongside each other but somehow present as two totally different things.  

“The next record I’m finishing up [the new Lilacs & Champagne album], isn’t going to have this same energy at all, so I guess there are times when you become extra aware of the opportunity to bottle up a particular period of your life.”  

S13: Listening to Zone Black, and not that the two are remotely linked, but it got me thinking about Spotify playlists and how the album itself has been devalued by tech. Did you ever think technology would have so much resentment to the human emotion and artistic expression?  

EA: “We’ve all gotten familiar with the idea that the internet is this evil mutation that descended down upon us and destroyed what was once the natural world… but to be fair, when I think about pre-internet life, people were just as stupid. People were just as non-receptive to things of depth on average… so if I’m really being honest with myself, I think there was always an available excuse for people to be avoidant.  

“People have always had a vast array of excuses for why it’s okay to live a conscience-less life and why it’s perfectly understandable not to challenge yourself. They may say, ‘I don’t really care what other people think’, as if it’s a rebellious statement… but that’s probably just the perennial escapist tendency again. 

“As we come into this new maze of AI algorithms, and people already don’t have the patience to sit with anything within the current speed of the news cycle… we’re forced to try and communicate through this super-dense wall of shallow systems you’re talking about… and that just gives people a better excuse for doing what they’ve always done, which is to find ways of escape. 

“I suffer from a brutal attention span deficit, for sure… but I still see the LP format as the dominant way to hear what someone is trying to say in music… 40 minutes still feels like the exact amount of time you need for some kind of total immersion. And if you don’t like the length of the LP, that’s kind of like saying you can’t really stand getting to know people at all… that 40 minutes is just too much of an investment. And if we accept that level of intimacy shouldn’t be part of the point of art, then we’re celebrating art in a watered down, more powerless state. And we’ve compartmentalised sound so successfully that it can’t really be dangerous anymore. 

“So, your question is timely because it reflects a kind of mass distance right now. And it’d be easy to assume that people are using this kind of compartmentalisation in all contexts to make it faster and easier to escape all the time…”  

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S13: Zone Black was initially pitched to KPM in London, right? Talk us through it…  

EM: “It was a convergence of a couple life factors. When Grails first came over in 2004, Holy Sons opened. We came to London and recorded at Southern studios and played a show with a sort of sister band we’d met called Guapo. Daniel O’Sullivan played in that band. Do you know him?”  

S13: Yeah. Grumbling Fur and Ulver? 

EM: “Right, he’s been in the new formation of This Heat and made all kinds of records. About six years ago, I was back in London again and we played a show together and backstage he said, ‘You should make some library records with my friend Paul that works at KPM’… not knowing that I was a huge fan of KPM records from the ’70s/80s. 

“Grails had been basing certain aesthetic decisions on some of the classic KPM library records, so when he said that to me, a special door opened up. Daniel, Steve Moore and Ben Chasny were all lined up to make library records through KPM at this time, too. It made a lot of sense; we’d  all come up together and were friends. And at that moment we weren’t totally sure if Grails had another record in us, so it was a perfect time to pivot and make a different kind of instrumental record. 

“At the time I’d also been living in New York with this hilarious roommate that used to be a Prince impersonator. He’d started bringing home a strain of Indica weed I could function really well on and still mix records. I’d been hanging out with Steve Shelley and he’d given me a lot of the Sonic Youth experimental records that I’d missed back in the day. So, I started listening to their experimental records while smoking pot and came to the realisation that, in some way, a lot of the avant-garde music I may have veered away from as a kid was totally perfect for getting high and experiencing music as just pure texture with no clear focal point.”

S13: The SYR material?   

EA: “Yeah. I was realising that my ADD had greatly fucked up my ability to enjoy long-form, low-activity music for the majority of my life. There was also a new record store at that time in Chinatown called Two Bridges that became my favourite place to go for abstract records. It was underneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges inside of a Chinese flea market, tucked away in a back corner upstairs. I started going in there hesitantly at first because you wouldn’t know a single record in the store… and I’d been living in a paradigm where ‘new music sucks’ for years, you know?  

“Simon, who ran the store, had essentially become the core distribution point for all new avant-garde music around the world at this time. He’d found ways to get all the newest and most obscure records from the farthest parts of the world really quickly and had killer taste. So, I’d walk in and say, ‘You know what I like, will you show me what came out this week?’ And he’d walk around the store, piling up about 30 records from around the world of the most fucked up, interesting, rule-breaking music. And I’d drop like 300 bucks and never know who made the music and often never look at their names.” 

(Both laugh)  

“It was about re-discovering the mystique of music and soaking up this worldwide dialogue in real time. I’d grown up making instrumental music, and we’d all watched everyone from Sebadoh to Dog Faced Hermans to The Beatles, integrate aspects of atonal noise against melody. And I was always obsessed with that relationship but was also kind of ashamed I’d never had the patience to make a truly mature, beautiful Vangelis-style, instrumental record. And Grails always felt a little hemmed in by our rock instruments and the expectation that audiences might be expecting to get their faces ripped off. So, we created Lilacs & Champagne to be as bizarre and unnatural as we wanted to be. But there was still something missing.  

“To some extent, ADD has been a curse on my brain chemistry… I often felt like I just couldn’t calm down and make the kind of true body high music that I could benefit from myself. Holy Sons was largely built on message music like Minor Threat… the attempt to compact the quickest sentiment across the speakers to your ears that could change the way someone thinks. But in the ’90s it felt like that approach was eventually starting to become passé and tiring out listeners, so I just continued that tradition on for myself in private… waiting for some kind of window to open back up where people might be able to understand what I’d done with my life. I hung back watching the major assimilation of underground music into mainstream culture, mostly in a kind of horror. It’s disgusting to watch people take what you care about and just make it a background, lifestyle ornament. Music is often just a nice little plant people put in the corner of their living room to warm up the room.

“We watched as skateboarding and just about everything in the underground was assimilated one by one into the larger market… but the one form they were never able to figure out how to make money from was lo-fi. You can hear avant-techno in the stadium of an NBA game… punk and hip-hop are just backgrounds for car commercials now. But lo-fi could never help facilitate dumbasses to hit the jackpot, so they left it alone… so I was always positioned perfectly to stay out of reach.”  

S13: Music doesn’t appear to be life or death for that segment, that’s for sure.  

EM: “My early attitude towards making things ‘sound good’ was that that’s the aspect of music that’s lulling people to sleep, so it was just natural to ignore that aspiration. That was a classic tenet of Captain Beefheart… that the 4/4 beat was the enemy because it was just too friendly. And when people get too comfortable, they eventually become un-conditioned to confronting difficult truths. So Holy Sons was built to be something quintessentially ‘uninviting’ in its way… so you’d be forced to wrestle with a three-dimensional person in the same room… and since nothing could soothe you into a place of distraction, you’d have to focus on the transcendent point of the art.  

“But after embodying that method for decades, you inevitably get a little sick of yourself and realise that getting back into your body and that a little less self-consciousness would feel really good… texture and sound-in-itself could become beautiful again in a very present, practical and immediate sense.

“And being high is a really nice divining rod for sound… on the one hand you don’t want sharp, angular, headache music in that zone. And it’s nice if something isn’t too repetitive or predictable. It points you towards a specific value system where total freedom and experimentation meet inside of a particularly sensual/hedonistic approach… and that’s a powerful target. So, the only real worry for this record becomes, ‘Do enough people out there smoke enough hash to understand it?’” 

(Both laugh)  

S13: It’s funny, because to me, Zone Black has that noirish, narcotic effect you’re talking about. All your projects, including the podcast, everything’s linked in some way. The interludes during the podcast, I get that vibe with this record, but it’s more wholesome. There’s an evident hip-hop influence with Lilacs and its here, too. Do you remember first getting into hip-hop?  

EM: “The golden age of skateboarding. The golden age of underground music, hardcore and hip-hop… It all lurched forward in those same years, and I was a little kid at the perfect age when it all exploded in front of us. 

“After such an obscure beginning, hip-hop broke really fast early on… it was suddenly everywhere, and it was suddenly everybody’s music. And by the time you get to Public Enemy and Prince Paul, it became obvious that hip-hop was one of the most radical opportunities for anyone to shove hundreds of ideas into a song. A whole new ceiling was ripped off of traditional production methods, for sure.

“There are rules you can break in hip-hop you can’t even approach in other music. As long as you have some kind of repetition, everything else can be absolute batshit crazy. I don’t see that opportunity in almost any other kind of music. And I don’t even understand the frequency that pop music is talking to the average person on; it’s so insanely insincere. Like the emotion in a One Direction song… “You’re the only girl for me, and I love the way you smile!” People cry to that shit! I don’t know how they can swim in that emotional sewage, but they find a way somehow.  

“People see music as such a tiny, little compartment. And maybe this presents a great situation for me because nobody’s really watching my little corner of the world… so now I can fuck you up! (laughs) There’s a superpower in grasping these freedoms… and using hip-hop as an artistic opportunity, instead of just trying to find another way to make money with it, really respects the form.” 

S13: Going back to the conquest of pop music… there used to be more of a certain underground tribalism in music that’s slowly receding to the point where it might be on the verge of extinction. Growing up in the feverish underground of ’80s/’90s, does an alternative music scene exist anymore?   

EM: (Pause) “Any of our ideas can be uploaded and shot around the world within seconds now, and the equipment is easily available for any person of any age to quickly master it. And I’m not sure the common consumer can often tell the difference between something that’s been wildly laboured on for years versus something that’s just been thrown together in seconds. So, the field of vision at this point is so crowded, that it’s a little easier to ignore that music used to fully be able to change people’s minds.

“The underground was originally a kind of ‘family’… hyper concerned with keeping raw expression and freedom alive. So, when you see everything getting relativised very quickly… and you see the crowd not necessarily catching the difference… and you see the way money moves through these micro-Amazon portals now… it’s just not a very exciting frontier.  

“The news cycle itself, whether there’s a mass shooting with 80 people dead this morning, or if the White Album gets released tomorrow, it’s all going to be scrolled by in five minutes either way. So, we have to adjust somehow… the world won’t stop spinning for us. We’re all looking for some kind of meaningful love and this new paradigm seems to be saying that the world just doesn’t have the time to give it to you. Everyday there’s a new article about how people are more unhappy than ever. We’re not in the 1800s where we’re anticipating the future of society being more advanced and we can be hopeful of what’s in store for us… we’re already in the future and it isn’t looking so fantastic anymore.”

(Both laugh)    

S13: Do you see an association with Zone Black and Filmmusik?  

EM: “Yeah, definitely. I’d made most of Filmmusik in small apartments around Brooklyn. I’d figured I might be able to move to NYC from Portland and try working in music studios that were making music for TV or film. But I visited some studios and watched people making commercial music and was pretty much immediately like, ‘Wow, this shit does not look fun!’ It seemed pretty gruelling and can be thankless work, for sure.  

“So the Filmmusik idea originally began as a calling card to say I could make different kinds of library music, but that idea quickly evolved into a much more selfish, self-gratifying version of ‘film music’”.  

S13: With Zone Black, there are some similarities to Raw and Disfigured in terms of where it sonically takes you. The way I see it, you’re operating in this impenetrable sound realm against 95 percent of the rest of the world. So, people that get it, really get it.

EM: “Right, right.”

S13: There are dark corners within that world where you still haven’t been. Your objective is to get there at some point, and here you’ve gone into a new, hidden crease. That’s the whole point: to keep flipping the script all the time right?  

EM: “Totally. When Grails was a much younger and hungrier band, people often commented that every time a new record came out, it presented as a different band. We were flipping our new influences so fast that you might not recognise it was the same entity on the next record.”    

[I hold a copy of Doomsdayer’s Holiday up to the screen]  

“Oh man, I got that cover image in this legendary bookstore that’s closed down in Portland now and I loved it so much that I still have dreams about it. But yeah, there was always an obligation to outpace any lazy aesthetics.”

S13: On Drifter’s Sympathy during your conversation with Stephen Malkmus, you touched on waking up in the morning and having 20 different emotions throughout the creative process. It got me thinking - how do you feel after you finish the record? Does a weight feel like it’s been lifted, or is there like an empty-feeling depression?  

EM: “Strangely, on average I often find myself in a kind of shitty mood when a new record is delivered. It appears to be a total coincidence at the time… and I’m always hard at work on the next record on those days. But maybe this is all a part of how natural order works, because you have to be kind of upset to begin a whole new thesis…

“I often think back about a songwriter friend of mine saying to me back in the day, ‘When I play music, I transform into the coolest parts of myself. I become the thing I want to be’. And that was really confusing because I’m trying so hard to reveal something that’s occurring in real time, more like a field recorder… not build myself into something more attractive. I’m trying to record whatever attractiveness was there in the room that day. And that’s a totally different approach and brain chemistry at work.

“The artist temperament is ruled by the fact that you’re making these things because you’re looking for an emotional equilibrium… you’re trying to ‘make things right again’ in theory. So, the record after it’s made is a bit of a trophy, for sure, but it can’t technically provide sanity itself, you know? The reason why you keep working is because you’re still upset… you’ve never solved the situation. 

“Also, maybe the fact that I’m often working by myself, from the beginning of the idea to the very end of it being packaged and shipped out, is a little abnormal. The history of music wasn’t really like that. Generally, the history of making records was much more of a group effort, you know?”  

S13: But that still feeds into your idea. I see that as a part of your makeup as the outlier. The preservation of DIY.  

EM: “Yeah, that’s definitely true. And I think a lot of the original lo-fi pioneers wrestled with guilt about how selfish their music was, and a lot of them eventually took refuge in trying to become much more normal entertainers. And I was bummed about that at the time… feeling like, ‘You guys are abandoning our job and we’re not done’.”  

S13: That is your job right? That’s part of the accomplishment of what we’ve been discussing, in a certain sense. 

EM: “Yeah, I don’t want people to be able to write us off so easily. There was a distinct urgency in hip-hop, hardcore and lo-fi. It’s a young, obstinate energy to say ‘No, stop this idiocy, it’s my turn to talk’. The reason we have heroes, the reason why we put a poster of a guy dunking from the free-throw line up on our wall when we’re nine years old is because we ultimately see that potential in ourselves. But when kids get tripped up and decide that they are merely a consumer and not really part of the greater dialogue, that’s one of the great, early mistakes Capitalism offers you… that you’re not important. That’s the worst way to teach people to approach this world. In reality, every product the customer is putting up on a place of worship is really just the suggestion that there are other, new ideas that they themselves can generate. The death of youth or freedom is only in your mind… Everything is just an idea.”   

Zone Black is out now via Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.