The Dark Arts: In Conversation with Emil Amos & Duncan Trussell

Whether engineering the prank call or having been on the wrong end of one, most have participated in this space at some point in their lives. As you would expect, Emil Amos and Duncan Trussell took the art form of the prank call to a whole new level.

During the ’90s, the perennial underdogs quickly formed an alliance at Warren Wilson, the liberal arts college in Asheville, North Carolina. It was these formative years that would forge a path that Amos and Trussell would explore in their respective futures.

Deep practitioners of outsider culture and, by extension, rebellion, these philosophies explored throughout their college years formed the bedrock for what they would each become. Amos, a crucial voice from the alternative underground as co-founder of Grails and Lilacs & Champage, as well as being the mastermind of the shadowy doom odyssey, Holy Sons and the Drifter’s Sympathy podcast; Trussell, a revered stand-up comedian, actor, founder of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and co-creator of the Netflix series, The Midnight Gospel.

While the seeds of Amos and Trussell’s relationship were sown in college, Insidious Mind Control is a vital early chapter of their story. The first recordings of prank calls orchestrated from Amos’ college dorm, Trussell takes the lead as he essentially turns the mind of his target inside out.

Naturally, there’s a humorous aspect to Insidious Mind Control, but it’s not the focal point; the pair exposing the deep seeded behavioural pattern whereby humans are ceaselessly susceptible to the psychological grift. Or as Trussell emphatically states, “The human mind being hacked”. It’s one of the many vignettes he and Amos offer during our conversation via Zoom in late August.

Throughout their respective careers, while the pair have splintered off from that path forged in the ’90s, a crosspollination of ideas has remained. The calls on Insidious Mind Control are a look into the young mind of Trussell who, with a unique mental nimbleness, shepherds his quarry towards the same dark corners Amos has explored throughout the years as Holy Sons. It’s here where a liminal space exists between the two.

Anyone who has listened to the numerous episodes between Amos and Trussell on the TDTFH and Drifter’s Sympathy podcasts will know of their unique cadence in conversation. This experience is similar. The difference? This isn’t a podcast.

The first print interview the pair have conducted together, it felt essential to start at the beginning of their journey and how their relationship began…

Metaphysical Transitions: In Conversation with Lilacs & Champagne’s Emil Amos & Alex Hall

Sun 13: What are your earliest memories of meeting each other?

Emil Amos: “We met in the most important phase of your life.”

Duncan Trussell: “In the womb!”

EA: (Laughs) “By the time I was entering college, I was a fully formed practitioner… a ritualist, little witch. I immediately found myself sticking out like a sore thumb when I got there. Duncan and I spotted each other because both of us weren’t blending in well. We weren’t necessarily popular at the school or doing well in classes at first. So when we met, it was the beginning of us both glimpsing that our unusual natures could be flipped into something good or something possibly more universal.

“It was really exciting to meet someone else that had the same curiosities and was using their intelligence to cross over to the other side of the tracks. To obsess over the occult and think about what’s behind the curtain of the surface world.

“And as a side plot to all this, the prank calls became a research and development field for our friendship. There’s an extreme playfulness to those calls… a spontaneity other areas of life weren’t giving us the window to use. My dorm room was a dark portal… any energy was allowed to fly in.  We knew that I had music as a daily religion, so we ended up using the same tape recorders to create a space for Duncan to have his own practice.”

DT: “It’s super important to note that when I started at Warren Wilson, I was a verifiable weirdo. But I thought, ‘Okay, here we go. I’m in college now, so all the LSD in high school and almost joining the Hare Krishnas… now I’m going to focus and take advantage of this education’. (laughs)

“I’d see Emil – I’d seen him around, he appeared to be really sullen and miserable – sometimes playing funhouse pinball in the cafeteria. He’d always have his jacket pulled all the way over his head so you couldn’t see his face… and then in women’s studies class, I remember his head was down on the desk in utter despair of his whole situation and at some point beginning to cackle out loud. And I remember thinking, ‘Look at him squandering this education!’ (laughs) I really didn’t like him at first. I thought of you as an example of wasting this precious knowledge we were there to learn.” 

EA: (Laughs)

DT: “At the time, my dad ran a shopping centre, and what happens when you can’t pay your rent at a shopping centre is they just change the lock and whatever’s in your store becomes something that they sell to cover your costs. A CD store had closed, and my dad had called and said, ‘What music do you want from this store?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Pink Floyd’. He sent me a bunch of Pink Floyd CDs in a box. Emil came and sat next to me in the lunchroom, and this is when our friendship really started. I was initially like, ‘Oh, there’s that fucking dick’. But you sat next to me, and said, ‘What did you get? and I replied, ‘It’s all Pink Floyd!’ He said, ‘We should go listen to these in my dorm room!’ 

“You have to understand. I loved music, but I’d never been around someone who was an actual musician making music which I didn’t understand. That’s what Emil was at the time. Suddenly there’s four tracks and guitars at hand! But he can really play guitar. I remember what Holy Sons songs you were working on at the time and I couldn’t believe it. You introduced me to Daniel Johnston. I think you just followed the musical lineage from Floyd and figured, ‘Well, he may like this’, and then you played me the first Daniel Johnson song I’d ever heard, Rock ‘n’ Roll / EGA.”

EA: “Oh my god, I love that song.”

DT: “So I played that. I’m listening to it, and the beginning part was so haunting and beautiful. I could relate to the opening, and then it transformed into this evil thing that actually felt satanic!”

EA: “Totally, he starts screaming about Lucifer.”

DT: “Yeah. I’m like, ‘This is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard in my life’. I was mad at you again!”

EA: (Laughs)

DT: “I thought, ‘I can’t even fucking believe he gave me this evil shit!’ (laughs) That was my first introduction to lo-fi, which I’ve never stopped listening to and I’ve always been in love with, but I was really angry again at you. So that’s how I ended up getting to be friends with Emil. There was a lot of respect for the music he was making and a lot of confusion regarding whatever this lineage of music and art that he was attached to. But I got really lucky we became friends.”

EA: “You make it sound like you’d crawled out of this Hendersonville hell to the salvation of a higher education and you’re like, ‘My new life!’ And then I just pulled you back down into Satan’s clutches.” (laughs)

DT: “Yeah, I love that. You call it satanic, and I do think there’s something to that with actual art… it’s so wild and undomesticated, if you’ve entertained some idea of rehabilitating yourself into a normie… and then you meet an actual artist, there’s going to be some cognitive dissonance as you glimpse what that actually looks like.

“The other thing was seeing your diligent hard work… the drudgery you’d put yourself through to make those songs. It isn’t all wild chaos, there’s this other side to it, which is somehow reigning that in via the discipline of making a song. Which again, I had no idea how to make a song at the time, so trying to understand what you’re talking about when you were mixing it down or trying to make sense of this thing at the time that looked like a spaceship to me, the four track, I didn’t understand any of it. But it was a great friendship in that regard, and then to suddenly get to participate creatively with these prank calls. My god, we just couldn’t believe the campus phone lines were rigged perfectly for it so no one could trace us.”  

EA: “Do you remember how we stumbled on the concept that they couldn’t figure out where we were calling from?”

DT: “I think that came after the fact. I think you just had that handheld cassette recorder on hand, and it evolved. I don’t even know why we originally decided to make a prank call.”

EA: (Laughs) “You have a whole different take because, in my mind, the way you came off was not someone that seemed normal or was attempting to be normal.”

DT: “Compared to you, I was normal! And I’d been taking LSD as a practice since the tenth grade! Do you understand? You were offending someone who was definitely the weirdest person in the room. I thought, ‘This guy’s out of control!’” (laughs)

EA: “Back in Chapel Hill, I’d seen creative kids, and understood their confidence. I was of the mind early on that ‘It can be done’. So by the time I got to Asheville, I’d been studying that practice for some years by that point… and you sort of just walked into my workshop. And then, the way you ran out of my room after hearing Daniel Johnson, I probably thought, ‘Well, that wasn’t a very good audition of my culture’. 

“I never understood that all the famous movements we read about… like ‘Swinging London’, was probably like 250 people. Andy Warhol’s movement was mostly, like, 80 people. The Sex Pistols movement originated with, like, 60 people. All these legendary things in books about renaissance art and all these movements were basically started by a very small group of people that somehow found each other. Sometimes two people find each other and set a spiritual fire, chant around it and go to another realm. But generally, these types of people are spread throughout the world and throughout time, they never get to meet. I think I’d already known that I had an ideological family, and that breed had a kind of understanding of the ‘blacker arts’. But back in the ’80s and early ’90s, Christianity was still incredibly dominant, so if you wore your clothes a little too big, used dark sarcasm and drugs, you were seen as being part of some sort of the criminal/satanic element in these small southern towns.”

S13: That’s difficult to even imagine back then…

DT: “You’ve got to add in the setting. You’re in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, just post-Satanic Panic. When I was growing up in North Carolina, I’d be sitting in class and there’d be kids from some church saying with great confidence that the world was going to end at noon because on Sunday their insane pastor had told them the world’s ending! And you’d sit there and think, ‘Fuck yes, this is incredible!’ You’d really have this hope that you’re not going to have to be in school… early dismissal at the very least! And then noon passes and you’re still fucking there!  

“The mood in the Appalachian Mountains to this day is still some distant cousin of the beginning of Dracula, which is incredible… or any great HP Lovecraft story where, inevitably, someone goes into the dark mountains and there’s a lot of superstition. Some of the superstition is probably justified. There’s a kind of witchy vibe up in those mountains that’s more pronounced than other places, and with the symbol set a lot of people are using to look at reality, there’s this incredible potential for blasphemy that doesn’t exist in other places. 

“And of course, if you do have this outsider sense and you’ve tried to fit in and it just isn’t working, then what’s left but to blaspheme just to get some kind of reaction? You don’t even realise you’re learning something, but you’re becoming a professional blasphemer. You don’t think to yourself, ‘This is some kind of reaction to the Evangelical, moralistic, puritanical oppression we’ve been experiencing in some way’. But you start realising, ‘My god, all I have to do is bring a deck of tarot cards to high school and a lot of people freak out’. You’re realising there’s a lot of potential energy that can create these little chaos explosions, and that’s a form of entertainment within that sort of drudgery.”

EA: “Were there any experiments in high school you had done that mirrored something like the prank calls?”

DT: “There had been little acts. For me, it was the discovery that if you take LSD in the morning before you go to school… that’s going to be a great school day, and you can’t tell anyone! In those days, we didn’t know about microdosing… you were just like, ‘Let’s hope this works out!’ You would be in this boring science class merging with your desk, like, ‘My god, I’ve become infinite wood’. That happened to me once. I still remember the lecture he was teaching about the human eye, and he goes, ‘Sometimes the human eye dilates. This can happen when you go to the eye doctor, or it can happen on psychedelics. Isn’t that right Duncan?’ Because he must have seen my eyes. (laughs)

“That was the setting. Anytime you get to meet someone who’s making good art, it’s a real lucky thing, because it confirms it’s a possibility in the world. And until you’ve met someone in person, that possibility seems like a fantasy or a dream.”

EA: “There were times you were worried or ashamed the calls may’ve been too mean spirited, and that we shouldn’t release some of them. Do you think you were just merely trying to make me laugh as I’m sitting there with you? What were you really trying to do?”

DT: “Yeah, that was part of it. But we were also running into something that’s still very present today. You’re not initially thinking when you’re making prank calls in a dorm room with weed smoke floating in the air that you’re ever going to share these with a lot of people. All of the intent is localised in that moment, and the intent isn’t solely to make people laugh, but also this exploration into how willing people are to believe what this remote voice is telling them.

“This is before Robo-calling and pre-spam, so there’s no immune system. Everything is wide open, and you begin to realise that social engineering is the most powerful form of hacking. The human brain is so hackable. If you just call a hotel and say, ‘Let me talk to Bill Finn’ and blur it a little bit. They’re like, ‘Who? Well, there’s a Daniel Williams’. They’ll just give you the names and then suddenly you’ve travelled into someone’s room and transformed into the person at the front desk. Nobody would’ve thought to fact check that… and so now they’ll do anything because of this programming in humanity, which is to succumb to the hierarchy. That’s what we were realising: that people have been trained to believe these voices. And, sadly, if there’s some sense that the person talking to them is an authority, they’ll take on whatever role they’ve been assigned. 

“That’s why I love the name Insidious Mind Control. That’s what we’d stumbled upon. It was the first taste I ever had of just how absolutely susceptible people are to manipulation. It’s sinister, man. These days, at least people are a little more aware of the concept of the troll or misinformation. But to this day, people still veer towards believing something and not questioning it. And so, to really run into that setting, man, it filled me with such joy and simultaneous dread and guilt. It was this irresistible experiment where you just can’t fucking believe it. I would walk out of those calls feeling so guilty sometimes, thinking ‘What have I done?’”

S13: To have that self-awareness of feeling guilty at that age, though… a lot of people the same age probably wouldn’t have felt like that. Maybe you were pulled forward by these realisations to understand the dire consequences of them. 

EA: “There’s the one call that I think has and will continue to become a legendary call… I think the Home Shopping Network is one of the greatest of all time. That call will be the finale of the second tape we’ll put out next year… Duncan put it on YouTube years and years ago.

“He goes into the Home Shopping phone answering network, and he says he’s the boss. Then he enters this dance with an employee, continually testing her boundaries, but she goes toe-to-toe with him on some very spiritually confident levels and they determine a bizarre kind of friendship over the course of 10 minutes. It escapes any mean spiritedness and shows he was really just exploring, and you want the person to come with you. Some people respond more to low grade taunting, so Duncan just becomes the character the situation creates.”

S13: Absolutely.

DT: “That’s the other thing about these calls, because you make it seem like it was just me. The funniest thing you can hear on the call was Emil whispering lines to me. One of my least favourite jobs of all time that I had – this is in the old days before Amazon – I had to sit in a call centre and take orders for Clifford and Wells, which is a clothing company. You would just sit there and type orders, and it sucked. Your phone would beep, and they’d say, ‘You can go home now’. There was no difference between the phone beeping for the management and the phone beeping for the call. And that’s when we tried this, because I thought, ‘I wonder if that’s how it works at Home Shopping Network?’

“So I called and I said, ‘I’m their manager, we’re just going to ask you some questions’. Like an evaluation, and she totally went with it, because I guess the system was the same there… she just assumed I was the manager, and then you tune into the character as the call progresses. You’re sort of dialling in like, ‘Who do they think I am exactly? I’ll become more of that’. What are the boundaries of this new relationship? It’s some perceived power, lack of power and wanting to please your boss, which is the road to hell and the road to fascism. And even though the boss is essentially insinuating he’s a Nazi Satanist, she’s going along for the fucking ride. That’s when you’d whisper and say things like, ‘Tell her, Home Shopping Network is like one gigantic crack rock that all of society are taking hits off’, so you start sliding in little bombs like that and they just go along with it. (laughs)

“You hear these stories of serial killers, you’re in their car, and you just go along with it! Because it’s easier to go along with it than to not. So to me, that’s the darkness to these things. That’s what made me feel queasy about them. But how are you going to do benevolent prank calls? It’s impossible. It’s a form of deception and on some level you’re a chameleon invading their space. That’s what haunted me about them. But I’m glad they live to see the light.”

EA: “The serial killers that are the hardest to catch are when the motivation is impossible to detect… that’s what the victims of these calls are looking for and there’s no thread to hold onto! It’s absolute nonsense and people don’t have a framework for that. They want to understand why they’re being assaulted, but there’s just no reason, and that bewilders them further.

DT: “Some of them are obviously suspicious… it’s like this game of make believe, and you realise how quickly you can find the right string to pluck. A lot of the funniest ones are with a bouncer at a bar… you break through the rational mind to the lizard brain, and they just go to what their default seems to be, which is ‘Alright Puppy Dog I’m gonna murder you!’” (laughs) 

S13: You evoked Ronnie’s impulses for murder within nine minutes…

DT: “Just fucking ready to kill. There’s another shocking thing when you realise that ‘Jesus, this guy probably would kill me’.”

S13: Did you actually go to the Dairy Queen the next day looking from afar?

DT: “Hell no. I didn’t want to cross paths with Ronnie like that. No way. Again, the joy of it all was that we had a force field, which was the school switchboard. Our friends in security told us, ‘We’re getting these calls back to campus. Someone’s making prank calls within the school’, and we said, ‘We have no idea who it is!’ We were immune and protected. So it was the ideal situation for making prank calls.”

EA: “In the Home Shopping Network scenario, the boss comes through the earpiece and it’s amazing how she skirts all his bizarre philosophical advances and stays her own person. That’s what’s so life-affirming about that call. 

“There are so many ‘games people play’ aspects to these interactions held over from the 1800s. The way we’re supposed to act, because we wouldn’t want to be seen as an ugly person to anyone. So within the politics of language itself, there’s extreme power. The politics of interaction dictate that you’re always trying to come off a likable person and trying to stay within the lines. The calls exposed that everybody feels judged by God or some kind of camera all the time… even if they’re in private. Asheville, North Carolina in 1996 was the ultimate prank calling district, because it was a landlocked island up in the mountains where people might be lonely and bored up there without a lot of reference points and your voice is coming out of the void. And they have the greatest accents in the world. The funniest, sweetest accents… mountain people that have the time to sit on the phone as you create narratives that’re absurd, but they become curious to see if maybe they’ve found a new friend.”

DT: “I don’t think things have changed that much in the sense that there’s still a general assumption in the world that people wouldn’t be willing to just blatantly lie to get some response or reaction. We were chaos agents just truly having fun. To me, the thing that’s really unnerving about this human trance state many people allow themselves to be in, is that there’s a percentage of sociopaths in the world – people who don’t feel bad at all and walk away from the most atrocious acts – feeling more relaxed.

“When you take that aspect of the human population and mix it with people who are in various trance states regarding their own lives and aren’t expecting anyone to exploit that for power, you have a tilled field ready to grow some form of fascism. Because that’s all you need to do it! Once enough people believe what the experts say and when you add to that, ‘I want to be liked, I just want to fit in’… those are the ingredients for fascist stew!

“It’s wild to see what people believe. I did a podcast called 2 Bears 1 Cave, with this comic, Tom Segura. This was when Cat Williams had come out talking about the satanic initiations of Hollywood. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we talk about the initiations we’ve been through?’ Let’s improvise all the crazy shit we’ve done’. So I said, ‘I knew I’d be on Drunk History because a pit bull would come through my window sometimes and make me suck its dick’. I just assumed people would see it as satire, but a week later, Tom sends me the comments under some clip of us saying that, and many of them are like, ‘There they are, putting it out there in front of the world. That’s how it really is!’”

EA: “Oh my god.”

DT: “That was really funny to me, but it also seems to confirm that nothing has really changed. If people will believe two comedians are going in public to talk about fellating pit bulls to get on Drunk History and not question it… that’s unreal. You don’t want the majority of people to just accept what they read… you want people to question stuff. To me, the prank calls just illuminate these greater patterns in a low-level way.”

EA: “I’d been reading Carl Jung at that time, and he claimed to have predicted the rise of the Nazis because he could see an Achilles heel in the psychology of the German people at that time. It’s playing on that loneliness we’re talking about and turning it into a new energy. Maybe the people you’re talking about in those comments are the modern version of this breed of lonely, gullible ones.

“You open a door for someone, like you do in a call, and they’ll walk right through it if there’s a perceived reward. That transcendent idea exists throughout every societal paradigm, and I think our early conversations were often about that. 

“You were much more well read about a lot of this stuff… if you saw Duncan in the lunchroom, he would be on fire with ideas every day. ‘Did you read about this? Have you heard about this?’ I was always hungover and amazed you’d retained all this stuff. I had my own discipline, where I worked all night and then partied until I had to wake up to wash dishes in misery. And when I woke up and struggled to deal with the world, I’d see Duncan in the college bagel shop and he’d be on fire, riffing. It felt really fresh that the world of anthropology was open to any curious outsider who wanted to flex their intelligence for things outside of the grid of ascension, school and getting your degree. ”

S13: Right…

EA: “I could remember being a curious kid. I remembered this part of myself, but nobody had ever shown me a seductive format to apply that curiosity within. But then you see this pathway ahead where your private dialog is potentially applicable to psychology as a universal science. 

“We inevitably form secret societies to share these hard-earned truths… and Duncan started teaching me about what secret societies are. I’d heard of the Masons, but he started telling me about the various working layers and it made sense that we were forming our own backroom thing. Because some of the things we were talking about… you can’t just announce them to people. They’ll be offended and disturbed, so we set up a little Think Tank in my room. Kids would drift through and shake their heads in confusion. 

“As the three years progressed that we were in school together, we both eventually developed a powerful style of confidence in articulating this hybridised philosophy and kids started to listen more and more to the music and the calls and the ideas. Everything before was all apparently leading up to this peak of learning to articulate this great message underneath us. That era became the great hinge of our lives.”

S13: It’s like what you mentioned in a recent interview we did, when Duncan said, “music turns villains into heroes”. This sounds like that trajectory… or that thread, where you and your followers are finding this same frequency…

DT: “If you put the right chords together and introduce people who are ready for something great, then you can make their life better. That’s why I like to do my podcast. I like to find people who might consider themselves outsiders, but who I feel have something really wonderful to say that’s helped me… and then I just talk to them! People hear that, and I think it can create a real positive impact.

“Whereas I think Emil is a real creative genius. How wonderful to have any kind of input or impact on someone who’s making music you love. That’s really cool because there’s a feedback loop there… where you’re hearing the art and it’s making you a better person. It’s making you feel a certain confidence. To me that’s a delight to know that this is possible in the mundane world, that people can ripple ideas/art out into the world that aren’t dictated by cultural norms… that are novel in a wild, beautiful way. The impact it could have in the world, you could never guess because it’s brand new, so who knows what that’s going to do? But to me, that’s the difference here. That’s why we have such a great friendship. I wish I could find a way to artistically articulate my general sense of despair! But that’s not my path.”

S13: Did you ever want to become a musician, and conversely, did you, Emil, every want to become a comedian?

DT: “I would love that! I like to make music. I have all this gear, and I’d sit around and make music with my modular synths, but I have so much respect for musicians that I don’t think of myself as one. I don’t have this feeling of, ‘I need the world to hear my music’. That’s not in me. I just like to put silly songs on my podcast.”

EA: “There are totally different advantages to both forms. It’s interesting that a comedian can’t necessarily go on stage, hit an ambient pad of F minor and just sit there for two minutes and have people rapt. There’s no parallel of that.”

DT: “God, I wish you could come out and play F minor. Good night!”

EA: “I was just listening to Conan O’Brien interview the Beastie Boys, and he pointed out that The Beatles and the Beastie Boys are essentially groups where the birth of their entire brand and style comes from a deep overlap into comedy. When you think about the greatest practitioners in music or any kind of art, I’ve always felt that being in touch with the part of your brain that understands humour must be present in art or else you won’t have a well-rounded statement. 

“If you’re making a statement about life that cancels out an entire part of what makes life itself because you’re struggling to create a product, then you’re not taking an accurate picture of what life is. Your statement is bound to be impotent. By that metric, the history of most classic songs could be considered a form of shilling/propaganda.”  

S13: It’s funny because you’re talking about propaganda, and I just listened to the Portland episode you guys did for …Family Hour. What you’re talking about is like an extension of the grift…

EA: “We could have talked about that for nine hours, but the grift as a songwriter is the reduction of your whole self into something that’s a cardboard cutout… something that’s flimsy, quickly bought and moved beyond. Because art may not even be able to absorb everything in any given circumstance, you have to cut it down or else people are going to lose patience with it. You’re constantly trying to keep things brisk… so the grift is how far down you want to chisel a version of the truth that’s perfected by some movie magic, right? Or do you want to try and un-chisel it to a point of virtual un-sellability? The less chiseled the language is that the listener acclimates to, then they can’t go back to what’s processed and we’ll inevitably end up sitting in a backroom secret society together.  

DT: “That’s right and that still exists. Everyone bitches about the algorithm, and I understand how it’s removed the ritual of sitting with someone playing the record in that experience where there’s so much that can happen that’s so beautiful. Now it’s just Spotify’s suggestion of a spiritual experience… ‘So you like the Beach Boys? Well, check this out…’ But I don’t see it that much different than what happened with radio. Where there were the people who just listened to the radio and who’d never heard of The Descendants. I think it’s always like that… some background hum of default reality.

“I think what you’re mapping out there, on some level, Emil, is that every single person has imposter syndrome and recognises that they have fully committed to some form of interfacing with reality. But underneath it, there’s just an emptiness of form. Which is obviously the greatest thing ever; god help us if that wasn’t true. That’s where comedy comes from: the despair! Comedy is like the grin of that amazing painting of Jesus in the desert. I love it. I think about it all the time. He’s half smiling, half completely fucking freaking out, but there’s this weird secret smile happening there. He’s realising the two polarities he must contend with.”

EA: “When we were kids, music was defined by The Beatles at Shea Stadium, where you had a massive crowd chanting and screaming in a sold out stadium. But then as the ’80s wore on, the underground became so developed, everybody was digging for these obscure, esoteric sub-worlds. And as we got the freedom to home record, it became a total revolution that someday there will be books and documentaries about. 

“Ironically, both of our careers ended up becoming stabilised and created by the internet, because we were able to get this esoteric information out to other people in small towns that were also interested but weren’t seeing it reflected around them and had nowhere to talk about it. Duncan showed me these burgeoning worlds that the internet was going to conjoin, whereas back in 1980, we may not have had careers because we wouldn’t have been able to reach these people.”

DT: “Not a chance in fucking hell! And that’s what’s great. The internet’s a double-edged sword. 

“I love what you’re talking about, the scenius thing. Brian Eno coined the term. You get the Andy Warhol. You get the David Bowie. And people don’t realise that behind that person was a group of people and lots of hangouts. For comedians, it’s the green room! We sit in there and laugh and roast each other and exchange ideas. It’s a ritual, and it has rules! It’s not a secret society, but it has its own form. I think that’s a really positive kind of interchange.”

S13: You told me once that Duncan had a hand in coining the name ‘Holy Sons’… 

EA: “Duncan had been teaching me about occult history on a daily basis back then. He was colouring it in with this incredible enthusiasm and it was the same level of unquenchable thirst I’d had for music ephemera. So I was seeing a parallel there and by the time I needed to finally put out a record, I didn’t know what to call it. Everybody knows that in the early ’90s you generally didn’t release solo records under your own name. You called yourself ‘Pavement’ and tried to shroud yourself. Jandek was unreachable. He’s only going to disseminate this piece of art and that’s all you get. So when it came time to name the project I’d been slaving away on, I think I ran with Duncan’s cult world fascinations and considered the idea of ‘Holy Sons’ as being a kind of secret society.”   

S13: The patchwork of all those things woven in is fascinating when you really think about it… 

EA: “If you go back to Lost Decade, I’m sure there’s lines about pygmies thriving on a distant island that could have just been something Duncan had said to me as he walked out the door before I started recording. We were weaving all this together up in the mountains of Asheville alone but eventually landed in a relationship with other people who also share this aesthetic gravitational pull.” 

S13: If you lived in somewhere like L.A. or New York in your youth and found each other, do you think that the trajectory of your respective careers would have changed?  

EA: “That’s a weird thing to think about.”  

DT: “What if my dad didn’t send me the Pink Floyd CDs? What if I decided not to go to college? What life would I be living? My study in Buddhism is called the ‘Mishap Lineage’… if you are a miscreant but you stumble upon the truth, your wrong turns have led you to the truth in some way. Then all of that karma is purified, all of the karmas. Not just that karma, but all the way back through the generations, because all the wrong turns that led to your wrong turns led to the truth. I think of it like that. Little miracles, and they don’t necessarily come from going to church on Sunday, burning incense or saying the right prayers or being a good person. Sometimes they derive from mishap. So yeah… I think it was perfect timing, the perfect time to meet. I feel so lucky in that regard.” 

Insidious Mind Control is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.