Name: Emil Amos
Occupation: Drummer, songwriter
Nationality: American
Current release: Emil Amos's new single "Jealous Gods" is out via Drag City. Full-length Zone Black will follow on August 4th 2023.
Recommendations: I recommend the painting of the deceased outsider artist Owen Lee of Coconut Grove and the pioneering music of Robert Turman.

If you enjoyed this Emil Amos interview and would like to stay up to date with and find out more about his music, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I just got back into 'body listening' after developing a rabid hash habit. Before this I usually had to be skateboarding or doing something else to disengage and listen more passively. But now that I'm getting high again I'm hearing sound as this kind of natural force that massages your brain.

It's been a necessary return to when I started recording as a kid and had an early fascination with Syd Barrett's intuitive approach  ... which sounds like what you're describing as he was said to write from a kind of Synesthesiac perspective. 



What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

Everything in the beginning was shaped by gravitating towards my heroes  ... in a good way. I think watching older kids do extremely difficult things and having that as a high watermark was totally important. And then the big turning point is when we eventually decide to shed those blueprints.

If I go back to early recordings of myself 25 years ago, I hear the same person saying the same exact things ... and it's a powerful thing to hear that kind of emotional consistency.

So maybe all the experience and the loss of naiveté that occurred along the way didn't really bring any radical changes as much as this has all been part of settling into a kind of inborn destiny. 

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music meant to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

Certainly that was true for me. I have a entire podcast centered around that early molding and how everything was fixed for me from that point on (Emil's podcast is called "Drifter's Sympathy").



I think being entranced by the value systems of people like Ian Mackaye and Lou Barlow back in 1990 was a perfect anchor for understanding what is still real and meaningful in life. And as a street skateboarder during the 'golden age' of that culture, there was a full understanding that from within our cult, the outside world was generally a silly place.



I still draw strength from the classic underground perspective that we can choose to move outside of the mainstream sheep-sheering systems and refuse to take most of the adult world seriously.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

The guitar was really everything for most of us when I was a kid. It was sort of the central gateway into your inner world, but also your ticket out into the world. With it, you could devise whatever depth you could imagine. My relationship with it was so deep ... and now I barely have time to pick it up. At some point I made so many recordings that it became crippling to deal with.

So I'm slowly trying to organize about 8 different LPs worth of archival material off of hundreds of tapes and hard-drives and its going to take me a long time. At some point my relationship clearly jumped from the guitar to the computer whether I like it or not.

The idea of "performing" in front of people seems a little odd to me right now, when I have this mountain of work that's already happened.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Anger is one of my favorites. It feels pretty amazing! ... being ignored is also great, very fueling.

The life of an underdog artist is comical and oddly redeeming ... you get to constantly believe that no one has the depth to understand you!

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

Paul sounds pretty high! My personal sound emanates directly from my specific dissatisfactions with the world ... and from the values I take refuge in / where I've been able to find happiness.

The fate of an artist is pretty simple ... you find a small group of people that can understand your contribution and then the rest of the world spins very quickly by it.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

The 'natural music' phenomenon that comes to mind is being in a deadly thunderstorm in a jeep while blasting Gunter Schickert's inner-terror kraut masterpiece Uberfällig on the beach in Savannah, Georgia. The storm rocked the jeep back and forth violently bringing lots of urgent, cool death feelings.



I always thought, concerning the overall worth of anything our band Grails ever did, that we at least approximated some kind of natural sound force with our conjoined emotional upset-ness ... and if you can find that kind of power in sound then you've unlocked something worthy.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I'm finally fully grappling with the implications of Brian Eno's work in the late 70's. What a beautiful contribution ... It's so poignant that, as non-active as his sound pieces can be, he really likes to keep his tracks short. There's something so polite and maybe British about that.



I was a late-comer to true patience ... and it's so gratifying to understand all of its rewards now.

[Read our Brian Eno interview about climate change]

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I never start the same way and never do the same thing, but it feels like I usually end up in a similar place. I have an addiction to working on sound, so its hard for me to let it just be there ... and out of my anxiety a structure always seems to develop. There's probably something about human failure and triumph implied somewhere in that I guess.

In terms of motivating musical scenarios, I sometimes dream on what I wish my heroes would have done. Like, when Vangelis is sitting, smoking at the piano in the "Chariots of Fire" video ... wouldn't it have been so much radder if he'd thrown down the most morbid, satanic sequence of notes that caused you to eventually curl your toes and get so uncomfortable that you had to turn it off?



Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

I have this new thing where I've been putting a piece of arbitrary audio in front of a song that's vaguely in key with it ... (in a recent case, a scene from an old film where a girl is laughing). Then I throw it through a deteriorated tape loop machine so it pops up in arbitrary places of the song like a bad memory.

Things like that can keep the repetitive nature of mixing feeling new.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

For sure ... I think the idea of Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" is probably a simulation of what a real producer ought to be doing anyway. That card set is a little like trying to explain what being high is like to a sober person.

There's not enough talk about the perverse things you have to do behind the curtain to make things sound "right". I mean Phil Spector's Wall of Sound was a completely perverse idea. To have 3 basses and 5 guitars playing the same thing at different distances from the mic?



I can't think of anything more frustrating than working with people who actually think there are rules. Most artists would probably agree that everything they're making is an experiment until its handed in at an arbitrary deadline.   

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

Definitely. I think one of the main things we perceive from music is a kind of supreme spiritual confidence ... a calm and grounded approach to navigating confusion. Listen to Can creating profound shapes out of nothing when there was no blueprint on Tago Mago ...



or Peter Tosh's lyrical insistence on "Stepping Razor".



There's a kind of bewildering confidence in that kind of art that shakes you and makes it that much harder to concentrate in your high school chemistry class after encountering it.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Music allows for much more success in exposing flawed aspects or making 'wrong' decisions ... I don't think making a cup of coffee could do that on so many levels and offer so many rewards. I would have a really hard time trying to convince the world that stylishly bricking the ball in a basketball game was worth their time because of the commonly narrow sense of what 'victory' is.

But music can accept levels upon levels of rule-breaking. In skateboarding there's technically only one way to land a 360 flip ... but in music 'landing it' is a relative concept.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

The only piece of music that comes to mind is the clarinet and strings that play when Luke stares into the two suns in the first Star Wars film.



I was in pre-school when I saw it and that piece of music still seems to say that the whole story is written before you live it and that you have no choice but to step forward into your destiny.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

For people to like better music and therefore rid our lives of all this time-wasting, insufferable garbage so we can hoist up worthwhile things instead.