Ambience with Andy (from Lowercase Noises) 1
Matt: So Nate, the funny things is, we were supposed to record this podcast on 4/20. Then I realized you were on vacation, so we couldn’t do it. But I did prep a really funny intro to the podcast that I would like to read to you still.
Nate: Okay, I guess.
Matt: Here we go. Welcome to Don’t Weed the Bulls Budcast, it’s 4/20 and we’re going to talk about some really trippy, deep stuff. Like how music affects your mood. But first!
Nate: That’s great, man.
Matt: It was pretty stupid. But in all reality we do have a pretty good guest on today. Andy Othling of Lowercase Noises, which is an ambient instrumental project. He’s going to be talking to us about how music and mood and consciousness and all that plays off each other. But first.
Nate: But first! Holy cow, I’m looking at this list of new patrons.
Matt: Dang.
Nate: We’re going to read a really long list right now, and butcher it badly.
Matt: Yes, yes, we thank them by butchering their names, that’s how it works.
Nate: Yeah. So here we go, I’m going to try this without butchering anybody’s. Alright here we go: John Hone, Seth Gunter, Michael Jewel, J’han Borzhan, Erin Benninger, Joey Holt, Mo Dubs, Nick Halversen, Torrin Donowski, Kevin Morrey. That was easy, I blew that one. Kellen Craiger, John Beacon, Zane Harnish, Jason Wilder, Chris Kelley, Grant Litton, Travis Peterson, Nathan Saner, Matt Adams, Anthony Baker, Ty Hopkins.
Matt: We might have to start rethinking the names that we read on the podcast because I know part of the Patreon is the five dollar one we read the names, but at this point everyone’s just doing one dollar and we’re having to read all these names. So maybe we’ll make it a little bit more exclusive. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s lame.
Nate: No, no, I think it’s cool. They still get access to the free podcast, or sorry, the exclusive podcast. Yeah, if you give five bucks a month, that’s a little bit cooler. You’re sacrificing that one latte for a partay.
Matt: A partay.
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Nate: A partay here on this digital sphere of hanging out and talking to you about good stuff. I mean, if you think about it, I still laugh every time my friend texts me, “People donate for your hobby, Nate.”
Matt: He doesn’t know how much work it is!
Nate: Yeah!
Matt: He’s just sick of his desk job.
Nate: But he just laughs at, he’s just one of those guys that makes fun of, he’s old school in that sense. No country for old men, you know what I mean?
Matt: Well, if you want to support our “hobby” you can go to patreon.com/dontfeedthetrolls and do it because that’s dope.
Nate: You know what’s funny, Matt? The only band’s email list that I am on is Explosions in the Sky. (laughs) I don’t know how I got on their email list. And every time I get an email from them I’m like, “I’m not going to delete. I’m not going to unsubscribe.” It’s just funny. I just think that’s funny.
So if you like Explosions in the Sky you’ll probably like Lowercase Noises.
Matt: (laughs) Andy! Welcome to the show, Andy Othling. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into making ambient instrumental music?
Andy: Oh, boy. So I started playing guitar. I wanted to be like the next Stevie Ray Vaughn. So I just wanted to shred super hard because Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughn were my dudes.
I was in this blues, rock, jam band thing and I accidentally wrote a post rock song. I didn’t even know what post rock was at the time. It was basically like an Explosions in the Sky rip-off type of song.
Matt: So you had a delay pedal. And then it just happened.
Andy: Exactly. I had one delay pedal. Yeah. And that coupled with, you know, playing 1/4/5 blues shred solos for a few years, it just got old. I never wanted to play one of those ever again. So yeah, that’s the long story short is I just kind of accidentally stumbled into it. And at the same time kind of found some other bands that I didn’t know existed.
I didn’t know this type of music existed and once I found it I was like, “Oh, this feels like it actually means something to me. So I’d like to be in this world instead of the shredding, posturing world of blues guitar that was I was before.”
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Matt: Did you ever think that you were maybe going to get a singer and put lyrics to that? Or not?
Andy: No, because – wait, to the blues stuff or the ambient stuff?
Matt: To the ambient stuff, yeah.
Andy: No, only because a lot of it started off because I was doing experimenting with recording myself in my college dorm and stuff with shitty software. I just focused on my skills and one of my skills is not singing and lyrics. So I just completely ignored that. It’s kind of out of necessity, it’s just I’m not good at it. So I’m not going to do it. And it works, so it’s fine.
Nate: Yeah, that’s funny. That’s how it usually goes in terms of bands, somebody’s always good at something. But if you’re a solo artist, I don’t think people realize you have to be good at everything when you’re a solo artist. Or hire somebody who’s good at it to do it for you.
Andy: Or at least can fake it on most everything. Yeah, totally.
Matt: Let’s talk about the DIY thing. Because you talk about starting off recording with whatever your shitty gear is in your college dorm. That kind of grows into you producing your own records and being a part of scene of other people who are producing this ambient music. But it’s all kind of done by yourself.
And that’s kind of, we love talking about that on our podcast. It’s like, how do you go from nothing to something? And what sort of work and hustle methods do you attribute that do?
Andy: I attribute it to working very slowly over time and not having any grand goals, really. I mean, it’s weird because there was never any massive, “Here’s what I need to do,” in a DIY sense. “Here’s the next goal.” Other than there were personal goals. I remember the first time I’d just put out an album.
I was just like, “I just really want to put nine songs together and see what that feels like.” Instead of I spent three hours working on a song and then you show it to a friend who feigns excitement on your behalf and isn’t actually.
So the whole thing about the way I’ve done it is really weird because for the longest time there was never any inkling or desire to do it for a living or try to milk it moneywise in any way. So it was purely just, I would honestly say one hundred percent, just trying to fulfill something creatively. So that just kept moving on too. It was like, “Okay, I’ll experiment more with recording software and I could figure out how to release an album on my own.”
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And then started the YouTube channel, which was honestly just a songwriting experiment at the beginning. It was like, “I want to see what I can do.” Because I had just gotten this recording software where you can sit down and make a hundred tracks of yourself. There’s all these software instruments and it’s just incredibly overwhelming. I felt kind of stuck and was like, “I don’t know what to do in writing songs,” in that scenario.
So I started a YouTube channel because I was like, “Well, what could I do with one guitar and one take, one track in the ten minutes?” At that time YouTube could only let you upload ten minutes of video.
So everything kind of stemmed from personal desire rather than –
Nate: Yeah, what timeline are we looking at here? How many years are we talking about?
Andy: I think my first album was 2009. Well, that’s not true. I wrote an album that’s not available anymore. That was probably 2008 or something. That one’s pretty embarrassing. I think the YouTube stuff started around that time, 2009 or 2010. Something like that. So it’s been, I don’t know, seven or eight years.
Matt: So you kind of credit YouTube as being your launchpad to releasing records.
Andy: Yeah, totally.
Matt: How did the YouTube channel take off?
Andy: It was a combination of things. So I was doing these one take ambient guitar performance things, like I mentioned. A big part of it honestly was just tagging, in the description, just saying, “Here’s all the gear I’m using.” So anyone searches for this delay pedal, then my video will pop up.
The point wasn’t to necessarily –
Matt: Yeah, so the gearheads would find you and be like, “Oh, my gosh, look at the gear he has. Look what he’s using and look what he can make out of that gear.” And there are people that are just hyper focused on the tools as opposed to the craft of using them.
Andy: Yeah. And I mean, if you want to go down that road, like I said, it literally did start as songwriting exercises and trying to get myself more creatively inspired. It was successful in that way. Then there was a period where I sort of started chasing the, it’s like, “Oh, whenever I post a video where the thumbnail has my pedalboard clearly picture, those get more hits. So I’m going to do more stuff like that.” Then after a while it just started not feeling good about that.
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Matt: I noticed that just marketing some of your videos and full disclosure, Andy’s got a new record called Swiss Illness that’s coming out on B C Music. We’ve been working in tandem with him to release this stuff. He had a bunch of YouTube videos which we took to Facebook that were already successful on YouTube. We posted them to Facebook.
I noticed exactly what you’re saying, is that when you have the pedalboard up close, there was just a lot more interest. Because kind of the engineer-y tech heads are so avidly obsessed with the gear that they will like, comment, and share on those videos as opposed to just you with the guitar and the pedalboard not pictured. What do you think that is? I mean, this is not even part of where I was trying to go with the conversation, but what do you think that is with kind – is it a personality, temperament thing? Or do you think that people are, they want to be grounded in a physical reality and not close their eyes and experience the music? What is that?
Andy: I don’t really know. I mean, I get it because I’ve been there before. As a guitar player you go through a period. I specifically went through a period where I just wanted, all I ever wanted was to see pictures of other people’s pedalboards and try to buy the next more expensive, newest delay pedal. And post it on forums and get all the responses because people think your pedalboard is so cool. Rather than anything you created with it.
Nate: Well, there is the weird part about being in a band, is there’s just always some sort of thing. There where so many bands on Warp Tour in the early days where it was like, “Oh, that’s the band with the guy with the purple hair.” Or whatever. You know what I mean?
I don’t know, I kind of think that helps you as an artist if you’re –
Matt: The guy with the pedals!
Nate: Yeah! Or everyone knew at the drive-in because what’s-his-face would just dance around like a maniac and he had the crazy pedalboard.
Matt: They had their shtick.
Nate: They needed someone to switch, to do it because it was so crazy.
Andy: There’s a difference between Slipknot masks and pedalboards, though. Because everyone has a reaction to Slipknot masks. But there’s only a certain subset of people who give a flying shit about my pedalboard. But they just give a huge shit about it.
And there’s a lot of people who – and I know this for a fact – if I really did pursue that, I would actually be ostracizing a large portion of people who don’t have any
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idea what that stuff is and don’t care. So they would just feel, like if I just posted that stuff all day on Facebook and YouTube and everywhere else, these people would be like, “What? I don’t know what this is. This obviously isn’t the place for me, so I’m out.”
Nate: You almost need a gear channel for the gearheads and then your regular music on its own thing.
Andy: If I wanted to do that, I would. But I don’t.
Nate: No, I don’t blame you. I was the guy who was the exact opposite. I was the guy who was more into the lyrics and the vocals. Then the other guys in the band were all doing your job which is coming up with all the sounds. I’m like, “Those sounds sound cool. Cool, let’s work on this.” You know what I mean?
So I feel you. I’m one of those people who would be like, “Pedalboard? What? I play bass. I plug it in and I just play the thing. It’s easy.”
Andy: And maybe this sounds like high faluting or something, but I really, really value this type of music and I want to respect the people who listen to it. And because it can mean a million different things to a million different people without lyrics. I don’t want to limit it in any way possible. So focusing on anything gear related, focusing on anything religion, politics, whatever. I feel like any of that limits the power of the music in my mind. So I want to keep that as intact as possible.
That’s kind of the only rules I have for myself. I really want to respect them and let it be whatever people want it to be. So, yeah.
Matt: Let’s talk about ambient music because you kind of almost introduced it to me. You coming along. I never listened, I mean, I listen to Explosions in the Sky because who hasn’t?
Andy: Typical.
Matt: Yeah, typical right? Because you know, they were on Friday Night Lights or whatever. You know, it was post rock and it was cool or whatever and it was instrumental. I thought, “This is great.” It kind of does something in you, it feels really good. But that’s the majority of all I had heard.
You came along and we’re trying to market your videos and we’re trying to get your music out there and you’re like, “Here’s five bands I like.” And I start listening to that and I start understanding there is a very diverse community of people who just make ambient instrumental music. And it’s worldwide.
Like you said, it’s global because it’s not limited to one language. It’s not limited to one topic. It is totally a subjective, a truly, purely subjective listening
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experience where people can go, “What does this mean for me?” And that’s why I think – I have a lot of opinions about this, but I want to ask you. Why do you think there is – and I’m just assuming there is. So just because maybe it’s like I just stumbled across it so not it exists. Like when you buy a car and you see it on the road.
But there seems to be this resurgence in a demand for instrumental, ambient music. It seems to be kind of a growing scene. Do you see that? And do you have any way to speak to that?
Andy: That’s tough. I don’t know if I have a great perspective on that. All I know is I do keep finding different pockets of it that are doing different – like if you really go down into it you get guys that are, their sole purpose of the music is field recordings or something. They’re featuring nature sounds.
Matt: Found Sounds man! We call them Found Sounds!
Andy: Yeah, but it’s like super heady and I don’t know how you describe it. But there’s people who are just so insane about this type of music. You can find these super niche. So I don’t know, I always wonder.
I was having a conversation the other day with someone about this. It’s like, Hans Zimmer has played at Coachella. His soundtrack for a movie. Movie soundtracks are getting bigger than I think they ever have. Maybe instrumental, ambient music which is associated with that a lot of time is kind of following suit. Maybe there’s something there for sure. But seeing Hans Zimmer playing Coachella is like, “Oh, wow!” That’s interesting that that happened. That seems like a good sign for me.
Matt: So that’s big. Yeah, you’re in the right place. Yeah, you’re doing the right genre right now. Well I was thinking, you know, this is kind of my take on it is that our society is so bombarded with so many coercive messages. “Do this and you’ll be happy. Believe this and you’ll be right. Follow this five step journey to weight loss.”
Everyone’s trying to get your attention and tell you what to do. I think that’s why it’s not even just a move towards or a reaction against that, towards music that doesn’t coerce or doesn’t speak from the ego. But I would say it’s even more of a mindfulness movement. Like, “We’re going to unplug completely from this messaging.”
Andy: And alongside that, it’s like I feel – and maybe this is too strong a language, but I feel like there is sort of a punk rock aspect to this. Because like you mentioned, there’s so much noise in the world. Literally in certain types of music that they’re telling you, the front man is telling you something in the lyrics. And with this, it’s just like, “Hey, screw you guys. I’m going to play one chord for 12 minutes.”
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It feels like a middle finger sometimes, you know? It’s like you’re driving 60 miles down the road and checking Twitter and eating burger at the same time. It’s like, you know what?
It’s funny, I actually – going back to YouTube. I made a video – and I never said this – but I kind of did it with a purpose of trying to piss some of my people off. Literally, what I did was a made a loop on one of my pedals and I sat there for 20 minutes and just let it decay. The video was me sitting there with a cup of coffee as this loop just decays.
And the point was, there wasn’t really a point. But I was just really curious to see what people thought of it. And most people were just like, “Oh man, this is so great. This is so cool.” I was trying to kind of like maybe get some of you mad at this or something.
Nate: That’s just funny though, because you’re kind of trolling your fan base. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a certain part of every artist that doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Or at least the ones that I like to talk to don’t. You know what I mean? You’re trying as hard as you possibly can to create something great and leave some sort of memory in someone’s mind and have fans and do all the things. It’s hard because you measure yourself against other artists your whole career.
But at the end of the day, you kind of always go back to that part of your mind that’s like, “Is this any good?” You know? Am I actually doing something worthwhile? Those voices just continue to come back and haunt you and sometimes you have to make a video where you play a note and let it sit and make fun of people, right?
Andy: Yeah, totally.
Matt: Well, I think the first video I saw of yours, Andy, it was called 12 Minute Drone in B Major or something like that.
Andy: And that one had even more going on than the video I’m talking about.
Matt: Well that one was super popular. As an outsider looking at the title of the video, 12 Minute Drone in B Major. In just one –
Andy: Yeah, there’s no chord change at all.
Matt: There’s no chord change, it’s just B Major the whole time. I was like, but then I was watching it and I looked up and I was like seven and a half minutes in. (laughs)
Andy: It was a time warp, yeah.
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Matt: My mind had shifted. My whole kind of focus, I was focused on one thing. As opposed to being so scatterbrained of all the things I needed to do. I felt like it was a mood change. Are you trying to usher people into a mood?
Andy: So I feel like what I do is – and I think this is probably the same for a lot of people in this genre – it’s like there are certain feelings you get. Not necessarily from music, it could be from movies or from being out in nature. Just anything really. It’s a recreation of that move.
So maybe this is just a small point, but I’m not trying to necessarily give anyone a mood, I’m just trying to recreate it for myself and make myself feel that way again. The interesting thing is that once I’ve done that, people will take wildly different things from it. And that’s fine.
But then that brings me to, like with you guys, Classic Crime and Sherwood and stuff, I get anxiety just thinking about having to present literal ideas and meanings in art. I don’t even know how to do that. I make it for myself based on some sort of ambiguous feeling. And people take other ambiguous feelings from it. That’s all I can really do.
Matt: I would say at the core that’s exactly what I do. I’m just expressing an emotion in a moment and about maybe an experience that I have or am having or am going through. Then people derive a thousand things from that that I never intended.
Andy: Yeah, and that’s interesting. Because I guess what I was trying to say is I literally don’t have any words or ideas for people. I don’t. When I write these songs it’s not like I’m trying to, I’m even thinking of words like “peace” or “melancholy” that I’m trying to give anybody.
Nate: Well, how do you title the songs then?
Andy: The songs always come from how I was feeling in that time. One of my pet – well, I have a couple pet peeves with this type of music. One is when people associate it with space and celestial objects. I feel like that’s completely overdone, so I try to stay away from that.
Matt: Sci-fi.
Andy: Totally. Every song is based on a moon of Jupiter or whatever. I’m not going to do that. Two, I feel like people are very overly emotionally direct about themselves and how they felt about the song. With some, I don’t know, some overly dramatic song title or something.
So what I like to do is, yes, it did come from a feeling that I had. But I always like to overlay a story on top of it that the feeling is similar, if that makes sense? But
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it’s an abstraction from the way, from my personal feelings. So people can come in and be like, “Oh, this album’s about this story.” If they care to explore that far.
The story is overlaid partly so that they can be abstracted from me as a human being in a way. That’s what makes me feel comfortable.
Nate: Do you feel like, I mean, I sort of do a lot of video editing. One thing I have naturally is I can just visualize things and get lost in my head and thoughts. I paint pictures in my mind and I kind of go down trails. When you’re writing these songs and you’re playing them and you’re kind of in the, you’re not ready to record them, are you visualizing a same story every time you play that song? Is there any visual things that go with it?
Andy: The way my brain works, there’s visuals attached to sonnet qualities. I feel like – well, this goes back. So my mom is an artist. She’s a pastel painter. I remember growing up, she’s like super into color and painting and she’s very – I remember I was doing a poster for one of elementary school classes. I had to draw an astronaut.
I drew it real small in the middle of this really big canvas and she was like, “No, you’ve got to start over.” So turned it over, made it really big and filled in all the white space. She was very adamant. I’m like, “Can’t have too much white space, but can’t overfill it.”
So I feel like in my head when I’m writing songs it’s usually like, “Here’s a part I came up with. It’s cool.” And I see kind of a sonnet canvas and I’m like, “Okay, that filled up that part of it. What sort of texture or part or whatever needs to be different, separate enough to fill in the rest of it and not leave just a big hunk in the middle and bunch of white space on the outside.
That’s kind of what my brain is doing. There’s no narrative or even necessarily quantifiable feeling going on. Hopefully that answers the question a little bit.
Nate: Yeah, how does that transfer live? That’s the question I was going to ask.
Andy: Yeah, live is interesting. I did my first living room tour last year. I was only able to do a couple of my songs because there’s just no way for me to do them by myself unless I just did a million backing tracks and played one. Which is super lame, so I didn’t want to do that.
But there are certain rooms for – okay, I tried to set it up so I did as much as possible. I’m looping stuff on the guitar, I’m looping stuff on the piano, and there’s minimal backing tracks. But I’m still triggering them at the right times. I tried to set it up such that if a part comes out different or the song arrangement comes out different then it’s still fine.
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If I want to have it set up such so that I can’t move to the next section of a song unless I tell it to go there. So if I go another round on this and we want to let it go, then that’s fine. Then of course with live I tried to, it was really important to me to do a visual experience. I worked really hard to get a reactive video to the audio. So when I played the piano it would light up blocks on the screen in real time. Videos would fade in and out as certain audio tracks faded in and out and that kind of stuff.
Matt: You have a brain that does that? That controls the lights that way?
Andy: It’s just Ableton and another piece of software.
Matt: Ableton does it?
Andy: Yeah, Ableton talks to my video software. So I just have to deal with an APC 40 and Ableton and it controls everything.
Matt: Dang.
Andy: It’s kind of, I’m really proud of my little set up, actually. It’s pretty cool. (laughs)
Matt: That’s a lot of studying to get it to the point where you can do that. You got to learn so much. You have this idea in your head like, “I want to do that.” Then you have to learn all this software and hardware.
Andy: I’m really thankful because I have a degree in computer science, actually, so I have a very, a brain for that stuff. I had to write one of my own Max for live plug- ins to get my set to work. I was like, “There’s nothing out there that I need. I guess I have to figure out how to write this language and write a plug-in.” So I like that stuff too.
Luckily, I mean, that goes back to the DIY thing. I feel very fortunate that I really enjoy figuring out all this technical stuff. I really enjoy to a certain extent email marketing and social media stuff and certain business aspects. I just enjoy it all to a certain extent.
Matt: You like learning.
Andy: Yeah.
Nate: Well, I can agree to that because being in a band in any capacity you have to kind of be good at all the stuff. Especially nowadays because you have to –
Andy: You run into people who are super good at guitar or piano or something, they don’t give a shit about social media or whatever. It’s just like that’s really to their detriment. So I just feel thankful in this climate that I’m at least, I’m not faking
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interest in anything. I legitimately like doing, figuring out email segments and Mail Chimp and sending it out to certain cities. That stuff is fun to me.
Matt: Legitimately.
Nate: Yeah no, I hear you. It’s like being on Warp Tour or whatever and there was always that one band that was just like, just exuded that. They played music and they were either stoned geniuses or whatever. And then it was just like, “Why is this band on this tour?” Then you talk to them and you’re like, “Those dudes were on another planet!” I don’t even know who they made it here.
The rest of us are just like hustling.
Matt: Handing out flyers.
Nate: Yeah, we were that band with the, we were just, it was all gimmicks. Let’s find the right gimmick and then we’ll be the bigger band on Warp Tour. In some sense Sherwood was kind of a blend of all of that. We had some moments where –
Matt: You guys made funny videos, that was your thing.
Nate: Well we just didn’t take ourselves too seriously. But when it came to the music, there was always debates of, “Okay, how much artistic integrity do we have here? We’re in this scene, so we can’t do anything.” The cool thing about your music is it doesn’t get a timestamp on it. You know?
So much of the music we were in there’s just this timestamp. Boom! “That sounds like Sugar Colt from 1997.” You know what I mean? You can’t do anything with that. But someone can go listen to a song that you make ten years later and no know when it came out. Like, “Did that come out last week?”
Matt: I’m so jealous of that.
Andy: Are you sure that’s true? I don’t mean to sound –
Nate: The only thing I think that would differentiate a song with no, that’s more in the ambient world, would be the recording quality. Other than that, it doesn’t have a time.
Matt: Unless a, because you said you’re from such a diverse scene, unless something kind of takes over. I could listen to Explosions in the Sky and say, “Okay, that sounds like mid-2000s post rock.” Because it was a genre in and of itself within the framework of ambient instrumental music. But the stuff that you do isn’t nearly as structured, informed, and follow the rules like even the post rock stuff.
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Andy: It’s rarely ever because the post rock thing is kind of like a slow crescendo to a big, massive sound.
Matt: And there’s drums, and there’s repeating parts.
Andy: Right. I rarely do that ever.
Matt: No, I know! You take it and yours is very linear.
Nate: It’s really hard to be timeless in general. I just think that there’s some artists that are timeless. You pop on a Tom Petty song and it’s still good 30 years later. There’s not very many artists who can do that. They can just kind of capture their own, you know, and they just sort of seal it, put it in a box, and then it’s just out there. And that’s going to be good forever. The Beatles, there’s so many songs. There’s just going to be good forever, no matter what.
Andy: There’s another aspect to it, which you guys can say whether this applies or not, but I feel like there’s certain bands in this genre like Stars of the Lid, or Winged Victory for the Sullen, where I’ve listened to the album probably hundreds of times and it’s effect on me is it actually ends up removing me from the music. Such that even after hundreds of listens, I don’t actually know everything that’s going on because it just kind of zones me out.
So I’m just thinking now, I wonder if part of it is people use it to remove themselves from things and even from the music such that they never get so familiar with it that it’s old. If that makes sense. Because that’s my experience with some of this stuff, personally.
Nate: Huh, interesting.
Matt: Well, we’re talking about meditative or mindfulness practices. Do you do any of those or is that just the music you listen to? Is that when you kind of become in that contemplative, just exist and accept what is state? Or do you do contemplative practices like meditation?
Andy: Only when I want to. Sometimes if I’m driving in the car, purely just not having anything on the stereo is an experience like that. “I’m just going to not listen to anything right now.” That’s a, or just little stuff. If I’m pumping gas I’m not going to bring my phone out of my car. I’m going to just sit here and lean against my car until it’s filled up. Because I just need a moment.
Matt: That’s insane because that was the reality for everybody up until this point.
Nate: Yeah, what a weird world.
Andy: Yeah, it has to be a thing.
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Matt: Now we do it to shock ourselves.
Andy: Right. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t bring my phone out of my car.” But so there’s nothing that I do every morning. Meditation intrigues me but I also feel sort of lazy in those regards. I guess the music is kind of my general outlet for that stuff.
Nate: Kind of back up a little bit. You’re saying that you don’t know the experience that people are having when they listen to you music. It might be different than a singer/songwriter because you listen to a certain song, it’s going to always take you to that same place
If you listen to certain Jimmy Eat World songs, like Clarity for example. I listen to Clarity, I’m instantly 19 years old, in college. You know what I mean? Dealing with –
Matt: That’s more nostalgia than the music I would say, though. Because if you heard it for the first time now, you wouldn’t think that.
Nate: But the lyrics connect to a certain time and a certain story and they always take me back to those stories. Every time I listen to Third Eye Blind I’m in high school driving home. You know what I mean? I just can’t divorce that.
It sounds like you’re saying – and I could be wrong here – that when you listen to ambient music, it zones you out. Almost like you’re having, you’re getting high or something.
Matt: You’re not attaching physical memories to it.
Andy: Yeah, totally. Absolutely.
Nate: That’s different, you know?
Andy: Oh, very. That’s why I’m’ fascinated with, you know, Matt, people who are lead singers, front men of bands because it’s so foreign to me. Personally, the way I listen to music is the last thing I’ll ever hear, I’ve got to listen to a song hundreds of times before I even hear what the lyrics are.
I’ll pick up on syllables and how they sound together before I understand what the word is. Those syllables sounded cool. It takes me so long to pick up on any sort of lyrical meaning in a song. So I just haven’t valued it for basically my entire life.
Matt: That’s why this fascinates me because I really come from the opposite direction. I approach, everything I do is like, “What are the lyrics saying? And what is, is
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there poetry? Is there allegory? Is the rhythmic rhyming spoken in a way that captivates?”
I could care less, I mean the rhythm has to support the lyrics. The root notes have to support the melody. Everything is supporting this propped up poetic vision. To me, the music is just so secondary.
Nate: “Careening through the universe, your axis on a tilt.” You know what I mean? There’s these line. “I hope you take a piece of me with you.” Yeah, it’s like as a singer, as lyricist it’s funny because that’s the, I probably listen to the words. Making records was difficult for me because there was just a couple times we’re making a record and there was just two weeks of just insane focus on the drums. I’m like, “Guys, I’m going insane. We’ve just been doing drums! Get over it! Get past it!” And our drummer was a good drummer. He played them almost one take.
Andy: And see for me that’s fascinating because a lot of the way I write songs is reactive to things that happen on accident. So I’ll just be recording and come up with some weird loop on my something and the song will come out of that. So there’s rarely any intention going in, like, “I’m going to have a song like this or that.” But it’s just, ninety percent of the time it’s screwing around finding a cool sound. It doesn’t even have to be a tonal sound, even just a weird texture and then it just kind of grows from there.
So the experience is, a lot of bands are like, “Okay we’re got scratch tracks and demos.” My whole process is so blurred because the writing, recording, mixing process is all one thing. Something that would have been a scratch track to somebody else, that’s the final thing. I will never be able to recreate that. That was a weird fluke.
Furthermore, specifically for this new album that’s coming out, I just could not write on the guitar for one of the first times ever. So everything came from either a starting point on the piano, which I’m not a piano players, I totally just fake it and then fix it in MIDI later. Or just like I said, making some weird loop.
I have all these plug-ins that end up just mangling audio. I just send it through nine different things and it comes out sounding completely different. Then I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to start from here.” So it was not, in sending software pianos out back through re-amping it through guitar pedals and then back in. Then pitching it up two octaves and back down two octaves and see what it sounds like. That’s how this whole album came out.
Because sitting down and playing some delayed reverbed chords is what I’ve done a lot in the past. But I was just like, “I don’t want to do that this time around at all.”
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Nate: Is there some sort of drive to make something complicate? Like it’s not good until it’s complicated?
Andy: Oh. That’s a thing I fight against for sure. I think that’s, people think, I look at artists – like I mentioned before – like Stars of the Lid and Winged Victory for the Soul and there’s so little going on, but it’s so brilliant. I’ve done music long enough now that I’m like, “Holy shit, I would never be able to come up with something that simple.”
It takes work to be able to come up with something that simple. That’s what I’m striving for. I feel like that was a little bit what I was striving for on this album. It’s like, “I’m just going to come up with the coolest little texture sounds that I can and only layer them as much as necessary.
Nate: Do you listen to any bands like in the past? Do you listen to any Pink Floyd or anything?
Andy: Pink Floyd is one of those bands that I just can’t really get into. It’s a dad band. (laughs)
Nate: But they kind of have –
Andy: I mean, I get it. People say that a lot, yes. But they’re spacious.
Nate: Yeah. I remember watching a documentary on Pink Floyd. They were notorious for having to have some sort of visual display because they were convinced as a band that their music alone was extremely boring. So they even agree with you. They think their music is so boring they had to have this crazy visual stuff going on.
Sometimes I just, I was sitting there going, “Man, that’s such an artist way to think about something.” What we’re doing is complete, it’s so boring. So do you struggle with that feeling of you’re playing this thing and you’re like, “Is it good? Is it not good? I don’t know.” You know what I mean? “I need some explosion of light behind me in order to make this all come together.”
I don’t know, I just always think that’s interesting.
Andy: Well, for me it’s just purely of like when I come up with a part of something. I’m purely relying on my own taste. I feel like one of my skills honestly is being able to step back from myself and evaluate whether something is good or not. That goes into stuff like a website design.
I spent three hours on the website and I can still step back and look at it as someone who just visited it for the first time. I can still listen to one of my songs
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and hear it from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. Which is really hard.
Matt: That’s the DIY thing that teaches you. You have to wear all the hats. So you have to put on the artist hat, take that off, put on the producer hat, and then look from a completely different perspective. The more you make that shift kind of the better you get at it. Would you say that?
Andy: Totally, yeah. I feel like that’s the key to everything. Because when you first start, I mean especially in this genre, dudes are like, “Oh, I’ll get a delay pedal and do some swells and then I’m famous on YouTube or something.” It’s not that easy at all.
I think the biggest thing is being able to step back and say, I mean I remember when I was first starting. There’s the excitement and fulfillment that comes from doing the thing. I was using Sony Acid back in college and just inserting all these loops and layering stuff. And that was fun, but that doesn’t translate to literally anyone else. No one else has fun listening to it.
So you’ve got to divorce the fun of creating a thing and make sure it’s actually fun to listen to. That takes a while to figure it out.
Matt: It’s the artist and producer, yeah. It’s like the producer hat is the one that sees it from the world’s perspective. The artist only sees your own perspective. You have to jump between the two.
Nate: Yeah, you think about the first song you ever played on the guitar. It probably sounded like a really bad version of Coldplay’s The Scientist. You know what I mean? It’s like four chords, you can play four chords. But then when Coldplay plays those four chords you’re like, “Damn, that’s a good song. I think I wrote that song when I first played the guitar but it was pretty shitty when compared to that one.” You know?
Matt: Yeah, it had Green Day melodies over top of it.
Nate: Exactly, exactly.
Andy: Yeah, everyone wrote a song that sounds like What’s My Age Again? At some point.
Matt: Oh yeah. I had it, I can sing it to you. I was just wondering, do you ever do something that maybe it surprises you and your ears don’t like it, but it kind of makes you feel something. Maybe even disgust or maybe even, “Ugh, that’s painful.” Do you ever try to communicate those emotions?
Andy: Oh, I mean…
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Matt: Or is it just pure bliss the whole time? (laughs)
Andy: No, it’s not pure…if I was ever trying to do something it would never be, I would use the world more melancholic versus peaceful or something. Let’s do a minor seven chord on the piano or something with a voicing that’s a three one five instead of a one three five. Those kind of voicings…
That’s the other thing is certain piano voicings, more than guitar, you’re able to arrange the notes such that it sounds…You can even, my favorite thing is to try to figure out how to make major chords sound sad. That’s one of the hardest things to do. I like that challenge.
Matt: What just adding sevenths and ninths and stuff?
Andy: Totally. Or just rearranging it so it’s like a five one three. The five is on the bottom or something. Something like that.
Matt: Now with piano you can do it all within the same octave, whereas on the guitar you’re skipping octaves so the harmonics and stuff are different.
Andy: Yeah, it doesn’t sound so dense or sad, necessarily, on the guitar.
Matt: We’re getting super nerdy. I think we lost Nate.
Andy: I know, I apologize.
Matt: Nate are you there?
Nate: Snoring.
Matt: He’s sleeping. (laughs)
Andy: Nate, you want to see my pedalboard?
Nate: Sorry guys, I just fell asleep a little bit here. Yeah, you guys are like the YouTube guys that do unboxing videos.
Matt: No, I don’t. Andy knows way more than, I don’t know anything. I can pretend. I’m a social guy I can pretend I know what I’m talking about.
Nate: I’m such a snob, I have all the video skills and I don’t have a YouTube channel. What’s wrong with me, you know what I mean? Every time I sit down I go, “What am I going to film?” I’m like, “It’s not good enough, it’s not cool enough.”
Matt: The rules don’t apply to you, Nate. The rules don’t apply.
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Nate: Oh gosh. No, it’s funny. Gear people just snoozed out, but welcome back to the podcast all you people who –
Matt: Welcome back. All the theory heads are now jacked up on one three five.
Andy: Well that’s not anything special. I mean that’s –
Matt: No, it’s not. (laughs) No, but I do this for a living and that’s about a special as I can get with it.
Andy: Oh that’s same here. I’m like mixalidian, I don’t know what that is, sorry.
Matt: Yeah, Dorian? I don’t know. Air Low Force?
Andy: No, yep, you lost me.
Matt: I can say them! I can say them and sound smart. (laughs)
Nate: That’s why I think I enjoyed the grunge movement because it was just plug your shitty guitar into a shitty amp and just make noise and just dive onstage and look like an idiot. I mean, I identify –
Matt: Whoa-oa-oa! No lyrics, just whoa! Yeah, yeah!
Nate: That’s what woke me up to, I don’t know. I like Smashing Pumpkins a lot too. There was a lot of, I mean, I talked to Brad Wood when we did a record with him and he said there was some Smashing Pumpkins tracks that had 150 guitar layers. He was insane! Billy –
Matt: That doesn’t help. (laughs)
Nate: No, I mean –
Matt: They were all mixed down –
Nate: He would just layer guitar, layer, layer, layer. And you were like, “Wow.” I don’t even know how to begin to identify with that. I’m not a musician if that’s the case.
Matt: Well, let’s talk about your new record a little bit, The Swiss Illness. You mentioned kind of using a story as a framework with which to express an emotion. What is the story behind The Swiss Illness and kind of the, I don’t know, the concept of the record?
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Andy: Right. So this one was another one that’s pretty, almost purely retroactive in terms of this story. Because I was, I honestly had some anxiety trying to – because in previous albums there’s a story, I’ve stumble across some story. And I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s perfect, that’s great for this.” And with this one I was just like, “Nothing is coming. Nothing is happening in that area. So I was getting anxious and frustrated. So this is the first time where I ever kind of went out and I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to find something that this album is about.”
So it seems like a common story. A lot of people are like, 2016 was just not a great year for a lot of people. You know, 2016 was the first year where I had a family member die that I was actually pretty close to. So it just kind of felt like a turning point in my life.
It’s like, “Oh, from now on it’s like I’m going to have every increasing amounts of memories of people who are not here anymore.” Combined with that is just, you know, I still live in the same city that I have lived in since ’92. I was in second grade when we moved here. So there’s so many little things driving around town that have all these memories in all these different places. This music store that I used to go to every new music Tuesday is now a tile shop. There’s all these things that are gone that I’m noticing while I’m driving around town.
So it’s, I ended up just thinking about nostalgia and how it’s kind of thinking about or dealing with the loss of things both big and small. There’s things that just don’t matter, like my dorm got bulldozed and they put a new one there. That’s not a, doesn’t really matter. But it’s kind of weird that I drive by that spot and it’s like, “Oh, the room I lived in for three years is just not there anymore.”
Then there’s my grandma who’s not here anymore. So there’s things that matter and things that don’t matter. So I ended up just like, I was like, “Well, I’m just going to start and research where the word nostalgia came from.” And that was honestly the story.
Long story short, I guess in the 1700s these Swiss doctors were studying Swiss mercenaries who were away from home and realizing they were having all of these physical side effects as a result of homesickness. So nostalgia used to be a literal medical diagnosis where people would apparently die and have actual physical ailments.
Matt: They died of nostalgia.
Andy: And then there were certain songs. Yeah, exactly. And while they were away from home they were banned from singing or playing songs from their homeland because it would make everybody too sad. So there was this name, it’s like Ron’s Devanchez or something. It’s these songs that were banned, that the soldiers could not play while they were away from home.
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It all just kind of fit. So nostalgia, they called it the Swiss Illness. It means nostalgia. So that’s kind of how they coined it back then. So that’s the story in a nutshell.
Matt: So it all kind of comes together. And you ground your record in this concept of the Swiss Illness.
Andy: Yeah. The titles, the song titles come from a doctor’s account of dealing with someone who was suffering the effects of nostalgia while they were away from home.
Matt: Okay, so this is his kind of actual writings?
Andy: Yeah.
Matt: Oh, very cool. Very cool. Well, and can you let people know where to find – I obviously know, part of helping people know this. But from your words, where to find Lowercase Noises online and how to preorder The Swiss Illness. I have a sudden illness.
Andy: Yeah, you do. It’s just lowercasenoises.com is the best. There’s three, there’s a music video and a single up there right now and two trailers for the album as well as the preorder packages. Yeah, that’s the best place right now. Spotify is really good to me if you want to go stream everything on Spotify, everything is up there. Yeah, so lowercasenoises.com.
Matt: Lowercasenoises.com, that’s where you can preorder. You’ve got some pretty cool vinyl up there, I noticed.
Andy: I do, yep.
Matt: Some different variants and stuff for people who are into vinyl. If you’re into ambient music, if you haven’t checked out ambient music at all, I would say Andy’s is a great place to start because that’s kind of where I started. And it makes you feel things. You might feel something completely different than –
Nate: Nostalgia.
Matt: Yeah, when you listen to Swiss Illness.
Andy: Yeah, that’s totally fine.
Matt: But that’s the whole point. The whole point is just to get out of your brain almost and –
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Andy: One of my favorite descriptions or this type of music is it’s called furniture music. So it’s like a thing that’s there, but it’s not the focal point of the room. It’s kind of a utilitarian thing that’s in the room. It’s like, “Here’s the thing I sit on when I need to sit on it.” But it’s not a painting or something.
Matt: You’re not staring at it, yeah.
Andy: Yeah, so it’s there to be a support for your life. Or it can be something you’re looking directly at if you want, it’s fine.
Nate: You know what’s cool about your music is I have it playing right now as I’m talking to you and it just kind of like have the full experience. You know what I’m saying?
Andy: Great.
Nate: I was like, “If it’s instrumental, it’s not going to be distracting. I’m going to throw it on.”
Andy: Yeah, what are you listening to right now? What is it?
Nate: I just clicked the first track on Spotify so it’s Passage.
Andy: So it’s Passage. You’re hearing some sick banjo right now, which you wouldn’t expect, right?
Nate: Exactly. I’m going to throw it in under – because I edit the podcast – I’m going to throw it in there and then everyone will have the same experience that I’m having right now. So it’ll be really, really trippy.
Andy: Some people hate that I use that banjo, by the way. Some people hated that. But I don’t care.
Matt: So abrasive.
Andy: It sounded cool.
Matt: Percussive strings! Come on!
Nate: It’s funny because there’s so many parts of this type of music that are my favorite movie scenes. Typically it’s no lyrics, it’s just music and it’s just a human being having a moment. And it’s beautiful.
So many times I wish I wrote music like this because I’m like, “I could just put this to all the stuff I want to film and then it’d be sweet!” You know? But I don’t. I’m more the lyric guy.
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Matt: Well ask Andy.
Nate: Yeah, I’ll ask you, Andy.
Andy: Yeah, just get it to little pedal, turn the mix up, that’s all you got to do.
Matt: Yeah, it’s super easy. Yeah, yeah shut up. Well, Andy Othling, thank you for joining us today. Lowercasenoises.com if you guys want to check out The Swiss Illness, it’s his new record. It’s coming out May 19. Check out his music on Spotify, follow him in Spotify. If you’re working, if you’re doing anything and you want to really focus on what you’re doing and not get distracted, it’s perfect background noise. Or noise, music. It is noise, but it’s also –
Andy: It’s Lowercase Noise, yeah.
Matt: It’s Lowercase Noise, it’s also music. So I would just suggest if you’re listening to this, if you’re interested in what this music is, check it out. Listen to it right now, while you’re working.
Nate: And if you ever need a lyric video, I’m your guy. Because it will be the best lyric video ever.
Matt: (laughs) It will be the easiest lyric video ever!
Andy: Technically, I’ve made a bunch of those, right? I mean it’s like all I’ve ever made is lyric videos for my songs.
Matt: Well, Nate can get some really beautiful footage of grass on the farm and maybe some chickens and that will be your video.
Nate: I love it. I’m just thinking of all the times I have to put text and deal with it, it’s funny. Bad, bad joke.
Andy: Yeah, get him out of here. That’s what I say.
Matt: Thanks, Andy.
Nate: Well thanks, man.
Andy: Alright, thanks guys. I enjoyed it.
Matt: Alright, take care.
Nate: Hey guys, thanks for checking out this week’s podcast. And every podcast week after week. You guys are awesome. We just want to give you a little heads up.
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We’re going to have a couple more episodes here as Don’t Feed the Trolls and then Matt and I are going to take a little break for the summer. Both of us are moving and a lot of things are going on. Matt’s going to be on tour and it’s just going to be really, really busy. So we decided we’re going to take a little break. Hopefully that’s not too big of a bummer for you all.
But the good news is, anyone who supports us on Patreon will still be getting content every week for our Troll Talk episodes. That’s a podcast where Matt and I just kind of talk freestyle about whatever. We’re going to be rolling out some cool stuff. For anyone who supports us with five dollars a month will get access to a Q and A channel to ask us questions directly. So cruise on over to patreon.com and support the show. If not, no worries. We’ll pick up this fall with some new episodes and some great guests and keep things going.
Hope you’re doing well, wherever you are and thanks again. Alright.
Don’t Feed the Trolls Podcast