Ambience with Andy (From Lowercase Noises) 1 Don't Feed the Trolls
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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. Don’t Feed the Trolls Podcast Ambience with Andy (from Lowercase Noises) 2 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.” Don’t Feed the Trolls Podcast Ambience with Andy (from Lowercase Noises) 3 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.” Don’t Feed the Trolls Podcast Ambience with Andy (from Lowercase Noises) 4 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.