“A man is not his song”, Canadian pop artist Feist sings about the relationship between author and her or his work. Tristan Douglas aka Antwood is a countryman of Feist and, at least on the surface, he seems to live up to the singer’s statement. At a closer look, however, he seems to be hiding pieces of his personality, identity, and interests within his music. The first two recordings by the musician and microbiologist were released on netlabels under the pseudonym Margaret Antwood. Back then, he considered it a fun wordplay that refers to a popular Canadian writer. He soon realized, however, that this somewhat lazy nickname did not reach the quality and resonance of names such as The Dandy Warhols, Harmonica Lewinsky, or Com Truise and subsequent recordings have been released under the name Antwood. His first works, Energy Plaza and Work Focus, were a subversive take on the frenetic rhythmic loops of juke and footwork. Thanks to them, he has been discovered on SoundCloud by Mike Paradinas, who runs the label Planet Mu—where Delphi has been released.
Andrej Chudy Do you self-reflect on your musical and personal development through music that you have released? For example, when you revisit your previous records such as Energy Plaza and Work Focus, what do they tell you about yourself at that time? How much of your current self do you find in these pieces?
Tristan Douglas I still relate to Energy Plaza and Work Focus; I can listen to them without embarrassment. I like them. The technical aspects of my production have gotten better since those releases. On the one hand, this is simple due to the fact that I’ve gotten more skilled. On the other hand, I put in more time and effort knowing that some people will listen. When Planet Mu signed me, I really tried to make my debut album sound as good as possible, to make it modern and relevant—and also personally satisfying. Whether or not I succeeded is up for debate.
I think my debut Virtuous.scr could be the closest my interests will get to converging with dance music trends, and maybe as close as I’ll come to tapping into the current zeitgeist as I did by invoking the universal squeamishness towards AI. My second album, Sponsored Content, and it’s concept as well as execution was maybe less palatable, and Delphi is more esoteric still. However, I think the most recent record appeals to more types of people than my previous albums. What I’ve given up in semi-marketable concepts I’ve made up for in musicality, even if the audience I’m selling to isn’t in the market for that. Maybe I’m confused about who my audience is. Sonically there are things present in all my releases that I couldn’t get rid of even if I wanted to, and probably some I’m not aware of. That’s probably my “style” cutting through the flux of musical interests. Overall, I feel a sense of progress which is personally gratifying—and I hope it is in step with peoples’ enjoyment of the music.
AC You are exploring themes and interests through music in the form of concept albums, or better albums built around concepts—dance music, AI, advertising, relationships. Why does this approach appeals to you?
TD With the exception of Delphi, I wouldn’t exactly say that the albums are built around the concepts, because I don’t usually start making music with a defined concept in mind. Delphi is unique for me in that the story came before the majority of the music, and the artwork and video were made alongside the album. But, generally, the process of making a record starts with gathering whatever musical ideas I’ve accumulated since the last one, then the concept takes shape as I get further into the project and try to make sense of everything. It’s usually when I’m about halfway complete that an overarching idea starts connecting everything. Once the main idea becomes clear, I can use it to inform the rest of the production and try to make it cohesive. But I would say the main thing that unifies an album for me is musical coherence, and the concept is really a kind of emergent property, or a common denominator that results from combining all the parts together. And even then, the concepts, as described, only approximately relate to what is there in the music. The write-ups about the album concepts are useful, and necessary to convey their overall meaning, but it’s not until late in the process or after I finish a project and reflect on it that I can think of it as a single work with a clear meaning. In reality the process is less deliberate and literal, more musical and emotional.
AC To musically represent these various concepts you are using elements of dance music as storytelling and narrative elements. What’s your relationship with arpeggios & ostinatos? What do they represent for you / in your music?
TD I do like repeating musical ideas through an album, and I think that repetition and the recurrence of sections can instill a sense of meaning into a record, even if that meaning is undefined. It’s something I’ve done more deliberately with each record. I did it to some degree on my previous two albums, by slowing down sections, changing synth patches or otherwise altering patterns from one track and repurposing them as the foundation of another. For example, on Virtuous.scr, tracks 1, 5, and 12 are all based on the same melodic patterns. Similarly, on Sponsored Content, “Don’t Go” is a modified, slowed down version of the piano from “Human”. But I think on those albums the repetitions are not very easy to detect, and probably just make the albums feel more tied together, if anything. On Delphi the use of ostinatos was purposeful. The variations of the Delphi theme were written to guide the mood at specific places on the album, based on the narrative. Since Delphi is essentially structured as a story, it made sense to implement a leitmotif for the character who experiencing everything alongside the listener in a sense. There is both an arpeggio and a melody associated with Delphi which are used in 7 of the 13 tracks. After “Portal” the theme disappears for a while because I wanted to create a feeling of wandering far from home, like a hero’s journey to somewhere unknown, with a final return to the theme at the end.
AC How do you choose your samples? Are the samples you use in your music close to you on emotional level? Or do you use them because they relate to some other aspects?
TD I guess this depends on how we are defining samples. If we’re talking about all the sounds which I use that are not from instruments or recorded, that’s a bit complicated. There are many layers on most of my tracks, with sounds from all kinds of places, a lot of them sourced online. In terms of identifiable sound effects or vocal clips, I would say that I have developed a good ear for what sounds will work well in music and lend themselves to creating moods. Virtuous.scr has a very robotic and almost obvious sound-pallet that is associated with near-future dystopian aesthetics, and so does Sponsored Content to some extent. It’s easy for me to make that kind of sound world. Many of the samples in Sponsored Content were also meant to be funny and confusing, even obnoxious—that was the idea although I wonder if it would have been a better record without the ads or Mark Zuckerberg clips.
AC Music technology has enabled creating new voices, computer generated scores, vocaloids, synthetic choirs, AI voices, 24/7 AI-generated death metal, SampleRNN audio generation, voice deep fakes… It’s quite possible soon there’ll be fully AI created music with any voice (un)imaginable. What is going to happen to an identity, a personality and a personhood of a musician if the musician is a software?
TD I think the concern of technology overtaking human expression in music isn’t a new one. Music lends itself naturally to rules that are almost innately linked to the actual properties of sound. In western music for example, the ever-changing understanding of intervals and harmony results in a continuous sense of modernity and innovation as new guidelines and conventions are established and new forms of expressivity are made available. These changes in musical vocabulary have mirrored technological advancements, like the clockwork fugue of the baroque compared to algorithmically generated twelve-tone serialism in the 20th-century.
A lot of music is extremely mechanized now. What remains constant is the presence of a musicians’ intention—in whatever form. I think that the musicians currently using machine learning in their work are not making AI-generated music as such. The focus is still on the human, and the fact that they developed the idea or made the choice to use some automated system for composition. It’s still their artistic statement. In other words, the use of AI in commercially released music has up to now been an aesthetic choice made by humans. I don’t think the idea of fully realized AI music is appealing to many people. But I guess when AI music slip into the mix, we won’t necessarily know that it’s happening. Unless the AI musician becomes to be as problematic as Tay the Microsoft chatbot, then we’ll know.
AC Your compositions are very evocative, creating representations of physical and virtual environments. They almost seem to work as soundtracks. Is producing music to you a visual process? For example, how do you imagine a “Healing Labyrinth”?
TD Thank you. The Healing Labyrinth is a real place. It’s located in a community garden called “Providence Farm” near where I grew up. The labyrinth is a kind of spiral path with two routes—a short Rabbit Path and a longer Turtle Path—both of which lead to a bench in the middle. The idea is to make your way to the bench, sit and reflect, then leave. I went there a few times when making Delphi and incorporated it into the album.
More generally, yes there is a strong visual component to how I imagine music. For example, when Virtuous.scr was in its infancy, I was making the music with images in my head of different kinds of futuristic materials. The working track titles were things like “Graphene” and “Anthracite” (some of these stuck)—the album was going to be called Materials before I developed it further and its concept and visual universe expanded. When I made Work Focus I was fixated on William Gibson’s shantytown San Francisco and the Kowloon Walled City from his Bridge trilogy novels. Similarly, with my 2019 EP Alousia, I had certain images in my head of stylites atop towering pillars, which coincided with an interest in polyphonic chant and trance—and somehow it all came together.
AC This imaginative approach to musical representation in your work has some similarities with what the American guitarist and composer John Fahey did. Do you have a favourite John Fahey tune and if you do, why would that be your favourite one?
TD This is a real Nardwuar[1] question. I was really into John Fahey for quite a few years and taught myself how to improvise “American Primitive” guitar. Most of this stuff is played in open tunings. After learning to play Fahey’s “Red Pony” (also called “Wine and Roses”), I would sometimes have a guitar sitting around tuned to open D, because I liked that tuning. The song “Wait for Yengi” was written in a Red Pony style, on guitar tuned to open D. It’s funny, sometimes it’s hard to break away from that American finger picking style even when writing synth or piano lines. I guess the farthest away I’ve gotten from it is switching to writing arpeggios. But what I like about Fahey’s music is that it sounds simultaneously like Americana and trippy modal drone music. This could easily come across as hokey “spiritual” but feels legitimate and part of an Appalachian folk tradition, similar to Sacred Harp singing. One of my favourite John Fahey songs is “Beverly” because to me it sounds like someone telling a story while bullshitting and exaggerating every detail in the way most storytellers do.
AC Your piano compositions on Delphi are very tender almost like from a romantic anime or game soundtrack. They are, however, connected with rest of the album through the melody. What is their purpose in Delphi?
TD The recurring melody in Delphi is meant to represent the titular character, and every time the melody comes in it’s a kind of check-in with her. This happens at key points in the story when she’s undergone some kind of change or about to make a decision. The recurring, unaccompanied flute-like arpeggios accompanies her voice when she’s writing messages on Google Hangouts. I’m not sure if this comes across, but by associating the flute with Delphi’s voice early on in the record I wanted to imply that she is playing the flute at the beginning of “Castalian Fountain” as she’s walking from the Corycian cave towards the spring. There, priests are cleansing themselves in preparation for the oracle-giving process. From what I understand, poets of antiquity would get inspiration from this fountain. I wanted Delphi to have a sudden urge to play that serene flute tune when approaching it, right before a seeing a goat sacrifice and witnessing the inspired mania of Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo.
This interview was conducted for a piece originally published in Slovak newspaper Kapitál.
All pictures of Antwood were taken by Olivia Dreisinger.
[1] Nardwuar, better known as Nardwuar the Human Serviette, is a Canadian interviewer and musician from Vancouver, British Columbia who does such extensive deep-diving on interviewees that it often confuses, scares and/or really impresses them (via Wikipedia).