:::: : : Four full-lengths past, including his most recent work entitled I Want To Live A Peaceful Life (filmguerrero) - sctas speaks with Emil Amos, the man behind Holy Sons, regarding early influences, what's missing in today's music and the longing to live that 'Peaceful Life' . : : ::::

+ The latest album, 'I Want To Live A Peaceful Life', is more "hi-fi" than previous releases - is this the result of the new label and a better budget?

Well, I've never really had a 'budget', but each song's sonic qualities only reflect what the song seemed to ask for or how I was feeling at the time. In regard to 'no-budget' music, I think people have grossly misunderstood lo-fi ; it's power, it's point and/or what is satisfying about it - they tend to view it as a trend or a by-product of necessity but it transcends those things - it seems people just don't have the appetite to acquire a sympathetic ear for it.. . but that goes for most all avant-garde/cult music.

+ What is "family man" about (from '.. . Peaceful Life')?

Family man, more than the other songs on 'I Want To Live A Peaceful Life', was fun to do because it's structure gave me a lot of room to pack meanings in -- that's sort of my favorite thing about the vehicle of hip-hop. It compacts so many words together.. you can say so much in a small amount of time. During the time '.. peaceful life' was recorded, I had really plateaued out in terms of personal growth.., I saw no future for myself - it was a shitty period characterized by some sort of solipsistic claustrophobia, smoking too much pot, paranoia etc.. ..totally anti-social and hiding out for those years.. perhaps indulging in my opposition to everything.

As a lyricist primarily, I'm trying to find the most accurate phrases that could capsulate my sweat and blood onto the tape and bring those dead cells right through the headphones into yr ears, into yr brain and make you realize what this feeling feels like .. identify it in yr own life. The line ''wondering if I am a man with a caring soul or if I'm only just two eyes that stared too deep one too many nights into the empty nothing left'' represents a lot of holysons' music and where it's coming from; an endless spiral of depersonalization vs. some kind of nirvana. And then musically 'Family man' has a few elements; the Knight Rider bass-line is sort of obvious I guess, but maybe the main sonic inspiration was the first Neil Young solo record ... among others including Waylon Jennings' 'Dreaming My Dreams', Richie Havens' 'Alarm Clock', and Fred Neil's 'Fred Neil'.

+ The liner of 'Lost Decade' states that the songs were "recorded on various four-tracks and handhelds in the mountains of North Carolina '94-'99" - so you are originially from out this way? (we are in Virginia)

I grew up in Chapel Hill, NC and went to college in Asheville, NC. My family has a plantation in Georgia on 700 acres, so I'm still tied to the south and the east coast - Virginia is really nice. I think Gene Vincent was from Norfolk - I was in a skateboard contest there, Gator signed my shirt just before he was locked up...

+ What is it about Portland, OR that makes people want to write & record so much? (We recently did a feature with Lauren Newman (LKN of Portland as well), and she has well into the "thousand's of songs" / compositions recorded such as yourself) .. .

I guess I've cut down on writing new songs since I moved to Portland. Going from incessantly recording songs daily to releasing packaged and sequenced albums wasn't a really instinctual move for me - I wasn't really aware of the 'audience', so when it came time to release albums I was already wading in a large backlog- most of the time I've got three or four albums in my head continually changing shape. I don't think Portland has had much effect on the music I make.

+ You play many (if not all) instruments on the albums, who do you take on the road with you?

The longest lived Holy Sons live arrangement was made up of some of the guys who now play in Dolorean (Ben Nugent, James Adair). Then for about a year or so I played solo shows, and now it's mostly all the guys in my other band Grails and Ben from 'Dolorean'.

+ What happened to Pamlico Sounds, the label earlier albums ('lost decade', 'staying true.. .') were released on?

That was the label Holy Sons and Grails used to release our early stuff - it hasn't really disappeared.. . I may have to use it again to release songs that haven't been allotted to scheduled albums because it's getting hard to move on while wading in piles of tapes and songlists.

+ Some of your earlier songs deal with religious matters ('jesus was walking', 'of cain') - does this reflect any certain personal views on "religion"?

I'm not a Christian - for me, it's inevitable that you would stumble through these classic parables and illustrations of spiritual navigation when trying to spiritually navigate. But, for me, it's just part of a larger research into acquiring more tools to articulate and find out more about what I think, rather than trying to assimilate ideas from other sources into my mind. It's important to me to join the force of creativity in the universe as opposed to worshiping it as a subordinate.

+ Tell me about how you got into "underground music" and what your early influences for HolySons were.. .

When I was about 12 or 13 my favorite band was Led Zeppelin .. I was just discovering Metallica .. and then skateboarding came along and devoured all my other interests besides music. There were some key skate video moments where we began to get curious about who the bands were. Black Flag just sounded so repellent and impossibly tough.. and Dinosaur had somehow cornered the market on skate video soundtracks. A watershed moment was Mike Vallely's part in Speed Freaks skating to 'freak scene', also Natas' part to Naked Raygun was great. I remember Caballero dropping in and Dinosaur's (Jr.) version of "Show Me The Way" began.. And we were all taken aback at how bad J Mascis's singing was. We'd never heard anything that raw and out of key. At first we were confused but we kept playing these videos back and by the next few listens we had sort of bonded with these weird voices.. And we searched the credits and started trying to understand these bands.

At the end of the 80's we had to make up our own imaginary scene. Just me and a couple friends began living our own little version of what you could only extract from the black and white pictures of bands like Minor Threat. Never mind that their revolution had happened almost ten years before. We just latched on and there was nothing else but hardcore and skateboarding in the world.. everything else just bored us. We only thought of curbs, handrails and airwalk jumps with guitars; endlessly debating over the ultimate bands or the straight-edge lifestyle and it's strange and lofty mission to raise the stature of modern man.

Chapel Hill was a really great place to be a kid.. very small and a good bit of youth culture to be a part of. I was pretty oblivious to the fact that Superchunk and Polvo had started getting bigger outside of Chapel Hill. I remember being kind of stunned when Guy from Fugazi cornered Ash confessing how much he like Polvo's show at the 9:30 club as I stood next to them in the back of the old Cat's Cradle. I identified Mac as the guy at Schoolkids Records I hassled to get in more hardcore records or whatever. Schoolkids Records was like a daycare for me. I must have seemed pathologically obsessed to all the shopowners... this little kid with all these really strong opinions debating for hours about whatever band. I made my rounds going from the music equipment stores to the head shop to the different record shops badgering all the old guys for information. There was a small, somewhat burgeoning skinhead scene that me and a couple friends were pretty fascinated by. At the center was the huge burly, heavy-drinking dude named Ed Oaks that led the band 'Patriot.' They liked that we were so faithful to the music and endlessly interested in hardcore so they'd let us come over and watch them practice. You could tell they used to listen to classic rock and they fused it into Oi music flawlessly. It struck me as totally beautiful. I was stunned when once Ed mentioned that I should come and play drums with them because their drummer was in jail. I was so intimidated I don't think I ever took it seriously. At school I was playing with the jazz band and that was another world and another way of listening to music. Some of the guys in the band remain to be some of the best players I've ever played with. And some of the bands at High school were some of the more outrageous, creative and skilled bands I've ever seen. Al Burian was in the Celibate Commandos, which we looked up to because they had made three of their own seven inches. The idea of ever having any sort of record was really heavy to us. Certainly a large part of everything I do now comes from that time, those players around me and those older kids handing down their musical knowledge to me. In ways I don't think my ideas about music have changed much since the days of hardcore.

I'm still disturbed by what happened when 'underground' music became 'indie' music. I don't buy new music and I haven't for a long time. Anytime I hear almost any music made after Nirvana's explosion in around '92 it sounds like something is missing to me. There is a certain awareness of the audience that has corrupted what was once a thrilling state of camaraderie and seemingly endless possibility. I think, to some extent, people probably feel undernourished nowadays and wish it were different. So, like it all began I find myself inventing my own little scene in my bedroom with my records and a beer in my hand thinking about what Skip Spence must have been thinking about way back then....

+ What would it take for you to "live a peaceful life".. .

Well the title of the album is sorta erroneous, so this example may not be best: I once read that Dostoevsky was pathologically obsessed with the cycle of sinning to repent, so that when he was repenting he was already getting excited to sin again .. to then repent again and so on. While I'm not a descendant of his, wanting to live "a peaceful life" is an impossibility and so that title ends up being a dark joke.

 

--------- fin --------