Emil Amos is currently a part of no less than four different musical endeavors, but the one he is most recently focused on, and the one he has pursued the longest, is his own: Holy Sons.
The Portland, OR songwriter and multi-instrumentalist sits behind the drum kit for both the instrumental rock band Grails and the experimental trio OM, and produces psychedelic sample-based hip hop with fellow Grails member Alex Hall under the name Lilacs & Champagne, yet has still released a dozen Holy Sons records over roughly 15 years. This past March, Lilacs & Champagne released the excellent Midnight Features Vol. 2: Made Flesh, and now Amos has followed that up with Fall of Man, possibly Holy Sons’ most accessible collection of songs to date.
Through collage methods and hazy production values, Lilacs & Champagne create strangely familiar new environments out of old sounds: vintage records and other hidden thrift store gems that Amos and Hall collect on tour and at home in Portland. Fall of Man does something similar, though without any of the sampling. The album’s ten tracks often echo rock’s past, but are wholly new transmissions, originating from Amos, informed by his lasting fondness for the classic rock he was raised around. Instead of bluntly rehashing an era, however, Fall of Man‘s true time and place is elusive. Floating amid the acoustic-led “Discipline” or the soulful slow burning “Being Possessed is Easy”, the listener feels neither in 2015 nor 1975, but in a half-dreamed twilit realm somewhere in between.
Amos recently wrapped up a tour with drone metal band Earth that took Holy Sons all across the US, and in the middle of that tour, Amos took the time to assemble a playlist of what they were listening to on the road (“The whole theme is night driving, specifically on this tour when we had to drive overnight from Orlando, Florida to New Orleans!”), and field some questions about the inspirations behind the album and what sets Holy Sons apart from his other projects.
Considering the explanations you’ve given about the title, Fall of Man, what was specifically on your mind when writing the songs for this album?
My mind tends to automatically transmute what’s difficult in life into a philosophical landscape I can deal with, and it uses these records as a kind of re-evaluation process. Aging has an effect where it feels like you’re slowly floating up above your life and beginning to see the bigger god’s eye view. But life always remains to be a constant riddle anyway, so the records just directly reflect the process of trying to gain a better perspective on it.
Did the album’s theme come together as you were writing the material, or did you know from the outset what subject you wanted to deal with?
The sonics of the record have a kind of autumnal vibe, so maybe unconsciously it related to the idea of the “fall of man” in a seasonal way. The title and concept usually always comes after the melodies and themes have already occupied your brain for a couple years. The melodies are like viruses that stay with you for a while and then just cycle through, while the theme comes from a much more conscious place.
At least a few of the songs on Fall of Man, lyrically, feel kind of like internal conversations: either a dialogue with yourself, or that kind of “I wish I’d said …” feeling when a conversation you had with someone continues to play out in your mind after it’s over. When you write Holy Sons songs, who or what audience do you have in mind?
The original idea of Holy Sons was meant to be captured in a purely isolated situation without any kind of viewer involved as a kind of experimental therapy. So, theoretically and literally, there wasn’t an audience. But now that we are actually in front of one it presents a totally different dynamic by definition. Its become a less lonely reality these days, but the songs still come from that same original internal narrative. The recording process is where you’re sort of digging for discoveries and then playing live is where you basically display what you learned living back in the cave.
As a member of at least three other notable groups, what do you get creatively (and/or otherwise) from Holy Sons that you don’t get from your other projects?
Since this project was the first one that existed, it operated as a kind of testing ground where whatever I learned could be applied to the other projects and then those methods could be exchanged. When you’re alone with no constraints, you can attempt to fulfill any sonic fantasy you can think of. So recording is often a process of seeing what can come from the various intersections of experimentalism and traditionalism when they meet in the middle. I think jazz players like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane often emphasized that improv works best hand in hand with some structure, and I think Holy Sons gives me the opportunity to go further out on the spectrum of experimentalism and tradition to hybridize a natural meeting point between the two.
Grails, Lilacs & Champagne, Om, and Holy Sons all have sounds and vibes that are unique from one another. Does keeping them distinct sometimes guide your songwriting in Holy Sons? Say, if you were to write a Holy Sons song that sounded somewhat like a Grails song, would you feel compelled to change it?
I guess I don’t differentiate between them that much consciously. But when it comes down to deadlines and real life shit like hopping planes, everything has to take a concrete shape. If a Lilacs & Champagne record gets a deadline first, it could easily steal a cover design from Holy Sons, and if there are mellow sketches that a Holy Sons record might need to break up the flow, I could take them from a Grails stash. You never really know until the deadline demands it.
Classic rock is a noted influence on Fall of Man. What were your first experiences with that kind of music? Why does classic rock continue to resonate with you?
I can remember all sorts of flashpoint moments that kind of solidify [my] early relationship with those records, like driving through downtown Chapel Hill in ’93 after we’d won the NCAA finals with drunk kids hanging out of trees and jumping on our car, while my windows were rolled up listening to “Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin. Or being hazed by skateboarders in Miami, Florida, while listening to “Crosstown Traffic” by Hendrix on my Walkman when I was like 12.
A lot of legendary musicians had houses in Miami during the ’70s and my father often hung out with Stephen Stills, Hall and Oates, and the Bee Gees, so that whole mood was just in the air around the time I was born in Coconut Grove. Classic rock is really just the bedrock of our modern radio paradigm, no one can totally escape it. It represents that moment when great ideas meet great production and great performances. So I think it’s inevitable that we draw from these things when trying to make new records sound huge and timeless, too.