 |
| Art by Henri Rousseau |
A delicate web of sound layers is delicately placed within our minds. A cinematic sonic escape from the bothersome modern world with its constant needs for fast living. Landscapes built upon synths, natural sounds, field recordings and other instruments make the sonic world of Apoxupon a treasured refuge for those in need of instrumental bliss.
Apoxupon comes from the mind and soul of musician Anthony Pandolfino. Based in Austin (Texas, USA) Anthony also runs the Mystic Timbre label that releases several artists from different countries and music genres. Apoxupon already has 3 records released and Anthony is keeping himself busy with a few other projects showing his prolific and also conscientious side for he is deeply committed to the music he makes and extremely involved in its subtexts, influences and inspirations, being able to reflect and explain intuitively his body of work.
How the garden grows is Apoxupon’s latest release and is a mystical wondering through natural and pastoral paths that engages and entices the listener to a journey to another time and place.
- How did Apoxupon come to be? Have you played with other musicians in the past?
I've been writing and producing music for over 15 years, a
little more than half my life. I played in a few bands as a teenager, but
nothing serious. Most of my work has been as a solo artist. Since launching the
Mystic Timbre label this past summer, I have had the opportunity to collaborate
with many other artists on mastering their music and designing artwork for
their albums. It has been an incredibly enriching experience, and looks to
continue progressing into the future as I become acquainted with more artists
from all over the world in many different styles.
-
Your name sounds quite melodic and like a play with words. Does the name hold a
special meaning to you and is there a background story to it?
'Apoxupon'
was chosen entirely due to the melodicism and playfulness. It is, as it seems,
a reference to the Romeo & Juliet line "A pox on both your
houses," uttered by the character Mercutio as he's dying. His final line,
"Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man," is exactly
the sort of pun I'd like to be remembered for having as my final words, I
think. It's a terribly tragicomic refrain; it captures, in words, the exact
mood I was trying to convey with the earlier Apoxupon albums: the absurdity of
life and death. 'Apox-upon' had a
stronger sense of poetry when spoken aloud than 'Apox-on,' so I made that
change in stylization.
I read some
time ago that George Lucas chose the title THX
1138 for his first science fiction film due to its physical, visual
aesthetic, and not for any significance or relevance of the sequence of letters
and numbers. I've always had a fascination with that idea, the aesthetics of
words and numerals removed from their semantic, linguistic meaning, and find
the same sort of purely visual pleasure from 'APOXUPON.' There's an interesting
symmetry to the word in print and text.
- You have released three
albums so far: Impermanence Throne, Revived and How the Garden Grows. Listening
to them in that sequence, we may be aware of a certain evolution in terms of
the dynamic between “light” and “darkness”, like it’s a journey that starts off
dark and ominous and culminates in a garden which is quite peaceful and filled
with bliss. Is the trilogy meant to be listened as a whole or do you think more
of them like separate albums?
There is something of a conceptual arc across the three
Apoxupon albums that became intentional beginning with the second release, Revived. The arc traces the course of my
personal philosophy towards life over the course of my age 20s. The first, Impermanence Throne, was made in 2014,
when I was 23 years old, followed a few years later by Revived and concluding with How
the Garden Grows, which I completed in Spring 2019, a few months before my
29th birthday. In that sense, they are separate, individual albums, each
telling of a different point in a decade of one person's changing philosophy,
and there is, as mentioned, a dramatic change in mood and timbre from the dark,
depressive first to the bright, hopeful latest; but, when taken together, they
inform a cohesive evolution in thought.
At 23, I was struggling to deal with the sorts of
existential angst I think most people experience when first confronting the
realities of adult life. I hadn't gone to college; I was toiling in obscurity;
I was struggling to make ends meet financially, and things were generally not
going my way. It felt like I would try and try without success in life and then
someday die. That feeling of futility and hopelessness, that nothing ultimately
matters, that life was all planting and tilling without any harvest or
fruition, is what prompted the creation of Impermanence
Throne. I poked a bit of fun at the thought of a young 23-year-old being so
preoccupied with unfulfillment and inevitable death when I released Impermanence through Mystic Timbre this
summer, by changing the title of the second track to Dirge for a Dying Boy. Musically, this morbid preoccupation is
embodied in the doom and gloom of the album's atmosphere, and the funereal
march of the tempo.
Revived was made at the end of that depression, as the fog lifted
and I began to better understand and make peace with the circumstances of life
and death. I was reading a lot of Albert Camus, and had become fascinated with
absurdism. Now, I felt as though I would try and try in life and then someday
die, and that was all I could ever ask for - the trying and trying was the fulfillment.
How the Garden Grows was the
culmination of that Sisyphean acceptance, the realization that life is
abbreviated and incomplete, but full of wonder.
- In your first album,
Impermanence Throne, you played the keyboards and added other sound elements to
create atmosphere that is both mysterious and enchanting, especially in the
theme Winged Seraph Covet. What were your main inspirations (be it in
literature, music, films or other arts), to create this kind of mood and
atmosphere?
There are a couple main inspirations in particular behind
the atmosphere of Impermanence Throne,
both musical and literary. The title of Winged
Seraph Covet is derived from a stanza in the Edgar Allan Poe poem, Annabel Lee: "But we loved with a
love that was more than love - I and my Annabel Lee - With a love that the
winged seraphs of Heaven - Coveted her and me." Poe was not the most
refined poet, despite poetry being his true creative love, but he was able to
convey a very delicate sense of loss and tragedy in his poems, and often
conjured the sort of celestial images I felt exemplified the atmosphere of Impermanence. Two other tracks from the
album, The Upper Spheres and The Veiled Ones, directly reference the
opening stanza from another of Poe's poems, The
Conqueror Worm: "An angel throng, bewinged, bedight - In veils, and
drowned in tears - Sit in a theatre, to see - A play of hopes and fears - While the orchestra breathes fitfully - The music of the spheres."
The main distinguishing element of Impermanence's lo-fi production is the bitcrushing applied to the
grand piano and synthesizer sounds. Bitcrushing is a digital effect that
involves a reduction in a soundsource's sample rate and resolution. There is a
lot of technical jargon needed to fully explain what that means, but let's let
it suffice to say it is a process that reduces the fidelity of sound, or makes
it uniquely lo-fi. Until modern data compression techniques and Blu-Ray were
developed, video game soundtracks would have to be downsampled in much the same
manner in order to fit on the limited storage space of the old compact and DVD
discs, creating the 'retro' sounds we associate with games of previous
generations. This effect was utilized in order to imitate the ethereal
atmosphere of the soundtrack for the 2001 Playstation 2 horror game, Silent Hill 2, as it is heard in
downsampled form when playing the game on its original disc and console. In
addition to being influenced by that soundtrack's sound, Impermanence's sparse melodies are inspired by the simple, but
evocative, lines from the piano-led themes on Akira Yamaoka's haunting score.
 |
Image by Anthony Pandolfino "I grew very fond of the process of putting an album together as I arranged all the material. I had some very talented friends in much the same situation I was, with hours and hours of great music sitting around that no one had heard before, so I had the urge to reach out to them and offer to release their music alongside mine. In total, there were 21 fully-formed albums when everything had been assembled. It was a pretty exhaustive process that took a little over a year of daily work, but we were finally able to launch the label this summer and release all 21 albums on tape and digital in 3 batches of 7 releases." |
- You are from Austin in
Texas and we noticed that the proceeds from your records go to two different
charities. How is your relationship with social causes and how active are you
in those and other causes?
I wish I could say I was more actively involved with these
particular causes, but at the moment my contributions do not extend much
further than the donation of proceeds from sales of music released on Mystic
Timbre. I've felt a great deal of frustration at not being able to impact
positive changes on a direct level, which recently prompted me to start
attending college, with the goal being to eventually go to law school and
become a public defender. While I am working on that, the donation of my
label's proceeds will have to suffice for my public service. I can also
hopefully help to spread the word about two great programs doing immensely
important work:
The first, RAICES, is the Refugee and Immigrant Center for
Education and Legal Services, headquartered in San Antonio, just south of where
I live. They provide, as the name states, education and legal services for
refugees and immigrants seeking to make it across the southern US border. This
issue has become highly politicized under my country's current administration,
which has made the work RAICES does more vital than ever. I believe the
majority of immigrants and refugees are leaving their home countries as a
result of the devastation caused by US economic and foreign policy, and so we
have a special obligation to provide them sanctuary and asylum.
The second charity, LifeWorks, is based here in Austin. They
work within the city to offer assistance and support to people suffering from
poverty and homelessness. They emphasize support for youth suffering from these
crises, by providing shelter and access to education for the children without
anyone to provide those things for them, or whose wards do not have the means,
but also work to support the other end of the spectrum of society's most
vulnerable, by running shelters and food banks to provide sustenance to the
city's rapidly increasing and aging adult homeless population.
Originally, it was not my intention to donate proceeds from
the sales of other artists whose music I released, and do a more traditional
split of tape profits with them instead, but so far it's been something
everyone has either brought up to me or been immediately on board with when I
mention it as an option, so it's been wonderful to see everyone inspired to
contribute.
- Your label Mystic Timbre
Tapes has released your work and the work of other musicians as well. What
first motivated you to create Mystic Timbre?
I needed a way to release all the music I'd made over the
years. There was a lot of it, and across a broad range of vastly different
styles. It made more sense to do it as a label through which a multitude of
aliases could release music than to try and individually operate all those
different aliases. I grew very fond of the process of putting an album together
as I arranged all the material. I had some very talented friends in much the
same situation I was, with hours and hours of great music sitting around that
no one had heard before, so I had the urge to reach out to them and offer to release
their music alongside mine. In total, there were 21 fully-formed albums when
everything had been assembled. It was a pretty exhaustive process that took a
little over a year of daily work, but we were finally able to launch the label
this summer and release all 21 albums on tape and digital in 3 batches of 7
releases.
Two of the other projects we released music from this
summer, Seikai and Bigcats, are collaborations with my roommate, Samuel Groat.
Sam is an amazing guitarist with a strong background in music theory, so he's
been a very valuable musical partner, and has also made artwork for a few
different Mystic Timbre releases. Additionally, we released three albums each
from two friends of mine, Jordan Thomas/Exquisite Ghost from Winnipeg, Manitoba
and Alex Cino/Pink and Yellow from New Orleans, Louisiana. I met Jordan and
Alex about 13 years ago on an old internet forum called Musicianforums.
Musicianforums was originally attached to a website for guitar tablature called
MXTabs, a name that will be familiar to anyone who learned to play guitar in
the 2000s in America. I don't think the forums are around anymore, but
thankfully we've all kept in touch over the years.
Since releasing those 21 albums, I've had several people
submit their own music to me to release through the label, and I've been able
to make new acquaintances in the underground spheres of electronic and
experimental music. That has definitely become the motivation to keep growing,
the opportunities to work with so many people in so many genres. The first
fruits of these new collaborations and acquaintances will be releasing in the
coming months and into the new year.
 |
Impermanence Throne by Anthony Pandolfino "The photos used for the Revived artwork were taken one night at a local state park, McKinney Falls, after I'd been there making field recordings. The limestone formations that constitute McKinney Falls were created hundreds of millions of years ago, when an ancient volcano, Pilot Knob, spewed lava all about the shallow sea that used to cover what is now the state of Texas. It had been raining earlier in the day, so water collected in the pockmarks in the limestone formed by those ancient eruptions, and they looked so mystically beautiful, these little moonlit pools of radiant cerulean glimmering in the black of night." |
- Both Impermanence Throne
and Revived have your own artwork and they adapt perfectly to the music. How is
your relationship with photography and other visual arts?
It's a relationship that I am working on, to say the least.
For Impermanence Throne and Revived, the artwork comes from
photographs I've taken. I am not an exceptional photographer by any means, but
for Impermanence, I had a strong
concept in mind that didn't require any technical skill, and for Revived, well, the nighttime scenery and
landscape did all the work - I only had to capture it on my cheap camera
phone.
Adding to the irony of a 23-year-old making an album about
how all things end, I used my girlfriend at the time as the model for the Impermanence cover photo. There may not
be any irony to the fact the relationship ended not too long after the photo
shoot. We wrapped her up in fabrics found at a craft store, had her hold a
bouquet of fake flowers in her hands, and snapped the picture in our little
apartment - nothing too extravagant. I applied various photo filters and
effects to give her the appearance of some decaying granite statue.
The photos used for the Revived
artwork were taken one night at a local state park, McKinney Falls, after
I'd been there making field recordings. The limestone formations that
constitute McKinney Falls were created hundreds of millions of years ago, when
an ancient volcano, Pilot Knob, spewed lava all about the shallow sea that used
to cover what is now the state of Texas. It had been raining earlier in the
day, so water collected in the pockmarks in the limestone formed by those
ancient eruptions, and they looked so mystically beautiful, these little
moonlit pools of radiant cerulean glimmering in the black of night. The sky
above was a pale blue that became a deep purple in perfect gradation, and the
tiniest dot of a moon sat overhead, seeming a million miles further away than
it usually was. Later that night, I wrote what would become the first movement
of Not Dead Yet, the opening track on
Revived.
"Musically, Garden is in the realm of Neoclassical, however the structures are much less progressive and more what you might call modern. I chose to rely on repetition to evoke a calmer and more meditative aspect. This resulted in the album sharing many characteristics with the dungeon synth genre, a style that plays simply structured ambient music of Medieval, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Romantic motifs with dark, atmospheric synthesizer sounds."
- Your music is extremely
layered and in your latest release, How the Garden Grows, one feels the bliss,
sense of mystery and peacefulness that is only felt amid nature. It’s classical
and pastoral but has your own edge, your own modern take. Can you guide us a
bit through the composition process?
The concept of How the
Garden Grows was fully realized before I'd written the first note of music.
I had already arranged my nature recordings into 6 sets, with the basic ideas
of spring renewal, a moonlit forest, a fertile jungle, a chattering field full
of insects, a soothing stream, and the chorus of night. I would improvise
playing the harp sound you hear throughout the album with my keyboard for hours
over the nature recordings, until I'd found the right melodies or chord
progressions to form the songs. The next step was typically to find basslines
with the acoustic double bass - the harp and bass form the heart of every
track. From there, it was about adding dynamics and layers of additional
orchestral instruments and synthesizer sounds to flesh the compositions out
into songs.
Musically, Garden is
in the realm of Neoclassical, however the structures are much less progressive
and more what you might call modern. I chose to rely on repetition to evoke a
calmer and more meditative aspect. This resulted in the album sharing many
characteristics with the dungeon synth genre, a style that plays simply
structured ambient music of Medieval, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Romantic
motifs with dark, atmospheric synthesizer sounds.
 |
Revived by Anthony Pandolfino"The volcano molded this land, but now it must be flattened and have concrete poured on top of it, to accommodate the ever-growing human population. These natural features are what attracted people to locations in the first place, and eventually the natural features must be razed to make room for the people. Philosopher Timothy Morton uses a word typically used in coding and programming, 'concatenation,' to describe this interplay between 'hyperobjects' like nature and civilization, that each and every action by one has a direct, physical effect on the other — some immediate, some taking hundreds, thousands, or millions of years to develop." |
- Austin in Texas is a very
populated metropole but it has quite a few rivers and lakes. Do you feel there
is a dichotomy between the nature-inspired music you create and the place where
you live or do they flow together?
Austin's most distinguishing natural feature is the Colorado
River, which flows right through the center of downtown and serves as the
division between the north and south sides of the city. The Colorado's decisive
carving of the thoroughfare and concourse leading from the steps of the Texas
State Capitol Building serves as the perfect analogy for the relationship
between the city, nature, and myself and my creative work: it's not a dichotomy
per se; there's no contrast, because they're all involved and influencing each
other all at the same time, but they don't smoothly flow into one another — they abruptly interrupt. It's not a harmonious union, but there's a begrudging
acceptance that each has to deal with the other's existence. The river cuts
through the city center and carries on with its agenda to drain into the Gulf
of Mexico, and the city and society move at breakneck speed around it, often
only noticing it when a bridge needs to be crossed.
A good example of this tension would be the aforementioned
McKinney Falls State Park, where I took all the field recordings heard on the
second Seikai album, 17 September 1770,
most of the field recordings for How the
Garden Grows, and the photographs used for Revived. Being a short drive from my house, McKinney Falls is where
I go when I need to be in nature, or want to capture its wondrous sights and
sounds; yet, with each passing year, doing so becomes harder and harder.
McKinney Falls is also just down the road from Austin-Bergstrom International
Airport, so it is almost always necessary for me to filter out the low rumble
of airplanes passing overhead from field recordings. In other words, it
requires digital manipulation in order to make the field recordings sound
natural.
Lately, it's become difficult to find any section of the
park where construction noises can't be heard. Once, the park was separate from
the city — now, the city has surrounded the park. The area around the park is
being heavily developed; they're even egregiously building apartment blocks on
top of the hill that is all that's left of that ancient volcano, Pilot Knob,
forever burying the great font which carved out the very physical features that
literally created the landscape. The volcano molded this land, but now it must
be flattened and have concrete poured on top of it, to accommodate the
ever-growing human population. These natural features are what attracted people
to locations in the first place, and eventually the natural features must be
razed to make room for the people. Philosopher Timothy Morton uses a word
typically used in coding and programming, 'concatenation,' to describe this
interplay between 'hyperobjects' like nature and civilization, that each and
every action by one has a direct, physical effect on the other — some
immediate, some taking hundreds, thousands, or millions of years to develop.
It's easy to romanticize the times before industrialization,
before humanity had extended its influence to cover every inch of the planet,
before the Anthropocene. It's less easy to admit and understand I wouldn't be
able to play harps with a keyboard, make field recordings with a portable sound
recorder, ship cassettes all across the world, or answer wonderfully thoughtful
questions for Portuguese music websites if it were not for those things. We
have the ability to capture the natural world around us, in sound and image,
and share it with others in a way never before imagined, and yet the very
capturing and sharing threatens the livelihood of the natural world being
captured and shared. Life, as we know it, is only possible because of the
tension of the concatenation, not despite it. It is an undeniable aspect of the
absurdity of modern life that we must accept every single action we take will
have an effect on, and in turn be responded to by, nature, and vice versa;
there are inevitably going to be actions taken which can be argued are
necessary for the burgeoning population: homes must be built, food must be
produced — these actions are a strain, to say the least, on the natural world
that enables them. Clearly, there is a better and more sustainable way of
living than humanity currently practices, and it would seem that way will have
to involve a healthy merging of the natural and human worlds, as the latter has
expanded far beyond its own bounds.
- What other releases or
projects are you preparing, if you wish to divulge?
I try to keep busy, so there are quite literally a dozen or
so projects and releases in the works at all times. We've just released Automata by Fencepost, an album arranged
entirely from field recordings made at a now-closed Mechanical Music Museum in
Northleach, UK. By the end of 2019, we'll have released two more albums: Optical Seclusion by Dvelop, and Mutiny by Selvedge. Optical Seclusion is a bass-heavy set of minimal synth beats; Mutiny is deconstructed club beats
beneath walls of noise and woozy dub rhythms.
We've got a series of batches planned for the first quarter
of 2020, with new releases each month: two albums of dark ambience in January, Grains by Andrulian and Pestis by R0; two garage punk records by
Nashville outfit The Fionas in February; two albums of progressive electronics
in March, including the fourth Seikai album, and Superbloom II by Brazilian sound designer Phantoms vs Fire; a trio
of dungeon synth albums by Archana and Lost Tales in early April; and a
post-metal/dark ambient hybrid-beast of an album by the enigmatic band Abhasa
at the end of April. There are many things planned into the summer and beyond,
but those aren't quite ready to be unveiled at the moment.
- Thank you!
And thank you! It's been a pleasure — and thank you to
everyone who reads the interview and listens to, enjoys, and supports the
music. Anyone should feel free to reach out or submit their own music (always
looking for visual artists too) to mystictimbretapes@gmail.com — making new
acquaintances around music and art is the most fulfilling part of running the
label.
mystictimbre.bandcamp.com
twitter.com/MysticTimbre
instagram.com/mystictimbre
raicestexas.org
lifeworksaustin.org
Text/Interview: Cláudia Zafre
Band: Apoxupon (Anthony Pandolfino)