Tone Glow 131: Eyes of the Amaryllis
An interview with the Philadelphia-based trio about the role of failure in their music, the plans they have for their UK tour, and their newest LP 'Perceptible to Everyone'
Eyes of the Amaryllis
Eyes of the Amaryllis are a Philadelphia-based trio consisting of Jesse Dewlow, Goda Trakumaite, and Jim Strong. After playing together in various configurations for years—a result of the interconnected web that is Philly’s experimental music and arts scenes—the band started recording music together in 2020. At the time, the group was a quartet that also included Esther Scanling. Their self-titled debut was released in 2021 on Strong’s Cor Ardens label. Horn of Plenty would house the band’s future LPs, putting out their second album, Sift, in 2022. Last year, they released one of Tone Glow’s favorite albums of 2023 with Perceptible to Everyone.
Eyes of the Amaryllis consider their music to be a warped take on twee, and they are interested in the way that songs arise from their improvisatory shenanigans. Their work, broadly speaking, can be understood as falling in a lineage of shambolic rock bands, queasy improvisational acts, and domestic avant-curios—the kinds that have graced labels like Kye, Swill Radio, Vitrine, and Discreet Music. They’re currently on tour in the UK through April 6th and a full list of dates can be found on Instagram and their website. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with all three members of Eyes of the Amaryllis on March 3rd, 2024 via Zoom to discuss the musical experiences they had as children, the origin of the band’s name, their different albums, and the role that failure plays in their music.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What’s the story of how you all ended up in Philly? Were you born there? I associate Jim and Jesse with the city pretty strongly.
Jesse Dewlow: Goda’s the most interesting so we’ll let her start (laughter).
Goda Trakumaite: I was born and grew up in Lithuania. And then my family moved to the states in grade school, first to Cincinnati, Ohio. And then I lived in Pittsburgh, then Buffalo, and then slowly found my way to Philly.
Jesse Dewlow: I grew up in North Jersey, actually, so I was right outside New York City and moved to Philly in 2006 or early 2007, so I’ve been in and around Philly for 17 or 18 years.
Jim Strong: I was born in New London, Connecticut. And then I moved here in middle school.
Did all three of you have a musical family? How did your interest in music get fostered?
Goda Trakumaite: Song and music is a really big part of Lithuanian culture. My dad’s family is from a pretty rural area, but he and all his siblings went to music school and he learned to play the accordion. Growing up I went to music school too for piano and when I moved to the States I was always in choir and school musicals, which is kind of funny. I never had a lead part, but I was a participant. And then for a long time after that, music was something I loved but didn’t participate in that much. Maybe it’s because I studied it and did it in such scholastic environments that I didn’t know it was a medium I could use for my own creation. I’m a visual artist and people say things like, “I don’t know how to draw,” and I think that’s kind of crazy, but until being a part of this band I thought, “I don’t know how to make a song.”
Do you feel like there’s a difference between Lithuanians’ relationship to music and what you see in the States?
Goda Trakumaite: Yeah. There’s all these song competitions for kids there. There’s a song holiday and people go to see all these choirs perform. It’s part of how the pagan history has been passed down in Lithuania through song, and there are some particular harmonic ways of singing, which I don’t know too much about. It’s an ancient and celebrated tradition there. I have this family tree book where it says that my great grandmothers were singers—it wasn’t their job, but it was a noted part of the culture. Like at parties, someone will pull out an accordion and everyone will break out into song. That doesn’t happen too much here in my experience (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: There was that Christmas party with caroling we went to with your friends in Pittsburgh.
Goda Trakumaite: That’s true. There’s more of these formalized carolings here.
Jesse Dewlow: That was a funny situation because I don’t have any experience with being around that. Jim, your dad’s a musician though right?
Jim Strong: I grew up with my dad. He was in a psych rock band in the late ’60s called the Crimson Flugel. He would have parties and ride motorcycles and shoot guns and stuff. And that was way before I was born. In the ’80s, he started a band called the Mice. His two best friends lived across the street from me, and this strange brotherhood was my family in a way. His one friend was a Satanic Nietzschean Übermensch. He would come over and mix drinks at midnight when we were trying to sleep and also turn on his engine, trying to wake us up. And the other uncle—none of these are my blood relatives—was in a prog rock band called Songster. I say their name here because they got screwed by their manager and they were never allowed to use their name or their songs or anything. When my sister and I were born he planted two trees. He would walk to our house and read us his poems while we were trying to watch TV.
Jesse Dewlow: I didn’t talk to him about it much when he was still alive but my grandfather was a session musician before he was a history teacher, and he willed me the guitar and amp I still use for People Skills. So his vestige is a big part of how I got some of my first gear. But other than that, there’s not really any music in my family, and no formal experience was transmitted to me at least.
In the late ’80s my dad owned an audio equipment store in Manhattan. I remember spending time there as a kid, but I never lived with my father—he and my mother were never married so I would just spend weekends with him. After the audio equipment shop shut down, he was doing CD distribution for these sampler promotional CDs that radio stations used in the ’90s. I think they would pick the popular songs that would end up getting played, or however that worked. I just remember being at his house and there being towers of CDs everywhere looming over my head, and it would be hard just to get to the coach. But yeah, he was an avid listener and a big appreciator who was involved in some sort of industry around music, but he was not a musician. He was also another one of these motorcycle guys who was probably into hairy political stuff at some points in his life.
Jim Strong: That’s the throughline: hairy politics from crunchy motorcycle dads (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: I think your dad, Goda, kind of falls into that too.
Goda Trakumaite: He’s a DIY electrician, among other things.
When did you three first meet, even before you started making music? What were the circumstances that led to that, and what were the first impressions you had of each other?
Jesse Dewlow: There’s a good bit of overlap with the noise and art scenes here in Philly. Jim was organizing stuff at a bigger gallery in town at a place called Vox Populi. That was probably the meeting point for all of us in some way.
Goda Trakumaite: The first time I met Jim, Jesse had introduced us and we went to go see a Butoh performance that he was a part of with Schuyler Thum outside of Moore College. It was a really strange event because it was in this fancy, public area where there’s a science museum and all these Friday night happenings with families. And then in the corner, there was this nude performer and people didn’t know what was going on.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, it was a really unsuspecting place. Like, it was right next to a kids’ museum, so it was families with their kids, and then there was Jim with a naked guy painted in white, playing homemade instruments.
Jim Strong: And unrelated to that, because we were next to the natural history museum, there were guys in dinosaur suits out scaring people (laughter).
Goda Trakumaite: It was a chaotic ambiance. Recently, I was looking through old photos and realized that I had taken photos of Jim playing at a LAVA space earlier than all this. He was playing one of his home-built instruments, and I guess I liked it enough to take a photo. So that was really the first time I saw him.
Jim Strong: With Jesse, I saw him at the Dream Castle, which is a house venue. And I was like, “I’ve been emailing you, let’s do something.” I was trying to book a show at the random tea room and you were like, “Alright, I don’t know who you are.” (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: I have no memory of this. I just remember at some point Jim and I becoming friends through his events at Vox. And then more so after a few of the shows at his family house. That’s where we’re at right now, out in the suburbs. What’s it called?
Jim Strong: My home is an art gallery and it’s called the Johannes Kelpius Center for the Emerging Arts.
Jesse Dewlow: Jim was doing house shows here for a little bit. It’s an old stone cottage.
Jim Strong: It was an old inn.
Jesse Dewlow: So I had come for shows here and after getting familiar with Jim and his friends, there was just a lot of overlap with people I was close with in my heyday in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I went to school there before I came to Philly and that was formative for dissonant and deconstructive arts and music for me. Those were the basement days when I was hosting shows at a few houses there and living with people who were in bands from different echelons in Philly and beyond. And some of these people are still involved, so it’s cool to see them twenty years on. Somehow, Jim and his house became a big part of that overlap.
Goda Trakumaite: But in terms of the band, both of you were like, we should make music, and then one day Jim was like, we should have a band.
Jim Strong: I was coming out of a period of feeling isolated, and I had been reckless with my musical activities for so many years. I would record things but then I would just leave the tapes outside to get rained on. There was no record of anything and, when we started, I just wanted any friendship to be an occasion for an album or book—any sort of document. I wanted to start documenting these relationships and say they were real.
Jesse Dewlow: And I’m an obsessive documenter too, like a budget archivist. I’m always hitting record whenever I play. When we started getting together, it was a couples band. It was us and then Jim’s partner Esther [Scanling].
Jim Strong: It was kind of like Fleetwood Mac (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: This was during the lockdown, so we were hanging outside a lot, and all the recordings are dappled with ambient sounds of the neighborhood and birds. After the first one was really great, we transitioned into playing together semi-regularly and the recordings started piling up. We’d do some post-production on those, and then [record label] Horn of Plenty was down with it.
Jim Strong: We’d put out an album and then we’d break up, and then we’d get back together. It was like the universe was pushing us back together.
So when did you first start making music together? The first self-titled album came out in 2021. Was it just earlier that year?
Goda Trakumaite: That must have been 2020.
Jesse Dewlow: That was the first time all four of us played, but me, Goda, and Jim had played together in 2017, and Jim and I had played music together as far back as 2015. But that Cor Ardens tape was recorded in 2020. And then after that, Nick Hamilton [of Horn of Plenty] reached out to put that out for us on vinyl and I mentioned that I had a lot of other new material. He seemed really excited.
Goda Trakumaite: And Jim, I would say instead of “breaking up” between every record, we contracted and expanded. It was never so rigid. And we’re not constantly playing.
Jesse Dewlow: We only played our first show last week (laughter). Well, actually that’s not true. We moved just outside the city a couple years ago and had a little house warming with 20-30 friends. So we did play a set there for our first record release.
How was that? Any fun stories related to that?
Goda Trakumaite: We made dinner, which is always nice. We had a couple friends join us—Rose, Mike.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah Mike Bruno is an old New Brunswick friend. He’s a member of a loose collective called Shadow Band. Did you play with Shadow Band, Jim?
Jim Strong: Yeah.
Goda Trakumaite: It was a nice turnout. At one point, we had incorrectly used the fireplace and by the end of the set, the room was filled with smoke and we had to carry the burning logs outside. There was this parade of people having to exit the building carrying the firewood.
Jim Strong: The firewood was being played percussively but then it was getting a bit out of hand.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, I was playing with the fire during our set because the fireplace was right behind us. The recording of that is actually on the newer record. That was “The Room Fills with Smoke”—it was a live recording of that set.
Goda Trakumaite: We were all sitting on the floor so none of us could tell, and as soon as we all stood up we were like… it’s not possible to breathe (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: We’re not a consistent band. We don’t practice.
Jim Strong: Well, we don’t write songs.
Jesse Dewlow: We did for that show (laughter). And we felt obligated to do songs that were on Sift (2022) at that show.
Goda Trakumaite: I would say the overarching thing, for me, is that we do really love playing music together and we really love doing that part of it. And then all the other parts of the band come and go. The driving factor is really that pleasure.
Jesse Dewlow: Jim’s kitchen is a good centerpoint for discussion, and that reference point holds true: We’re friends and hang out and sometimes we’ll have instruments and play.
How do you feel like your practice has expanded with being in this group? I know that you mentioned you’re a visual artist, Goda, so I’m wondering about this even across mediums. Jim, the first time I heard your music was with the Vitrine tape. I listened to everything they released back then, they were just one of my favorite labels. And Jesse, there’s all those People Skills albums that I’ve heard over the years. I’m wondering what Eyes of the Amaryllis has done for y’all.
Jesse Dewlow: This band was the first time I’d committed to playing with other people. My interest in playing music was always pretty personal and cloistered. It was just me in a basement with a bunch of trash gear and a Zoom recorder letting off some exhaust. It was a personal thing, and while I’ve jammed with people before, I never had a consistent practice of it. I never cherished the recordings in the way I did when us four first got together either. And then when Horn of Plenty was into it, that was when it turned into a real thing.
Goda Trakumaite: For me it’s just been huge to think about music as something I can shape. I do illustration work, but I also do a lot of different types of work with plants, with gardening and seed production and horticulture. On Perceptible to Everyone, there is a song—“The Usher”—that I feel like I wrote in the sense that we had a song that didn’t have vocals, and then I wrote the part that I sang after the fact. I couldn’t believe that I understood how to do that. It’s been a really fun process of expansion, of learning to make sound with different materials, and to trust the ear to tell you what to do next.
Do you feel like your background in horticulture finds a place in the way you approach music?
Goda Trakumaite: I’m sure it does somehow, but it’s probably really esoteric.
Jesse Dewlow: Having started outside, it kind of set the scene. The band’s name is about the sea and about this sideways pastoral vision.
Goda Trakumaite: And actually I think so much work with plants is about observation and deep looking and “listening,” and that’s true of the type of music we do. There’s a type of presence and paying attention that is a connecting factor, of being outside and listening and context-based improvisation.
Jim, was there anything you wanted to share?
Jesse Dewlow: Jim’s got the most history of playing with people.
Goda Trakumaite: He’s a prolific collaborator (laughter).
Jim Strong: Yes, and I want to proliferate more and more. I think one of the things that’s most exciting about Eyes of the Amaryllis is that I love pop music and folk music, and I always think that in my own personal practice, I’m trying to make beautiful music that resembles what I love in those forms. I’m trying to make folk songs, but there are some rules to my solo practice, one of which is that everything has to be done with a homemade musical instrument, and that involves making the instruments and finding the right process of home recording. Eyes of the Amaryllis is fun because it’s no holds barred—I’m playing bass, I’m playing guitar. There’s drums. It’s a chance to indulge in certain ways that are a bit less precious or tedious, though it all comes from the same place. There’s a nice freedom there.
Jesse Dewlow: Part of the reason why I haven’t done so many live performances with People Skills is that there’s a lot to make happen with broken gear. The Eyes of the Amaryllis format offers more of a palette to pick and choose. Our playing is super relaxed.
Goda Trakumaite: Not that our gear isn’t broken, either (laughter). I think that’s the other cool thing about this band. It’s not that scary if something breaks—we just figure out how to do our band with what’s available.
Jesse Dewlow: As if the church last week wasn’t a big indicator of our gear exploding.
Jim Strong: We don’t intend to bring any instruments on our tour. I think it’ll be a capella (laughter).
Goda Trakumaite: Perhaps.
Jesse Dewlow: It’s a little bit of a roll of the dice every time.
How was the show last week with Maria BC? I’ve actually interviewed them before.
Jesse Dewlow: Oh wow. That’s cool. I really loved their music.
So this was your first public show. How did you approach this show? Can you talk about the performance in general?
Goda Trakumaite: I think we were all excited about it. It’s another special Philadelphia venue—the First Unitarian Church was where I saw the Slits in 2006 or 2007. The guy that was doing the sound at our show was like, “I was there too!”
Jesse Dewlow: Oh that’s cool. I helped a friend run a record distro at a Naked Raygun show there many years ago (laughs).
Jim Strong: The church is an important place. And one funny thing is that I interviewed Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu for my high school newspaper in that side chapel room where we played.
Goda Trakumaite: It’s a formative place for people who love music. And it’s a chapel, so it’s a perfect, intimate space. Knowing that we were preparing for tour, the show was a test drive for that, and in a place that matters.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, it wasn’t the main stage, it was the side chapel, which is cuter and has a small wooden box-type atmosphere. I hope we can pull our live sets into places that are more about the atmosphere like that. For this upcoming tour, I was asking people, “Hey, if you know any outdoor locations we could do a show, an abandoned strip mall or something, we’d be happy to play there.” We were really hoping to get some weird location shows. And to get ready, we’ve gotten together about three or four times.
Goda Trakumaite: Yeah, we’ve been playing more regularly together in preparation for the tour.
Jesse Dewlow: I think we all have different ideas about that too. I feel like there’s something about playing too much that builds anticipation about what we should be doing. My creative practice usually is best informed by not playing at all—it’s reading things I find inspiring or watching films or enjoying different forms of art. I think we all relate to that a little bit, but I almost could’ve been like, “let’s not play at all.”
Goda Trakumaite: But it’s too fun.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, it’s true. It’s nice to do it, so we do it.
Do you feel like performing that show has clarified things about what you’re going to do on the UK tour? I know you mentioned this notion of not wanting to codify anything. And I don’t know if this was serious, but there was mention of not bringing any instruments.
Jesse Dewlow: That’s Jim being a jokester.
Jim Strong: That’s a TSA thing (laughter).
Goda Trakumaite: We are flying carry-on only.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, we’re not bringing a lot. We have a tour tape with some recordings from our practices.
Goda Trakumaite: And today, after this conversation, we’re gonna refine. We’re taking things out and swapping things in.
Jesse Dewlow: After the show, I was really happy with the recording, but during it, I mean I was happy with it but nothing was working (laughter). My mixer was totally fucked up and every time Goda was doing mixer feedback, it was blowing the effects on my mixer out and I had to turn it off and on like six or seven times. And you wouldn’t expect to be happy with those results but I still felt great. I just think about how if People Skills went that way, where if I couldn’t get through a song, it’d be so stressful. But in that format it was really pleasant. And if that’s the worst that things could possibly go, then we’re in good shape.
Goda Trakumaite: I don’t know if this’ll make sense, but when you’re playing you’re listening to the other people as well as listening to the gear and what the electricity in the room is doing. I will say, it feels like an extremely safe way to be a band (laughter).
Jim Strong: We can do no wrong (laughter).
Jesse, you mentioned this idea of reading books instead of practicing. I’m wondering, was the name of the band based on the book and film of the same name? What’s the story behind that?
Jesse Dewlow: Definitely. I think Goda and I were first struck by the film. There’s a made-for-TV, low-budget, very dreamy movie about the book.
Goda Trakumaite: It’s a children’s movie about death!
Jesse Dewlow: And delirium! The movie is painted with beautiful, pastoral visions and it has this lurching underproduced synth soundtrack I couldn’t get over. It’s really wonderful. I think it’s still on YouTube. The atmosphere of that movie felt like it fit some of the things we were all interested in.
Jim Strong: I haven’t read the book or watched the movie out of protest because in my mind, we’re still called the Hyena Forms (laughter). But once you choose a name it becomes the obvious, inevitable name.
Jesse Dewlow: And we called ourselves the Shells for the first year.
Goda Trakumaite: But only in private (laughter).
So throughout the course of the three albums and the 7-inch, are there specific things that you felt had an influence on your works? And this could be music or something else. Or maybe it’s not ever that direct?
Jesse Dewlow: I think the shape of the recordings just comes together through us playing together. I don’t think it’s super premeditated as far as influences, but I do think that when we have our handful of tracks that work together, we’ll put them on a single release. And there may be dissonant material or more song material. I think all of us have different affections for different types of music, but pop music is what our nonsensical, improvised technique is reaching for and scratching at the walls of. Like, some sort of bent twee.
Goda Trakumaite: I have some recollection of talking about the band as we were starting it. We were like, “It would be cool if it were abstract music and songs emerged from that.” I think that’s the organizing principle of the band for me—abstract music with emergent songs.
Jim Strong: That’s pretty accurate to how it happens. We simply wish to be twee.
Is this you wishing you were making twee and failing, or you wanting to intentionally make a fucked-up version of twee?
Goda Trakumaite: It doesn’t feel like a failure.
Jim Strong: Failure is not an option.
Goda Trakumaite: We’re happy with how it feels and how it comes out.
Jesse Dewlow: More importantly how it feels.
Jim Strong: Sometimes it feels bad and it sounds good.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, I think that happened with the last practice. I wasn’t feeling it and then when I was listening to it afterwards, it was great. And that’s mostly what we used on the new tape.
Goda Trakumaite: Personally, it rarely feels bad for me. And that’s actually because I have no idea what it sounds like. While it’s happening, I’m just existing in it.
Jim Strong: Yeah, that’s a whole other story. What it sounds like is separate if you’re overpowered by feelings of terror.
Goda Trakumaite: Do you have that?
Jim Strong: Yeah, but that’s irregardless of what’s happening and possibly unrelated to music. It comes and goes.
Goda Trakumaite: Sometimes I feel horrible when we’re playing but it’s not because of what we’re playing.
Jesse Dewlow: Is it that there’s this ambient dread?
Jim Strong: I get butterflies.
Goda Trakumaite: But once you’re performing it’s fine?
Jim Strong: Yeah, and that’s the energy that makes the show good.
Are there specific twee bands that you all fawn over?
Jim Strong: There’s a list.
Goda Trakumaite: I think that category is so specific. Like, what’s a twee band?
Jim Strong: Twee does have very specific connotations.
(Jim’s dad walks into the room)
Jesse Dewlow: Come say hi to our friend Josh.
Mr. Strong: Hello!
Jesse Dewlow: There’s Mr. Strong.
Mr. Strong: I’m letting the cats out. (He leaves the room).
Jesse Dewlow: Our dog isn’t here.
(Jim’s cat enters the room and he picks him up)
Goda Trakumaite: Jim’s cats are notoriously musical. They have a tape out.
Jim Strong: There’s a cassette of them walking across several pianos and organs that are lined up and create a walking path. I just started recording them one day. I have hours and hours of them just walking back and forth—it’s really beautiful. They still are always making music. Not this cat, but more the other one, Bolita.
Goda Trakumaite: This one’s the much less musical one?
Jim Strong: Much less musical.
Jesse Dewlow: I feel like we never get to spend much time with your cats because we usually bring our dog and our dog is not good with other animals. The cats will be stuck in the bedroom for a little bit.
Does having pets shape the music at all, be it on a logistical level or something else?
Goda Trakumaite: Caresse, our dog, is sometimes in there. She makes sounds.
Jesse Dewlow: Yea she’s often in there, licking herself or chewing things. I actually used a really close-up recording of her gnawing on a bone for a while, at our show at the church.
Goda Trakumaite: And there’s a song on Sift where I was petting her and singing to her the whole time.
Jesse Dewlow: She’ll whimper.
Goda Trakumaite: Yeah, she doesn’t like live music, especially drums. She would like to leave the room.
Jesse Dewlow: But we never play loud, so it’s not like we’re torturing her.
Goda Trakumaite: The cats don’t really participate in our project, but that’s because they have their own (laughter).
Jim Strong: Sometimes they’ll walk by and step on a wah-wah pedal, but we don’t edit that stuff out.
Goda Trakumaite: There were some cat field recordings on what we played at the church. And there’s bird sounds sometimes, too. I just watched this conference about insects and they were saying that, with the Merlin app that tells you the bird sounds, people keep playing them back and it’s actually messing up a lot of birds because they get confused. I was actually going to say that maybe if we’re playing outside, we should consider not playing bird samples. Although you could probably play the Lithuanian bird samples.
Jim Strong: We’d have to do it intentionally.
Goda Trakumaite: We’d have to understand the ecological repercussions.
Jim Strong: And there’s repercussions to everything.
Goda, you mentioned that you don’t ever feel like anything you do in the band feels like a failure. Does this mean that the songs that ended up on Perceptible to Everyone were easy to make? Put another way, is it challenging to get the songs you want when you play music?
Goda Trakumaite: I would say the post-production is the only part that’s challenging. And for that album, we actually did the most collaborative and in-person work. The medium of computer is not one that’s very inspiring to me, even though I do illustration work with it. Once we get to that part…
Jesse Dewlow: It’s the worst part (laughter).
Goda Trakumaite: Like, for the new tour tape, Jesse did most of the mixing, but there wasn’t so much that he did.
Jesse Dewlow: Yea, there were no overdubs really. Just sorting around empty or cluttered spaces in the recordings.
Goda Trakumaite: And it’s kind of that “no failure” idea again. It’s not that things are bad and need a lot of work, it’s just that there are endless options and possibilities for how they could be filled out or made more interesting, and that endlessness of options weighed out between all of us, who have different levels of experience and comfort with software… it gets annoying.
Jesse Dewlow: Yea and I’m a bit OCD. When I get started on something, I work on one thing obsessively until it’s done. I have a bad memory so I find that’s the best way to do things so I won’t forget my decision making for certain things I’ve already done. When I get in the zone and I’m reaching out to the band for that to happen, it sometimes leads to friction because people aren’t always on call to work like that. For me that’s the main reason the post-production is always the trickiest, but playing always feels natural and fun.
Jim Strong: “Easy” is an interesting word. It’s interesting how quickly… like the tour tape is relatively exactly what we did when we practiced. And it felt like every time we sat down, we’d make a perfect little song.
Goda Trakumaite: Or like a lot of perfect little songs.
Jim Strong: It just happened so fast. And now we have hours and hours.
Jesse Dewlow: Okay, okay easy there let’s not call them songs (laughter).
Jim Strong: In my mind, I think of them that way. They have structure to them, and the order is very intuitive. There’s a kind of ease with which these are coming faster and faster, and it’ll be interesting to see how that happens while we’re on tour playing every single night.
Jesse Dewlow: And it’s not just playing every single night, but playing every single night with different parameters. I’ve put out a call for certain instruments at certain places. At some places I’ll have a full drum kit, at another I might only have a trash can. I’m looking forward to that.
Goda Trakumaite: I have a weird hypothesis that I’m excited to see if it’s correct or not. It’s almost like the song-like stuff comes really easy when we’re comfortable. Our show had song-like moments but it wasn’t a bunch of little perfect songs (laughter). It was more drone-y. And I think we like both. I think there are two different ways we work, and ideally we combine them, but sometimes we go towards one way or the other. I think we’re happy to channel the thing that’s happening at that specific place and moment.
Jesse Dewlow: I think that because I don’t have particularly proficient guitar skills, when I’m playing guitar in front of people and there are all these new elements and energies on the table, I’m sometimes not as comfortable or able to find the sounds I’d like to.
Goda Trakumaite: I think we’re playing 11 or 12 shows in three weeks, and I’m interested to see what we sound like at the end. I can’t believe that other bands have to play the same thing every night—that feels so rote (laughter). And that’s what I learned at the show too; it’s great to play in a way that’s energizing. Do you feel that way after your performances Jim?
Jim Strong: Sometimes it’s the worst feeling you could possibly have. But also, sometimes you feel charged and unstoppable. Because it can go so wrong, the reward is high, but you need that possibility. Failure is not an option, but you need to know that it’s a possibility.
Goda Trakumaite: I’m sure there are some shows we won’t be happy with, but not as unhappy as if we had a very specific idea of how we wanted to sound.
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t talk about today?
Jesse Dewlow: It’s worth saying the world is what it is, and I think we’re all trying to figure out how to exist right now. I think we’re all trying to figure out how to do anything while things are changing as fast as they are, as the veils are dropping. And all this music stuff feels pretty auxiliary to our roles as people when you think about bearing witness to world horrors like the live-streamed genocide in Palestine right now.
There are positive things to say about feeling generative with friends and with making music, but by being someone who makes music, I don’t want to underemphasize how important it is to also focus on the other hard stuff that is a huge part of the reality we live in. Even though it can be painful at times, I find it cathartic to make sure I’m always trying to do both in some ways, to grapple with both. We don’t live in this bubblegum, twee world—the world is a dystopia in a lot of ways, so I like to keep that as present as possible.
I’m not gonna grab the mic and do a sermon, although Jim has encouraged me to do that on stage (laughter), but it is a big part of my life, to meditate about people’s struggle for sovereignty, and the crisis we are all surrounded by. My intention in some ways is to integrate that into our sonic output, even if just holistically or psychically.
Goda Trakumaite: I’ve always been both committed to the arts and questioning their efficacy in a world that has a lot of problems.
Jesse Dewlow: Yeah, so I guess in that spirit I imagine us to be an anti-rock or anti-art band or whatever. There’s just a lot of vapid consumption of these images and visions of a rock star or noise star or whatever. Lots of “cool kid club” stuff that I think we are all pretty against. Even the fringes of these art forms build so much ego that puts space between people and the fact that we are all just spacedust.
Jim Strong: We try to reinforce the fourth wall as best as we can.
Goda Trakumaite: We think about what the role of art is in our society. We’re not on the exact same page about it but we’re talking about it all the time, and that’s part of what makes a group project interesting.
There’s one last question I wanted to ask: Do you guys mind sharing one thing that you love about the other band members?
Goda Trakumaite: I really love playing music with the both of them, and I love them for creating an atmosphere in which I can explore and have agency in this medium I thought I didn’t have any range in. I just remember the first time we played music together, I played one note on the guitar the whole time and afterwards, Jim was like, “That’s the only kind of guitar I wanna hear.” (laughter).
Jesse Dewlow: I really appreciate and care for Jim’s specific spiritual practice and how he integrates that into his life and art. I’m not gonna elaborate on what that is for you, but there is an intersection that offers this space for dissonance and pushing against that hoo-ha spirituality and also incorporating it. There’s a duality in your work that I always appreciate.
I think we all have a lack of investment in making sound in a certain type of way, or at least of performing with well-tuned instruments or with proficiency, though I think Goda is maybe more trained than all of us in some ways. But as an artist and a horticulturalist, the framework you’re thinking about sound from is an important part of what we’ve put together, and that’s great.
Jim Strong: Jesse you have a marvelous ability for creating or finding trouble, and folding those around you into it. This spirit has occasionally been the source of adventures I cherish. I feel like you were the initial instigator of wanting to do a tour. I feel the butterflies I spoke of earlier as we prepare in the spirit of adventure. I appreciate that you will both get us into—and usually out of—various calamities.
Jesse Dewlow: It’s happened a couple times (laughter).
Jim Strong: Through sheer tyranny of will we will prevail.
Jesse Dewlow: We’ll see with these 30 days in the UK (laughter). I’m excited because we have a week off in Scotland and we’ve got a few friends in that area. It’ll be nice to explore. It’s a huge part of our visit there—I’ve never been in the UK. For the first two weeks we’re packed with shows, which is going to be cool, but I’m glad we’ll have some time to get into some trouble and do some hiking.
Jim Strong: And Goda, you have a pure heart.
Goda Trakumaite: Thank you (laughs).
Eyes of the Amaryllis’ music can be found on their own Bandcamp page and at Horn of Plenty’s. The band will tour the UK from March 16th to April 6th. Full tour dates can be found on Instagram and at their website. They have a new cassette that is being sold on tour.
Thank you for reading the 131st issue of Tone Glow. Shout out to all cats and dogs in music.
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