Issue #014 (July 2006) Faux Pas Email this article to a friend Interview by Matthew Levinson `I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love to see my music analysed, scrutinised and put into some kind of context by the really intellectual music bloggers'' says Tim Shiel. 'Athough I suspect I might be disappointed about what they have to say about it.' Shiel is in an internet cafe in Salzburg his wife is away on a Sound of Music tour and we are continuing an email dialogue that has been running for months as the couple do the around-the-world circuit. He employed the name Faux Pas at first for DJing purposes `No beat mixing, no effects, no nothing, as if I was doing a radio show (which I used to do)' down at the Espy Public Bar in St Kilda on Monday nights. Those sessions were soon followed by the self-released debut EP Faux Feels in late 2006, and the Entropy Begins At Home album in January this year that Shiel describes as `sample-based' music similar to `Caribou, Minotaur Shock or even Mountains in the Sky'. A week later he got on a plane, leaving Wally de Backer from Gotye to field calls from eager music journalists (the album was playlisted on Triple J, US college radio, and most Australian community stations). `I listen to so much music and I even make it myself, but I don't feel particularly articulate about it. I'm jealous of the way some bloggers and music critics can so artfully put music into historical or political context, and I feel like as a supposed `artist' I should be able to have the same level of insight. Arguably I should be even more connected to what I'm doing, more aware of the levels on which it operates or on the context that it depends on, but the fact is I tend to just slam music together almost by accident until I like the way it sounds. `I think comments like `waiting for baile funk to blow over' [his myspace site is emblazoned with the quote] come out of being frustrated about that, but it probably has something to do with me not being particularly interested in some of the most recent hipster obsessions like grime, baile funk, Baltimore, micro-house, or whatever. I just can't get into a lot of that stuff.' The buzz created by influential blogs and online magazines, and their huge influence over hipster audiences everywhere, seems to be making for a more, rather than less, homogeneous international music experience. `I guess what makes hip circles `hip' is everyone agrees on what's cool and what isn't, or that at least while there is enough variation in a given hipster population to give the impression of diversity. `I don't like the idea that obscure music is good because it is obscure. I like discovering new music and I am always looking for things that interest me in ways that I might not have thought of before, but I am definitely not one of these people who thinks that any band that more than five other people might have heard of is instantly shit. I wonder if some people listen to obscure or inaccessible music just to be difficult. `It's a matter of scale though, I suppose, because a lot of my friends would probably categorise me as the person who only listens to weird, obscure shit, and instantly dismisses all popular music, when really I don't think that I am,' he says. `But I still don't like Wolfmother.' Sound quality is shaping up as a big question mark around the internet only a decade old, at least in mainstream terms the web's instant delivery is changing the way we look at music, taking us further and further away from the hi-fi dreams of the `70s. Shiel is ambivalent: `Most of my samples come from MP3s I have downloaded, so the source quality varies wildly. Audiophile types always roll their eyes and gasp when they hear that, but I just see it as another way of adding texture to a mix. If I really like a sample then I am probably going to use it even if the sound quality is poor. `I don't fetishise sound quality. I appreciate good sound, but I put my music together at home using a computer, a combined sound card and keyboard that cost under $500, and a pair of speakers that my uncle made himself in the `80s. I don't fetishise lo-fi either, I just get the job done with whatever gear I can afford, which really isn't much.' His cut-and-paste antecedents, say, the Avalanches, DJ Krush, Coldcut, and Shiel's friend Gotye, invariably dwell on the darker, melancholy end of the aesthetic range, but Faux Pas seems much more optimistic. `If anything I probably swing further the other way,' Shiel says. `When I am putting tracks together I'm not really thinking about an end result, and in particular I'm not trying to illicit a particular emotional response from someone. I don't go into a track thinking `Let's make one about loneliness' or `I want to make a song that makes people feel contemplative'. `I don't listen to much downbeat or melancholic music, if any, because I don't really have any use for it. So I guess my stuff is going to end up sounding upbeat and optimistic, because that's the kind of music I listen to and enjoy. I'm also obsessed with rhythm and percussion at the moment, so it's hard to make percussive music that isn't by definition upbeat, or it's hard for me anyway ... Just don't call me a happy person, I'm complex, and brooding!' Although Shiel has had no formal training in music, he did grow up with computers. He swears he is not a PC geek, but it does seem to come quite easily, especially when you consider the leap in technical aspects of his production over the relatively short time between last year's EP and this year's album. `I got into grunge when a lot of my friends did in high school,' he says. `I learnt how to play guitar by getting a friend to teach me the chords to Nirvana songs. A few years later I completely disowned all of the music I'd been listening to in high school, I burnt Eddie Vedder's effigy and made voodoo dolls for each of the members of Soundgarden. `I would absolutely love to be in a real band. I would be absolutely pathetic and I may not last very long, but I would love to do it. Playing live music is something that I fantasise a lot about, having never really done it before. I'd love to play drums, even though I am obscenely uncoordinated. And I would love to work together with other people to create something. I haven't been at this particularly long, but I'm getting very tired of working alone.'