Author & Punisher Plunders the Crawl Space Between Metal and Industrial Music

Photos courtesy of Author & Punisher

Combining an abrasive, textured and downright brutal palate of sounds, the music Tristan Shone makes as Author & Punisher sits (un)comfortably between cranky, homespun, industrial electronics and slow, grinding doom metal. Eschewing any kind of traditional set up, Shone instead makes his primordial racket with a bizarre selection of hand made electronic instruments including his infamous masks and "drone machines," unwieldy brute mechanicals that produce a bizarre cacophony, comprehensively breaking the frame between composer, technology and performance in an often staggeringly intense fashion.

Using instruments forged from aluminium and steel alongside his laptop, Shone initially self-released music while studying sculpture in San Diego, and has put out five albums since 2005. But while you might expect his music to be unrelentingly bleak, it is also tempered with a rare elegance and harmonic texture that belies years of experience, layered vocal harmonies, a wilfully unquantized approach to arrangement and a disdain for the plastic "black eyeliner and zero substance" Nine Inch Nails worship that has befallen so many industrially minded artists since, well, y’know, forever. Catching the ever keen ears of Phil Anselmo, Shone is putting out his new record Melk En Honing on the ex-Pantera vocalist's revered Housecore imprint this month. Noisey caught up with him to talk masks, chaos and industrial disdain.

Noisey: How did you initially get into using electronics?
Tristan Shone: I’d always played in metal bands, just like all of my other friends back in the late 90s. [laughs] But then I kinda found myself as a mechanical engineer, doing the weekend warrior thing. I did a lot of sculpture too, worked with a bunch of artists building art installations, robotics and stuff. I went back to art school to develop that, but I didn’t really think I was going to combine the music with the art until halfway through grad school. At the same time I was programming my own beats on Abelton and Reason, stuff like that, background tracks for guitar, doing the one man band thing. But that quickly made me realize that I didn’t want to be tied to playing backing tracks. I wanted to play live, so I built the drone machines, built the peddles, built the masks and suddenly the guitar was all gone.

There is a heavy layered aspect to your work, particularly this new record. What is your working method?
I found in the past that if I write songs on my laptop instead of playing them on my machines, I end up layering the synths, and I end up with these beats songs that are just unobtainable. You end up thinking "I’ve gotta run that as a separate track… that as a separate track…" Too many layers. So I try to avoid that now, just stick to what I’m able to play with my right hand and my left hand, with my voice and my peddles. It was important for me to be able to do the album live. I’ll sit in the studio and just keep practicing, try not to use click tracks, try to just play in a visceral, live way. It’s hard to do it that way, but I think that electronic musicians don’t do it enough any more—they’ll end up stuck with sequenced beats, stuck in this rhythm. Even with supposedly really leftfield noise or electronic music you often find this cliche of a crescendo followed by the same beat. There's no variation. For me it’s all live.

Can you tell me a little about the Housecore Records link up? How did Phil Anselmo get into what your doing?
Phil is into checking out weird ass YouTube videos, crazy sounds. When Phil’s on tour, he’ll sit with his stage managers and watch shit with his managers and his front-of-house guy. Phil likes listening to gnarly shit, heavy music, and he tends towards stuff that’s different. So he found it. He’s into a lot of fucked up, obscure noise bands and so on. Housecore don’t have much of a grip on electronic music, and in a sense that was cool because it made me even more determined to do as much as I could live. I didn’t want to record to MIDI to fix everything.

And in terms of electronic music (and beyond), what did you listen to when you were growing up?
I grew up in a small New Hampshire town. It wasn’t like in the UK, where you guys grow up with drum n bass or whatever. We had some small raves, but it wasn’t what I was really into. It was more trance music and stuff. But I listened to a lot of the late 90s DnB and totally fell in love with it, and at the same time was listening to a lot of death metal, also Neurosis, Melvins, Godflesh. But really, I wasn’t listening to much industrial stuff. The whole house beats with distortion and tight leather pants was never something that I was massively into. [laughs] I think I’m learning about some of that stuff now.

How about touring? Are you mostly on metal bills?
In the US, it’s been mostly doom metal tours, actually. The label I was on, Arabot, are out in Seattle so I’d hop on a YOB show. I love those bands, and the whole scene up in the Northwest is really rabid for that stuff, which is great. And then there was the Phil tour, but when I go out on my own I get brought back down to earth pretty swift. [laughs] Like, how many people can I actually draw? I often get put on with a lot of industrial NIN wannabe bands, and I can’t really get down with that. For me, that isn't electronic music. I prefer more of the weirder hip-hop stuff, Death Grips, stuff like that. I think it’s taking a bit of time for people to appreciate or get into crossover stuff.

I guess it’s difficult because you’re in between two worlds that don’t converge so often. I write about electronic music and also metal, so I can appreciate that. You know, friends who love Surgeon but don’t know Eyehategod and vice versa. Music can still be pretty tribal, unfortunately.
That’s a good way to put it. I mean, I like all sorts of stuff. I guess the breakcore scene was a kind of crossover point for a while, but it’s not doing so well now.

I wanted to ask about the masks. How did that idea come across? How do they allow you to create sound?
The masks became a bit of a beast. [laughs] I wanted to make something that I could strap on my face and create physical rhythms, be it a violent or subdued gesture. And it worked great when I was doing the gallery thing in San Diego… but then I went on tour with Phil and tried to fix them up to a whole rig, and man, it was just brutal. [laughs] I’d have an air compressor on stage, and the mic would feedback, so it became this kind of unrelenting pneumatic grindcore. They’re really hard to hide behind, but they do help make some of the more ambient sounds come alive. I have this throat mic that straps onto my trachea and I’m able to kinda rumble" the room, that is a good feeling.

Order Author & Punisher's Melk En Honing here. Follow Harry Sword on Twitter.