Erik Phillips' New Single Is Quiet Story About a Terrible Omen

The music that Erik Phillips makes is getting softer. That’s been the goal for a bit, at least since beginning to make music as Cat Be Damned. Set on the path by hearing some of Elliott Smith’s records, Phillips realized that there was as much or more power in fragility as there was in the hypermasculine energy punk and hardcore ruled the scene in Richmond, Virginia, where they’ve lived since 2012. Their last full-length Daydreams in a Roach Motel prototyped that sort of cautious quietude, whispering over instrumentals that nodded to indie rock’s quieter corners, like Smith, as well as Bedhead and Duster, as well as Phillips’ pals in Alex G in Coma Cinema.

But One, Phillips first record under their given name (due February 2 on Joy Void), turns down another notch, playing similar songs in slower motion, with an even lighter touch. It doesn’t feel radically removed from the music they were making before, nor from that of their peers, but it lends a tentative gentleness to the proceedings, like a malfunctioning old tape deck, sputtering along at a slower speed. “Until I discovered Elliott Smith, I had never heard someone whose voice and guitar playing could be so incredibly soft and gentle without ever coming close to boring,” Phillips said in an email. “Ever since then, I've embraced softer, warmer tones in music, and kind of strayed away from rock in general, at least the loud guitar shit.”

Like Neil Young’s more spare recordings—which Phillips identifies as an “ideal” version of rock music—the songs on One are rarely composed of more than a couple instruments, most often an acoustic guitar, a warbly keyboard, and a minimal drum kit, each of which is played like they’re trying not to wake the person in the next room.

Such a disposition has a naturally meditative effect, but it also has the benefit of training your ear on Phillips’ increasingly moving lyrics. On the record’s opening track, “Happen,” Phillips sings of cracking facades and general anxiety—apparently inspired by a horrific accident they came upon on the road. “The opening imagery is based off my memory of this one night when I was driving down Interstate 95 back home to Richmond,” Phillips said. “Traffic got really bad as we approached this tractor trailer which had wrecked off the side of the road, the cab totally engulfed in flames. Meanwhile, plenty of people all around me were still driving as recklessly and dangerously as ever, and I remember being kind of weirded out by their total disregard for what seemed like such an evident omen next to us.”

There’s little resolution, melodically or lyrically, in the track’s two minutes, which makes for an eerie opening to the record, a ghostliness that lingers over most of it. All of these feelings, the itchy unsettledness and the quiet bliss, seem informed by Phillips’ chosen relation to the outside world. “Even with the healthy friendships I've been able to form over the years, relative isolation still feels like a central theme in my life, but I don't think of it as depressing or negative at all, usually,” Phillips says. “I've never been a very social person—I can hardly think of any friendships I have right now that didn’t form within a musical context—and I’m pretty content with the time I spend by myself. I like going places alone, I like going out to eat alone, I like making music alone.”

Perhaps relatedly, Phillips has never made much of a connection to the music scene in Richmond, and has instead found a home among a community of songwriters on the internet like Coma Cinema’s Mat Cothran and Alex G, among many of their Joy Void labelmates. “I was starting to get burned out on years of making music that I wasn't really happy with when I heard DSU by Alex G in 2014,” they said. “A little while later, Mat Cothran and I met through Tumblr, and the support he gave me and my music from the beginning of our friendship really helped give me the confidence I needed to keep writing and recording and putting my stuff out there. It's a really discouraging lifestyle if you don't have some degree of artistic and emotional support, and I've been lucky to make friends who are willing to provide that.”

So for now, Phillips continues on, finding solace in stillness, and peace in lonesomeness, producing songs that reflect a soft sort of contentment. Like the promise of a lot of ambient music, which Phillips says they’ve always loved, it’s implicit permission for you to turn down too, to take a minute to look inside yourself, and actually deal with whatever you find there.

Erik Phillips will release One February 2 on Joy Void.

Colin Joyce likes the quiet, but is still on Twitter for some reason.