It’s a touch difficult to explain the Portland, Oregon one-man-project Amulets to most people, even those who may be familiar with music genres outside of the mainstream. “It touches on ambient and drone, but it’s not completely that. There’s elements of post-rock and electronic music, and some field recording, too,” says Randall Taylor, the cassette tape-looping wizard behind Amulets. Think of it as the auditory equivalent of a found object sculpture—bits and pieces from a variety of sources coming together to create a heavily-layered, intricate, whole. These lush soundscapes have wide-ranging appeal, enough so to get him a touring support slot with the ecstatic black metal sensations Agriculture last year.
Taylor uses a huge array of equipment in the creation of his unique music, ranging from a Tascam 414 to build up the drones themselves on a looped cassette tape, to guitar pedals, sequencers, and synths to perform live. “It’s less ‘in the box’ processing,” Taylor says. “Mostly my creative process is taking all this weird shit on the outside and then getting it actually into the computer instead of the other way around. I’m not plugin-heavy or anything like that, there’s not a lot of post-production.”
Comically, one of Taylor’s most-used tools is his phone. “What is that saying, ‘the best tool you have is the one you have right now’ or whatever? I use my voice memos app, and when I hear something interesting, I just record it, make a note of what it is, and I have this library of weird sounds. And now people will just send me, ‘Hey, I heard this weird thing, and I recorded it for you’ which is very flattering.”
Taylor has already released an impressive body of work. “I’ve been doing this for quite a while, and when I first started, I was hyper-prolific trying to put out as much music as I could … but it wasn’t sustainable,” he says, referring to the 18 albums he released from 2013 to 2016. His new EP Rem(a)inders, however, out April 10 via Pelagic Records, centers around exactly what the title suggests: unused scraps from his extensive catalog of recordings.
“A lot of these songs are glued together by ambient guitar work and fragments from former songs, pieces of them, other remnants of stuff that I had combed through. I’m picking up the pieces and trying to mosaic this into something. And I really wanted to try this as a proof of concept, like, how can I glue all this together? Can I make it something cohesive? And then the idea of ‘remainders’ came up, the concept of leftovers and, like, what can you do with that? I was just thinking a lot about extracting the sounds from where they were and making them something new, reinventing it.”
Field recording as a genre is having a bit of a moment lately, with artists like Jake Muir and Brian House releasing critically acclaimed albums. Taylor credits this renewed wave to a cultural interest in the imperfect, the natural, and the analog.
“There’s something relaxing about these kinds of natural sounds. I think they’re just more interesting sounds than what we’re used to hearing. And I think interjecting them in music makes it feel different—There’s a response to like, hearing a sound that you’re both familiar with and very unfamiliar with that makes you listen a little deeper. It’s a reaction to digital perfection in this world, in music, and in art where everything’s so, you know, on the sterile end, and then you have something like tape field recordings of things that are very raw and imperfect, and I think people are into those things again.”
Amulets is opening for The Black Queen on their Fever Daydream 10 Year Anniversary Tour for the Seattle and Portland dates on May 7 and 8. Keep an eye out for some shows in the Midwest this June as well, where Amulets will be supporting Midwife.
Rem(a)inders is out Friday from Pelagic Records, and you can preorder it here. Follow Amulets on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: Alana Wool
