This interview was originally broadcast on WCWM on June 13th, 2023. If you prefer listening to interviews instead of reading them, you can find the recording wherever you listen to your podcasts by searching ‘I Hate Music with John Dietz’, or you can listen to it on Spotify below!
Aa & tyr is the music project of British DIY recording artist Morgan Woodfall, formerly known as space cadet (read on, we’ll get to that!) In the interest of journalistic integrity (or in an attempt to prove that I have it), I feel I should mention that Morgan is a good friend of mine, and someone I’ve collaborated with frequently on various musical projects, like this song!
This one, too, which is maybe my favorite out of all the songs I’ve made (but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret).
But that’s beside the point. Morgan has also been a frequent guest of my radio show I Hate Music on WCWM, and I’ve been lucky enough to get to pick her brain about a bunch of the albums she’s released over the years. When I spoke with her in June, we spoke about her most recent release, Echo Sun All Bliss, which is streaming just about everywhere you can find music online. It’s a sprawling, maximalist album with elements of psychedelia, glitch pop, post rock, and lots more, telling the stories of two futuristic archivists searching for identity in a world dominated by pure information.
The edited transcript of the interview follows below.
John Dietz: Longtime I Hate Music listeners might remember you from interviews we’ve done in the past about your space cadet project. That project has been retired, so I was wondering what prompted that decision and what distinguishes aa & tyr from your previous work.
Morgan Woodfall: The reason that’s come to light more than anything is that there’s so many bands called space cadet (laughs). There’s so many bands… you have no idea. And of course the shady figures that control me are like, ‘your Google search analytics are fucking shit’ (laughs). No, it was because ultimately I picked the name a while ago because I like Car Seat Headrest and then eventually I was like, ‘that’s not a brilliant reason to have a name.’ And then the distinction is also that I’m gradually making music for different reasons. I don’t know how known it is that prior to space cadet, I had never done anything with singing in it. So retiring it that quickly seemed maybe silly, but also it felt like I just sort of was doing a lot of stuff that were the first things I thought of after I was like ‘Oh, look, I can put vocals on songs now.’ And now, I feel like it’s… good. So I thought it made sense to distinguish it.
J.D.: Something I found really interesting about this album is that it has a very explicit mythology that’s made clear in the lyrics, but then you go even further in the liner notes, which you can get access to if you download the album on Bandcamp. In those notes, you expand even further about the narrative and the characters that are featured in the album. So, this might be a kind of chicken/egg question… but which comes first, the narrative or the form/style of the music, and how do they play into each other while you’re writing?
M.W.: They’re kind of both first, which is a terrible answer. In terms of the actual chronology of it, I came up with the aa and tyr characters (cause they are characters first and foremost) before I even put this to music. And then I was looking around for things to do, and I thought I could make it into an ongoing project. The reason it exists and works now is that I make songs — I just make sounds all the time, and I often need reasons for them to exist, and reasons for me to care about them. Having a narrative framework is a really nice way of doing that. Echo Sun All Bliss is, and will probably remain for some time, the most consistent and obvious exploration of the lore, just because I like to do other stuff, but everything I do will make sense with the mythology. It’s just a way of getting lyrics out of me that I actually care about.
J.D.: As a listener, do you think it’s helpful to have a baseline understanding of the mythology or lore before listening?
M.W.: God, I hope not, I really hope not (laughs). It exists if you want it to be there or to look at it. I would always say, ‘yeah, go look at it,’ cause it’s a fun, extra thing I wrote. I’ve done short stories and I’ll write more stuff in the mythology… it’s ostensibly multimedia, I’m just being lazy. But if the songs were bad without it, that would be really terrible and pointless. The reason why it’s just a framework for the lyrics, rather than being a guiding narrative, is because they should be good lyrics regardless of whether you know, for example, what the character tyr symbolizes. They’re all sort of vessels, they don’t really mean anything… they’re sort of containers for ideas.
J.D.: You touched on this a bit in that answer, but do you think that the format of an album is the best way to explore these characters? Do you see other media formats with these characters coming into play at some point?
M.W.: If I could get someone to animate it, that would be brilliant, but I probably can’t. Of the mediums that exist, music is the one I’m the most competent in — and I can write fairly well, and that’s about it, really. But when they’re written, they are different, and they are far more concrete, and I want to limit that, cause I want to keep it a little bit vague. But they definitely can exist in writing and in art. I don’t know, I can’t draw, so… Also, albums have tracks. When the characters first emerged on the last space cadet album, they were given a different setting in each song. I’m not going to do that consistently, but it’s a nice thing to have, and I like how you can get pre-differentiated pieces in an album — whereas if you write a story, causality has to take effect, and then it’s quite difficult to be vague.
J.D.: I’m doing this a bit out of order, but now that we’ve talked about these characters, could you give a brief overview of who the characters are and what the basic story being told is?
M.W.: It’s been a while! I spent so long working on the music for the next album that I’ve just forgotten, and now I need to think about it again (laughs). But aa & tyr are two characters who exist in a world in which the whole sense of self and identity has been replaced totally by information. They’re essentially vehicles for the archiving and recording of information, but they find out that there are things they don’t know about each other — which is weird, because if you live in a world where information is everything, you’re supposed to know everything about everyone. And then an album ensues. That’s not actually given within ESAB, but all of the events in the album are intended to be loose interpretations of things that would happen or be remembered as a consequence.
J.D.: So, is this project tied to these characters? Could there be an aa & tyr album that doesn’t revolve around them, or would that be another project entirely?
M.W.: It’s hard to say, because I’ve sort of hinted at there being different incarnations of these characters, and there’s more lore that goes into that that I’m not going to say because it’s a little secret that I keep. It has to do with that EP I put out that’s called The Mainland… but it’s very vague. The reason why I have these two characters is that I can kind of make anything I want to, and it would still be about them. They’re vessels, both within the specific world that I’ve constructed and more generally. They’re very much containers for my ideas, and so I wouldn’t really feel like I would need to — like, I don’t think I would say ‘I need to get out of this,’ because the point is that whenever I’m going to sit down and make a serious album, they’re designed so that they can contain whatever thing I want to put into them.
J.D.: Echo Sun All Bliss is the longest album you’ve released so far — it’s an hour and 23 minutes long, and —
M.W.: It’s an hour and 23 minutes and 45 seconds, and I didn’t mean that (laughs), and that is amazing.
J.D.: (laughs) That’s great.
M.W.: Do you know how happy I was? I loaded up the final playlist on VLC and my jaw dropped, I was so happy.
J.D.: Not only that, but it’s also a maximalist style that you’re using throughout the album. Is working on a project on such a large scale ever overwhelming either logistically or emotionally?
M.W.: Oh yeah, it’s completely insane. It was a completely insane thing to do. The next album is not that long, and it’s less maximalist. It’s maybe an hour at most. But yeah, this one was an hour and 23 minutes, and it was going to be 2 hours. There’s more material that didn’t make the cut, and there’s even more that got added quite late on because I thought that it was quite nice. The acoustic song ‘Tikkun’ is a very, very late addition, and you can kind of tell it was written a long, long time after the rest of them. For reference, I started it in January 2021, and it took me like a year and a half. It was really crazy — I was mixing it at the 6th form college that I went to in Logic, and then I was exporting the stems into FL Studio and bouncing that back and forth. Just keeping it all in your head is an absolute nightmare, and knowing what you have to do. ‘Okay, I’m happy with this set of 15 songs now, but I need to go through and iterate through all of them now and make them better.’ And that takes me an hour and 23 minutes to do, just to know what I have to do? So by the time I’m on the last track, I have no idea what happened in track 1. I have so many Google Docs of notes that are basically just ‘Make the kick drum better,’ and then the next track is just ‘Make the snare drum better.’
J.D.: I want to go back to the beginning of aa & tyr for a second. You briefly mentioned the first EP that came out under this name — it’s called The Mainland, and it released in February 2021. That was basically during the height of the pandemic, and I think for people like us, who were young at that time, our lives have changed a lot since then, so I’m wondering how the process of making music has evolved for you since then.
M.W.: Well, the big change is that I do less of it. But the even bigger change is that I listen to less music, and I found that’s more noteworthy. The next album that I make will be a lot more stylistically consistent. Not because I got bored of doing a billion things, cause I still love doing a billion things, but because I’ve been listening to about half the amount of music that I used to during the lockdown, when I was just chain-smoking albums. It was endless, it didn’t stop, and all of that was being vomited into the music. I’m happy it’s more consistent now, I don’t mind it, but that is the obvious difference, and I think ESAB is the culmination of the maximalist thing. The Mainland was like a weird interlude, where I made it in about a week. ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to a lot of John Maus, I bet I could do this,’ and then I did it. It was this concept I was playing with, just to be like ‘maybe this works, maybe I don’t care about it and I’ll leave it alone,’ and then it did work, and I thought ‘maybe this can be the vehicle for the next big, massive thing.’ Gradually, that’ll hone itself into a more coherent thing than the mess it was before.
J.D.: I know you’ve done some live performances recently as well. Has that changed how you think about creating music at all?
M.W.: It has and also it hasn’t. There’s a new song I’m working on that’s about 10 minutes long and it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, but I had to adapt it for just me and acoustic guitar, cause I played a gig at a little tea room in Glasgow (where, by the way, they had no microphone for me. I am upset about this. They booked me for a gig and they had no microphone that worked. That’s not okay). Anyway (I had to just shout really loud), I had to adapt this song, and then I realized, wait, this is literally just two chords. It was really funny, cause I hadn’t noticed that while making it, cause I was so busy thinking about guitar riffs, and melodies, and what are the drums going to do, and how is the song going to be structured. I am now thinking a little more about the continuity of live performance, but at the same time, I will never give in and write a song to be played live. They are all studio creations through and through — I am cheating every step of the way. I am editing those takes, I am auto-tuning, I am double-tracking. I cannot be stopped. I will cheat my way to sounding good.
J.D.: Your most recent release is a song called LOFGEORNOST that was featured on a split EP called Trans Folk. How did the split come together?
M.W.: Well, that was literally just Monty (also known as Cime), who organized the split, putting on her Instagram story, ‘I’m organizing a split! Does anyone want to be on it?’ and I said yes. So LOFGEORNOST will be on this next album, and it’s an example of the style I’ll be using on that album (Editor’s note: this album has now been officially announced, and you can preorder FOREVER NOW AND KEEP YOURSELF SAFE on Bandcamp now). It was just the most finished song I had, so I threw it at this split. It sort of came together by accident, but it was really cool to have that out in the world, and I like that more than doing a single, cause I want to know when an album is coming out exactly before I do a single.
J.D.: Now, like any good interviewer, I did some research, and I found that ‘lofgeornost’ is an Old English phrase —
M.W.: Yeah, here we go.
J.D.: It’s found in Beowulf, and it roughly translates to ‘most eager for praise.’ So in that light I’m wondering how this ties into the already established characters and narrative that was laid out in ESAB.
M.W.: You’ve done a really, really good 75% of your research (laughs). The word ‘lofgeornost’ is not only an Old English word featured in Beowulf meaning ‘most eager for praise,’ it is also a Norse word, and it is the last word in Beowulf. In Old Norse, it has a negative connotation, and in Old English, it has a positive connotation. Apparently, it indicates that the legacy of Beowulf is unknown, and whether he was a great and powerful king or a horrible tyrant is up to debate, and it’s a really interesting bit of the story. Separately, I had a really crazy idea that I was going to do a sci-fi adaptation of Beowulf, but maybe I’ll do that one later. I chose the word because a lot of the next album focuses to a degree around Norse mythology and modern Scandinavian folktales, and specifically the Rå, which are mountain spirits, and even more specifically the people who were executed in Scandinavia for having sex with mountain spirits. LOFGEORNOST touches on that to some degree, and it also touches on the guy who killed David Amess, who was a British Conservative MP. So there’s a lot going on — I won’t explain how it directly relates to all of the lore, but it does somewhat.
J.D.: I cannot wait to listen to this album — it sounds so interesting.
M.W.: It’s a mad album — it’s also got a shoegaze song about a paper I read about the masculine language of nuclear security studies. It’s the first straightforward shoegaze song I’m going to release, and it’s just four minutes of conventional poppy shoegaze, but it’s about nuclear warfare. I thought that was quite fun, and I’m quite excited to release that one.
J.D.: I was gonna ask — you always put together playlists of what you were listening to or inspired while creating your albums. Are there any songs that are coming to mind for this new album?
M.W.: The big ones are anything by Emperor X (which I’ve just been listening to loads and loads of, he’s so good). Anything by Faraquet, who are a really good post-hardcore band. Oceansize, bits of Everything Everything and Placebo, bob hund, bits of the Callous Daoboys, bits of Fleet Foxes, Wilco. Again, there’s loads of stuff in there, it’s just more homogenous than the last one. And, to be honest, my two favorite songs… one of them I don’t really know where it came from, I just sort of made it, and it sounded like an anime theme tune when I first wrote it, and I turned it into some 10 minute beast. And then the last track is my other favorite, and that one is just Richard Dawson. So that’s what’s going on on the album.
J.D.: That’s really exciting! Is there anything else aa & tyr fans should look forward to in the coming months, or years, or however long this timeframe is?
M.W.: The album will be out this year — ideally, it’ll be finished this summer. (Editor’s note: FOREVER NOW AND KEEP YOURSELF SAFE is currently set to release on August 24th). I’m waiting on an album cover, which will be a really good album cover, cause I know what it’s gonna be, but it’s not there yet. It will be probably 10 tracks and 50 minutes, and there’s a playlist if you want to know what it might sound like. That’s basically all I’ve got to say about it.