Emil Amos' Drifter's Sympathy

 Season 4 opens with a historical dig into the culture of home recording, beginning with Les Paul's initial invention of the overdub and then down the winding path of loner practitioners who seized his technology to exorcise their demons. Les Paul couldn't get electronic companies to listen to his ideas on multi-tracking for a couple decades so out of pure frustration, he assembled the ability to overdub in his garage using his father's old car parts and two lathe-cutting machines. After scoring 7 number one hits from his garage using the power of the overdub, he innovated a new way to add extra heads to mono-recorders and forced the Ampex Tape Machine company to accept that a new era had arrived. This changed music production forever and eventually put the power of recording entire records and exploring one's own imagination into the hands of the lone individual.  The focus and frustration that pushes someone towards invention parallels the same dynamic we experience when pushed to a breakthrough during spiritual struggle, which this season's odd-numbered story episodes will discuss. The advent of home recording opened up new channels and possibilities in private expression while inadvertently creating an 'underground' in-itself. This episode explores the beauty of this new free, independent world with R. Stevie Moore as its core underdog hero, someone who exemplifies the ceaseless searching and private alchemy of the home recorder.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's only 2 weeks left now until the 4th Season starts ROLLING OUT🌊 Episode 36 is a very dense & detailed, historical cast called "THE DAWN OF HOME RECORDING" and will drop directly to Patreon users on Monday Feb. 25th >> as usual, the cast will hit Itunes on the following Monday (March 4th) and then on March 11th the first story episode will drop on Patreon that features a very SPECIAL guest interview💐The 'I Want to Live a Peaceful Life' LP re-issue has been mastered and the art is complete while a KILLER new shirt design is being put together and all rewards are on track!🍏  Almost everyone on the Patreon has chosen their rewards for this season but there's still a couple people left who are signed up and free-floating from last season that haven't chosen a new tier... so choose one in the next 2 weeks when you have some time! - I should note that its really easy to CHANGE yr reward tier,, just click on the one you want & make sure you're allocated to receive whatever you prefer >> and don't worry,, if you're somehow not signed in correctly I'll figure it out and ship whatever you want regardless!💘 This season has been labored over to an obsessive degree! I moved back down to North Carolina to record these episodes & go all the way back to the BEGINNING 📖 >> Most of it was recorded solo so there's a very LATE NITE, one-on-one vibe that gets down to a level of DEPTH I wasn't quite able to achieve before. The content was GREATLY inspired by all the ideas that were sent in when we did the Q&A episode so thank you so MUCH for yr ideas💫 ...we can do another one of those as a bonus episode again this season if you'd like >> just lemme know if these next episodes provoke more IDEAS🌌🔦🌌10-4https://www.patreon.com/drifterssympathy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

✨🐍✨Episode 35... this is the finale of Season 3✨🐍✨In 1998, Emil has been living deep in an alternate universe with the other campus leper 'Crazy Jeff' up in the mountains of North Carolina. Jeff is almost a decade older than all the other students at school and he's been ordered to go to prison on the weekends after getting one too many DUI's. Eventually spring break arrives and Duncan has become fixated on going up to Boston to see the Guru. Duncan and Emil hitch a ride to find the Guru knowing that they might be asking for trouble. When they finally meet, Duncan randomly hands the Guru a book on the Satanic Underworld which skews the entire light of their visit. While the boys are running around Boston during the day, the Guru reads the book at work trying to discern the true intention of their visit. At the end of the trip Emil and the Guru venture out into the woods on acid and the devil comes home to roost.🔥 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This cast opens up the vault exposing all of Grails' early International influences. Turkish, Polish, Greek, Brazilian, German, Japanese and Dutch records are dug through in an effort to overturn the most satisfying junctures of experimentalism and tradition in the 1970's. Somewhat coincidentally, Emil is posting this episode while on tour in Istanbul, Turkey with his band Grails.✨🌴✨ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

...One of the most important chapters of our tale!📕 The towering myth of Ron's benevolence is put into perspective as his trust with Emil becomes fractured. Emil begins to see Ron as fallible and human just like the rest of us while his second guru begins to grow darker and darker. A new theory is posited... that the pull of the guru is fueled by a tension that comes from risk. And that putting one's trust in them can inevitably go very, very wrong... but the dare to follow them away from safety simultaneously functions as a life-affirming leap of faith. The end of this cast wrestles with the mentality of the second guru and admits that we can't understand someone who does not want to be known in this world where everything is about exhibition. Comparing him to Kafka won't do because Kafka is LEGENDARY. What great artist has successfully avoided being received entirely? Kafka wanted all of his work burned on his death... and he was defied by his best friend Max Brod, who decided to preserve his writings for future generations. This is such a complex 'betrayal'... but being able to look inside the mind of someone who existed without the most basic sustenance has created a small fire that the most alienated of us continually get warm by. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emil heads back down to the initial crossroads where we naively wander across the dividing lines of various sub-cultures and get sucked under their psychological tide. He sees a somewhat unfortunate Grateful Dead show with Ron at around age 15 which bores and frightens him in turn... and that experience begins a strange fascination with the dark side of the hippie movement. 'Plastic Flower People' has become a depository for speculation on the 60's and the rise of modern bohemia. This episode features a fascinating moment where Roger McGuinn talks with Hugh Hefner about the fact that long hair and hippie attitudes are ALREADY played out in 1968. Revealing a puritanical distrust that started to mount as the underground first began to be bought up and sold back to itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1998 Duncan Trussell (comedian), David MacLean (writer) and Emil (musician) went to India and Sri Lanka together for 3 months. They lived in Dharamshala for a month with Tibetan Refugees and Buddhist monks and then traveled to Agra, New Delhi and Varanasi together. In Varanasi they took a semi-disastrous trip down the Ganges where Emil ingested too many religious drugs and his body evaporated after being locked inside a very small, hot room after the power had gone out across the city. This OD came on the heels of having experienced an entire year of constant & supreme happiness... an unexpected explosion of serotonin that occurred after a dream where God had come to him and said "Are you ready?". After the overdose shattered that state, Duncan and Emil came back to the US in various states of distress and David decided to go on to Southern India. Four years later, David returned to India as a Fulbright scholar and ended up having a catastrophic reaction to Larium (an anti-Malarial drug), consequently losing the entire memory of his identity. This cast is an explanation of both of these unfortunate events, a conversation between David and Emil about how they met at Warren Wilson College and more. Check out David's book "The Answer to the Riddle is Me" or read more about it in the NY Times here. :: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/health/the-answer-to-the-riddle-is-me-a-debut-takes-on-memory-loss.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 EPISODE 30 ✨🔦✨ In this episode Emil travels back down to Chapel Hill to try and re-assess the landscape that gave birth to his musical outlook in the early nineties. He uses the flashpoint of Chapel Hill's underground music explosion to argue that its the people living in a town that truly define the psychological geography of a place before they disappear and that place's identity transforms. This will probably be the only Drifter's Sympathy cast that focuses on the atmosphere surrounding a 'modern band'. Polvo's era opens up a perfect gateway into the study of a fleeting uniqueness that explodes in unwatched environments before the sudden death of a culture's heyday and the rebuilding period that inevitably follows. In Episode 27 ('To Abraxas with Headaches') Emil dubbed Polvo as the band that quintessentially personifies the charm and underdog position of a local band for him. So we dive into the influence these older kids wielded and study a boiling kettle in its most unique moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On March 5th the next episodes of Drifter's Sympathy will start rolling out!💥 We've set up a Patreon for people to support the podcast so it can run ad free for the rest of the season. The 3rd Season has 6 more episodes to go, but if you want to support the show and join the Patreon you get all the episodes a week early and two of the Lost Episodes too. There's also a new Drifter's Sympathy shirt designed by Beholder Badges and a special Holy Sons hoodie you can order if you want to contribute more to the podcast too. After these next three months of episodes have run, Emil will cancel the Patreon and take some time off to create the 4th Season. Here's the link to the Patreon page... you can also find it on the Drifter's Sympathy Facebook, Emil's Instagram or Twitter (just search for 'Emil Amos'). Thank You SOOO much to everyone who's already helped out!💐 https://www.patreon.com/drifterssympathy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 29 tells the genesis tale behind the song 'Saccharine Trust' that was named after the classic SST band of the '80s. The first half of the cast meditates on the unstable period of life the song is about and then segues into a lesson on meeting your heroes when Emil ends up face to face with his early underground idol, J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. The second half of the cast drifts into the minefield of trying to discern why the modern era seems less distinct and vital and mourns the loss of a central underground community. While the end devolves into solipsistic philosophical attempts to find a positive thread somewhere within our cultural wreckage while wrestling with an increasingly plastic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices