tfy: an outsider's perspective
by e. estlin

i got to know tfy fairly early into his recording "career" (for lack of a better term; by all accounts he has made a grand total of $86 dollars, which made him technically a professional musician, but $86 doesn't exactly scream out "career")...

he was on a mailing list that i was on a while back, and while he wasn't all that forthcoming with personal information, we did get to know each other pretty well. we were both into the same kinds of films, music and literature - he's a huge fan of godfrey reggio, john coltrane and j.g. ballard. some of that even comes out in the music, the quickly changing landscapes, the sheer imagination...

some of the stuff that he did in those early days in hendersonville, nc, was interesting in some degree, but somewhat derivative. i can guarantee you one thing, though; no one in hendersonville was doing that sort of thing at that time. probably still aren't. not that it matters. if you've ever been to that shithole (known equally for its retiree population as it is for its backwoods methlabs. it's the typical southern town that kills its kids), it doesn't really take that much effort to stay ahead of the curve.

he's originally from orange county, california - the "o.c." ("no one really called it that"). home of disneyland, bob dornan, and the keating five. birthplace and internment site of richard nixon. he did stuff to either overcome or make up for his growing up in such a dull, conservative place - smoked dope, worked in a record store, played guitar and bass in shitty punk/metal/alt rock bands that, in his words, really aren't worth mentioning. given his bent for self-deprication, you'd think that he was exaggerating, but he uploaded snippets of a couple of early demo tapes for me to listen to - one that sounded way too much like a bad r.e.m. cover band that suddenly decided to do poorly-written originals, another that was extremely bad derivative of early-nineties mpls noise rock like cows, hammerhead, janitor joe - i'd say that there was some truth to that. after a spell in northern california (where he rode his bike a lot, learned to grow good pot and figured out how to scam the local food bank), in 1997 he moved to washington dc to live with his then-girlfriend (his words - "huge fucking mistake") and in early 1999 found himself living in h-ville, a town 1/20th the size of dc but with a higher per-capita crime rate.

it was around this time that he got his cd and record collection back (he had to leave it behind when he moved to dc), and after purchasing a copy of sonic foundry's acid 2.0 and installing it on his roommate's computer, he started pulling breakbeats and samples from them and slapping them together into tracks. nothing really that spectacular, but i could tell that he had an ear for that sort of thing, and i encouraged him to keep going. it wasn't until he did "solitude" (a track that perfectly encapsulated his record collection, containing samples of the clash, early pink floyd, seefeel, the orb, and glenn gould - fucking glenn gould!) that i knew that i would be looking forward to his e-mails telling me about his new stuff for a long time to come. something from him would show up in my inbox and i knew i'd be in for a treat, and after that point he rarely disappointed.

if you tried to put your finger on a specific style, genre, sound, whatever, it would be just like trying to put your finger onto a pool of mercury - it would slip away from you, and it could really fuck with your head after a while if you kept trying. that's what i liked about it. he could go from dance-y to ambient to noisy to cut-n-paste, sometimes within the same track (a good example of this kitchen-sink approach can be found in "bores the unhurt folk"). he was really into layers, too. burying gentle melodies within piles of noise. he got a chance to attend one of pauline oliveros' deep listening workshops when she came to asheville (where he lives now) as part of the "under the influence" festival that happened a few years back, and that really affected the way he heard things, outside and inside. he would go to denny's or waffle house on a saturday night with his minidisc recorder and just capture sound for an hour; the next thing you knew he was using the sound of a fork clinking on a plate and a spoon hitting the sides of a coffee mug as a beat. (he also got to meet one of his heroes, mark hosler of negativland, during that festival. apparently hosler lives in asheville now; i guess he got tired of the west coast as well.)

he has a very warped sense of humor that often permeated his work, especially in the dictionaraoke and bootleg stuff - you know, those mostly annoying x vs. y mash-up things that were really popular a while back. the ones he did were actually pretty good, but hardly representative of the rest of his stuff. they were more like creative exercises for him, to keep his editing and beatmatching chops up. one of them actually ended up on a uk compilation cd called "never mind the bootlegs", and that, along with the dictionaraoke (it takes too long to explain - click here for more info), ended up becoming both a blessing and a curse. mostly a curse.

i remember one email from him, sometime around christmas a couple of years ago. he found an old classroom-model record player at an estate sale and began to play it through a few old guitar pedals that he had lying around, a la philip jeck/emil beaulieu/etc., and became obsessed with the idea of making an entire album in that fashion. about a year later he released discard, which, quite honestly, is one of my favorite ambient/noise albums of the last several years, possibly his best work. it's an odd thing to wrap your head around; it's ambient and crazy as fuck at the same time, and can work well at any volume depending on whether you want background mood music or something that will cause the unsuspecting listener to run screaming from the room. i hear new sounds everytime i hear it. (note: physical copies are sold out, but the album is available in an expanded form for free download via the epicaricacy label - check the discography page for details).

not everyone was appreciative, though - about six months ago, some fucker in france e-mailed him and had the nerve to complain about the fact that not all of his stuff sounded like the bootleg tracks. fucking ingrate. here's someone who selflessly offers up some good music for free, and has the absolute unmitigated gall to bitch about it. if he were dying of thirst, would he also complain about the temperature of the water? what a fucking douchebag...

anyway, that's when it hit him. no matter what he did musically under the tfy moniker, he was always going to be known for silly little unsubstantial mash-ups and dictionaraoke tracks. he acknowledged on several occasions that it was his own damn fault, that by having a little bit of fun he inadvertently painted himself into a corner.

when you're painted into a corner, sometimes knocking down the wall behind you is the most sensible thing to do.

anyway, he dropped me an e-mail the other day. now that he's been able to "get rid of the albatross" (in a manner of speaking - the way he put it about a year ago, "i can still see it floating beside the boat... but it'll be gone soon. sure, some small aspects of the previous work will always be there, and i'll have to deal with them, but it's enough to know that i don't have to meet old, outdated expectations, simply because i refuse to do so."), he's doing fine. he got married recently, and he's working toward a degree in history. with a full-time job and everything it's hard to do the music thing, but he told me that he's working slowly but surely on another musical project. he's hoping it'll be ready by sometime next year. all i can tell you is this: look forward to it.

e. estlin - 28 june 2005

(e. estlin is the founder of epicaricacy.org)