Kayo Dot exist in the small intersection between metal and experimental music, often being too much of one that it pisses off devotees of the other. Yet it’s from this in-between space that they’ve created some of the most forward-thinking music of the millennium. It then follows that their 11th album Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason—out now via Prophecy—posits how music, even music as averse to trends and conventions as theirs, can progress as artificial intelligence encroaches upon it. It was borne from the realization that generative AI feeds on the patterns and tendencies all artists possess and strove to be unpredictable, a label that brings to mind Sleepytime Gorilla Museum or Mr. Bungle. Toby Driver, Kayo Dot’s leader, took a more nuanced approach however, cutting out the bottom end of most tracks and stretching them to their thinnest points. The progressions in the tracks are minuscule to remove anything that could be used to train an AI.
While Every Rock… rallies against algorithms and generative technology, the conflict was a stepping stone for Driver to reflect on the characteristics of his playing and, ultimately, eliminate them. It’s the opposite of the burgeoning artist’s struggle to find their voice—can you silence what identifies you? Can you rewrite your internal processing without restarting at square one? It’s through this that Every Rock… evolves past being simply anti-AI and into an avenue for Driver to examine his artistry two decades after his most heralded release.
That’s another reason why Every Rock… is so dear to him, It celebrates 20 years since Kayo Dot’s momentous debut album, Choirs of the Eye, and Driver asserts that the two records share the same spirit. They were performed with the same line-ups, written and composed in the same structure, and feature lyrics written in first person by Jason Byron in first-person perspective. Yet, if you’ve heard “Oracle By Severed Head,” Every Rock…’s first single, you’re aware that these albums are not siblings. They are fundamentally different, sonically speaking. While Choirs of the Eye expanded the scope of what metal could be if its core principles were altered, Every Rock… is advertised as “liminal metal.” It exists between worlds and realms, solid and gaseous states, evading one’s tendency to attach to melody, groove, or rhythm to facilitate an emotional bond. It’s fleeting. However, that’s the intent—it reveals what music that revolts against AI and its machine learning would sound like.
Turns out, it’s a lonely pursuit. Driver states the lyrics are central to this as they concern an entity haunting itself. This fear is never made concrete and, like the album as a whole, lays on the fringes of awareness. That loneliness reflects the wedge AI is driving between artists and communities. It’s a fear absent of a villain and typified by the gulf between connections. It’s agoraphobia driven by a market flooded with slop, clogging our pores and preventing us from feeling the person on the other end of the speaker.
A few months ago, Driver conducted an AMA on Reddit and answered some questions still of interest. A song comes to him in a dream at least once a year these days, even though he doesn’t try to, his current favorite metal band is Krallice, and his dream collaborator would be Björk. Fortunately, he spoke to us about more pressing matters, like his existential fears about AI, the connections between Every Rock… and Choirs of the Eye, and his drive to create experimental music.
Treble: This is going to be an obvious question, but it seems like AI gives you a bit of existential dread. Is that correct?
Toby Driver: Yeah, I think so.
Treble: I ask because Kayo Dot has always been outside the realm of predictability. Spotify’s never given me a Kayo Dot or maudlin of the Well album. So, I’m curious about how this dread relates to your work.
TD: We are existing in a short window where there are bands like Kayo Dot and others that are unpredictable, and AI can’t really do that music yet. But, that window is closing. I think we have only a few years before AI is going to be able to do that. It’s constantly learning off of what’s out there already. So this has made me reflect on things in my music that might be patterns. If you fed just my music to an AI and you asked it to write a song that was like my music, I think that there might be certain technical patterns that I frequently use that characterize my sound, and then an AI could discern and reproduce them. That made me aware of those things that characterize me and could be predictable. So I found the things like that and tried to eschew them all, or at least most of them, just so the music that comes out does not have patterns that could be predicted or learned from.
Treble: As a writer, I find myself with a similar fear. I know people aren’t going to want AI writing over the work written by people, but the issue is that the people who are paying livable wages are turning to AI. Is there a similar sense of dread that you feel for music?
TD: Yeah. Like an existential threat. Not for myself or not for artistic music, because it doesn’t serve that function. But, I had this experience not too long ago in a restaurant in Poland and noticed that the music being played there was AI-created. There were certain things that gave it away. The lyrics, in particular. The function of that music is to sound like normal music, to fill space and just be a background and give people this idea that they’re listening to music, but they’re not really listening to it. It’s just existing. And that made me just think of musicians who actually make that music for real. And I think that they’re massively threatened. I think AI has already replaced them. The restaurant can buy a generative app and it can just generate this music that is never going to repeat itself and sounds like normal music. So you don’t really need those musicians anymore for that purpose, because that music is not supposed to be good anyway, and it’s not supposed to be listened to. It’s just supposed to be wallpaper.
I think the bigger picture is that, let’s say we got to a point in our society where no musician can make a living off of that type of music, but people still want to be musicians. They still want to pursue music as their career. What’s that going to make them do? You can’t fight the AI. Maybe all the musicians just make a different kind of music and figure out a way to go beyond the AI. That could be an interesting path that I think would be difficult because there’d be this huge learning curve for people to train themselves on what other music sounds like. How do we stretch outside of our known patterns?
Treble: You said in your Reddit AMA that Every Rock… was composed with the same spirit as Choirs of the Eye, but it doesn’t sound anything like Choirs of the Eye. How do their spirits overlap?
TD: There are a couple of ways. The personnel involved is the same and the method, where I came up with the main structure of the pieces then recorded them, is the same. I worked with Sam (Gutterman), the drummer, and he came over my studio a few times and we recorded some stuff. It was just the two of us. That’s how Choirs of the Eye was also started. Just Sam and I working on stuff and recording demos and making structures. Then I passed it around to all the other guys and asked if they could fill in specific parts, like clarinets or strings. It was collaborative, in a way. I haven’t done another Kayo Dot record that way, so that’s unique to Choirs of the Eye and this new one.
The other way was that Choirs of the Eye came out of this moment of revelation where my value system and what I wanted to say in writing changed. I had a moment of inspiration where I grew as a composer nearly overnight because of it. Put simply, for Choirs of the Eye versus maudlin of the Well, the main difference is maudlin of the Well is written like metal. When I was writing Choirs of the Eye, I had this main revelation where I was just like, “What if I just never repeated anything? What if I could write this kind of metal, but nothing ever repeats, even one time?” So Choirs of the Eye is basically like if you took the style of writing a maudlin of the Well album, but you just made it so that nothing repeats on any iteration. It’s a simple revelation, but it had a profound result.
In the case of Every Rock…, it was kind of the same, where I have this way of writing things and a value system for what I want to express. I started writing the album by writing a bunch of music and it was closer to Moss Grew on the Swords and Plouwshares Alike, or at least, in the lineage of that. After about a year or so of working with that, something hit me and I didn’t want to do that kind of music. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the next two years on with touring, PR, and everything. So I wondered what would be more exciting to work with and to talk about. I ended up throwing away all of the recordings and starting over by reducing things and removing parts. And the record became sparse. Some of that came from just removing stuff and finding new ways into the music. As I was working on it that way in the sandbox, something jumped out and I knew it was the sound I wanted.
Treble: You said in an interview in 2019 that you harbor a bit of resentment towards the pursuit of experimental music. Given Every Rock…, do you still feel that way or do you now want to explore more experimental pastures?
TD: I think what happened was, I was living in New York for a long time and I was doing experimental music, and it was great, but people knew me as an experimental musician. I have this personality trait where I feel like I have to evade the impressions that are put upon me. For example, when you’re making experimental music, people say, “You’re an experimental musician.” But you may not be, then you see how your career is affected by people putting a label on you. And it happens with everything. It would happen with metal, too. But I was spending a lot of energy and time in this experimental world, and I saw that it wasn’t getting me where I wanted to be. It wasn’t helping me grow in the right way and there weren’t career opportunities for doing the types of shows that I wanted to do. Experimental musicians often have to play tiny gallery spaces and stuff like that. But Kayo Dot’s music is loud. It requires a good PA and a certain amount of tech. But you’re an experimental band, so you can’t play the stages that accommodate that. And you’re playing these DIY spaces because you’re an experimental band. You’re not thought of as a metal band that would normally play these spaces.
We did Hubardo in 2013, which is like weird metal, but it’s definitely metal, and shows started getting bigger. People were having more fun at them. Before that, the experimental music demanded a lot of attention and effort from the audience. So it was a totally different experience to have fun music. As we were doing albums that were more like, as you say, in the “commercial era”, where it’s like Coffins on Io, Plastic House, and Blasphemy, the shows were better and the audience was having more fun. And I realized that maybe having spent all my time in experimental music has, in a way, taken a lot of years away from me. Anyway, that’s the backstory for that statement.
But then what happened was we had done so many albums that were like rock in the past 10 years that I noticed the community I had built in experimental music turned their back on me. They didn’t support me anymore and didn’t care about what I was doing because it wasn’t experimental enough. That made me realize that the people I thought were my community, that I thought were open-minded, weren’t. There’s one specific thing that they care about, which is being experimental. And if you go beyond that, then they have a problem.
So now, I’m in between both worlds where I want to do these bigger rock shows, but I also want to do museum installations and things that are reserved for respected experimental musicians. I just realized that if I’m going to be in both worlds, I need to take care of both sides and not ignore one or the other. I’ve decided I don’t want to dedicate myself to just one or the other side. I want to do both.
Treble: What experiences and music did you pull from to tap into “liminal metal”?
TD: For me, my association with liminal spaces is emptiness. What inspires me is the lonely quality of it. I don’t think I’ve heard liminal music so much, but there’s lots of liminal horror movies that are inspiring, and of course, like the greatest of all time, The Shining, which, back when it came out, I don’t think anybody ever called anything liminal horror. I think in retrospect, you could see that one of the earliest examples of liminal horror. It’s the space that exists between the past and the future, and it exists between the dead and the living. It’s in between in so many ways, and it’s empty until it’s not, you know. One of my aims is that I’m not so sure that I’ve heard this “liminal metal” very much. And so that’s why I said in the presser that we invented this genre. There are probably examples out there but I can’t think of any.
Although, there’s this Instagram channel that I like a lot called Dead Tempo Visions. He makes three-second clips of liminal spaces, but with some demonic entity that’s like a sleep paralysis demon, and then he puts music to it. I guess it’s like liminal music when you relate it to the images that he has. It’s never metal. It’s ambient. And I wouldn’t say that ambient music is liminal music on its own, but I think paired with this guy’s videos, it becomes that. So that was a vibe to me, I just really liked it. And I also felt guilty because this guy’s making AI videos, but he uses real music. I’m generally opposed to the AI thing, but it’s here and we’re not going to get rid of it. Maybe some examples of how it can be good and useful.
Treble: Since you mentioned loneliness, how did you evoke that feeling on Every Rock…?
TD: I wouldn’t say it’s a traditional concept album because it’s not a story, but it’s an iterative album, meaning that all of the pieces follow the same idea and then they are reiterated differently in the subsequent track and then again and again and again. There’s a musical and thematic concept in doing it that way. And the lyrics are important. They’re all about these haunted experiences. I told Jason Byron, the lyric writer, that he has to write them from a first-person perspective. He hadn’t done so since Choirs of the Eye. I told him to do it because this is about a personal and lonely existence, in a way. All these lyrics are about haunted experiences, but the thing that’s haunting is haunting itself in a way, or it’s being haunted. It’s like being trapped inside a loop. An iterative composition. This thing that exists, and then, when it comes back, it’s just stuck there and it’s haunting itself. It’s changing, but it’s looping.
And then, inside of the songs, all of the music is like that as well. Like the first song, for example, it’s this ghost that’s haunting itself, to put simply, and it’s stuck in this loop where it’s doomed to repeat the same action over and over again. The parts of the music, they’re sort of repeating, but they’re stretching and shrinking and everything like that. So, in a way, it’s like a loop, but it’s like a transforming loop so that it’s not really predictable.
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