Saint Idiot (Tomáš Andel) is a Slovak-Canadian art pop musician, sound designer, and multimedia artist from Edmonton, Canada.
His music has been interpreted as a deconstruction of pop; familiar forms rendered in sophisticated sound palettes, set in lush, carefully textured compositions, that are both a little futuristic and a little mossy. Tomáš’ inspirations include the multisensory worlds of artists like Björk and Bowie, the continuing legacy of bell hooks, as well as Zen, Deep Listening, ambient music, and flora.
“Talk” is the third single from the upcoming album Alternate Utopias from a Nostalgic Future, a record that explores masculinity. Softening the heart with the grainy pastel sounds of nostalgia, “Talk” invites topics we tend to only reach for on certain kinds of days—a sitting-on-the-stairs sort of honesty, the most rewarding labor of love.
“It’s a celebration of those life-changing moments—both nostalgic and timeless—where we are really being there with a person without reservation,” Andel says, “listening fully, unpacking emotions, or learning to love and hold one another even through our disagreements.”
With a sort of skin tone sound palette, “Talk” is carried by earnest falsetto, guitar, harp, clarinet, and a host of gauzy synthesizers that are underscored throughout by an almost ASMR-like pointillism of intimate sounds. The end of the track features an excerpt from interviews titled “Conversations With Young Men,” a work in progress from documentarian Laura La France.
Where are you currently based?
I live by the tree in Edmonton.
How did you first start playing and writing music?
Apparently I had tinkling piano fingers as soon as my wrists reached over the lip of the piano, and I used to cut guitars out of paper as well. I really started as a drummer, though—I played in a fair number of bands in the past—so I’m really coming from the world of rhythm and improvisation. I loved my bands, but my creative ambitions tended to take over them, so eventually I started writing for myself. It’s for the best—I’m probably still a lousy collaborative songwriter.
What’s been happening recently?
I’ve discovered that I can rollerblade to the convenience store to buy all-dressed Ruffles, so now I pretend I’m Chip from “Baskets.”
You’ve got a new album on the way, what influenced the sound and songwriting?
I was really obsessed with “soft, human” sounds. I wanted an album that felt like skin, like a caress, something that’d get the oxytocin (the “love hormone”) flowing, ‘cause I wanted to support the potentially challenging lyrics with something both fantastic but also warm, inviting, and nurturing. At first I was obsessed with bells, chimes, wood blocks, and other “earthy” sounds—partly ‘cause I really fell in love with the almost tactile earthiness of Kilchhofer. I raided a whole bunch of antique stores for bells and tines and such. That didn’t make it on the album so much, but it got me thinking about hang drums, kalimbas, and mallet instruments (which did make it), and before I knew it I was painting with orchestral colors. I wanted to marry the sophistication, emotional pull, and rich, grounding character of harps, strings, and clarinets with the abstraction of synthesizers, to get something simultaneously organic and futuristic.
My goal with my music is to take a huge range of sounds, especially from the more experimental corners of the music world, and search for where they can intersect and still make sense. This is partly because I just love so many different types of music, and partly ‘cause I figure that I’m bound to find something interesting in these strange combinations. On this album, I was thinking a lot about Björk, Laurie Anderson, Motion Graphics, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Cosmo Sheldrake, and I’m also a massive fan of noise and ambient music. I guess it’s safe to say I really like music that tells stories and is deeply textural.
When will the album be released?
September 8th. After “Talk,” there’s two more singles coming on June 30th and August 11th.
How did you go about writing the album?
I was doing a lot of introspecting and inner work when I started working on Alternate Utopias from a Nostalgic Future. I’ve been really fascinated by masculinity. I wondered why I found it so hard to identify with it for most of my life, why certain toxic tendencies coalesce in certain masculine contexts, and what kind of work men have to do to cause less harm and become happier people. As you might imagine, this is a pretty tremendous topic with a lot of traps and tricky ground, and I really tried to approach it from a radically honest and transparent place, from a pre-political place, and with all fairness to the many different and valid ways to be a man.
I was very poindexter about it and planned it out almost like an essay, with every song unpacking a specific question, problem, or struggle that I’ve had in my own healing—whether that’s my relationship to anger, or possessiveness, or the reluctance to express emotions or ask for help. As rigid as that sounds, it ended up being a really organic and iterative process. It felt like exploration, or discovery. It felt like I solved a lot of my own personal tensions and found even more helpful questions to grapple with in the future, so it was really generative.
Where and when did you record/produce/master and who did you work with?
It was entirely a lockdown record, so I recorded and produced it in my room, but I’ll try to romanticize it a little.
The truth is, my workspace and my bed are less than 2 feet apart, and I’ve had the old “wake up at 3:00am, boot up the computer, and put down a chord progression” routine happen a few times, which is to say that from a certain point of view, it is as intimate a record as it can get.
I’m sure many people who have been creating through the lockdown agree that the boundary between life and art really disappeared in the last year. In the same way a lot of us are used to living in a “50 Chrome tabs open” world, Alternate Utopias from a Nostalgic Future was always only a few steps away from where my life was happening.
I sleep in this room, relax in this room, meditate in this room, read in this room, have sex in this room, have deep, honest conversations in this room… Basically, my work on the album was in such proximity to my regular everyday life, that the life-process that is “me” and my life unfolding was fully intertwined with the process of this album coming about.
My very good friend and talented piano composer Doug Parth (With Dogs) finessed the orchestral arrangements, and the incredibly spacious and accommodating mix and master were painstakingly carved by Hill Kourkoutis and Kristian Montano, respectively. All three of these people are the kindest, most inspiring mentors you could wish for. I really look up to them and am so thankful that this album passed through the prism of their kindness and creativity.
What programs/equipment did you use?
I swear by Reaper. I also do a lot of field recording that I then process, so I got a Zoom H5 for that. Otherwise, with the exception of some Omnichord parts, the bulk of it was soft synths. I love the Melda plugin suite to death, and also swear by Obscurium. I’m always on the lookout for “weird” equipment though. I’d die for a deliciously dusty old modular synth like the EML Electrocomp 200. I love instruments that seem to do what they want to do.
Please tell us about your motivation for writing about masculinity:
When it comes to who I feel myself to be, I’ve always felt like masculinity was an awkward map for the territory. It feels tight and constricting, and like parts are missing, which was sort of my conclusion when I started thinking about it a lot.
Please understand that I’m painting in broad strokes as I answer this question, but I think that “popular” or “traditional” masculinity is often guilty of being very isolating. The “code” doesn’t encourage a lot of open, emotional, vulnerable conversation between men, or even between men and the wider society—cool, rational stoicism seems to be the vogue instead. But really, the emotional and the rational are just two parts of a whole, and my motivation is simply to draw attention to the ways in which men trapped in this restrictive paradigm can restore their whole humanity and be happier for it. I strived to write in a way that put people before politics, and encouraged a holistic kind of masculinity with two very simple goals—healthiness and happiness.
You describe the song ‘Talk’ as an invitation—what do you mean by that?
I want to encourage people who have had the faintest brush with the questions I’m exploring on this album to take the time to dig deep, answer those questions as self-honestly as they can, and then share that with other men. Although, this isn’t just for men exclusively—we can all obviously benefit from openness and humility—but perhaps it is for men especially. Or, at least, that’s who I feel I have sufficient grounds to address.
This masculinity work is certainly not new—organizations like Next Gen Men here in Canada have been holding masculinity circles and helping youth disentangle themselves from the harmful behaviours boys tend to get socialized into for years. Before I discovered them, Nora Samaran and bell hooks started me on this path. The sea change is already under way.
With “Talk” I want to help catalyze other people’s journeys. In this song, I’m saying that it’s OK to be scared—it’s tough to genuinely, voluntarily open yourself in these ways—I get it. I’m saying that I’ve gotten it wrong before too, and I’m not saying I have the answers. I’m just saying that we all have some long overdue questions to pose to ourselves, and to one another. I was no better, and I’m still doing the work. I want people to realize that the work of being a better person never stops, but it certainly starts with honest, candid dialogue.
Please tell us about how you combine your music with your own visuals:
I don’t have synesthesia, but I do have a very strong personal sense of how sounds “look,” and how visual things “sound,” and it’s something that’s both helped me sound design and compose, as well as create visuals that reflect or amplify the feel of the music. I always loved album art and cool music videos—to me they seem completely inseparable from the experience of an album. I wanted to build a really strong sensory identity for my album, so super early on, I was planning songs in terms of color palettes and moodboards. I think that in the end the sonic profile of each song matches the color palettes and imagery I’m working with when I construct my visualizers, and people have told me that together they create a really clear sense of the tone of my message.
How would you describe the genre of your music?
I’ve adopted “art pop” as a genre because to me it seems like the most flexible way to say “music that wants to surprise you and break your expectation,” without necessarily pigeonholing myself in the world of “experimental music.” I LOVE experimental music, but I know that a lot of people groan when they hear “experimental,” and in a way it’s also become a sort of loose, diluted term. When people hear “art pop,” I think they know they’ll probably get something mostly straight forward, and so they have an easier time buying in. It’s the free-est genre label for what I like doing.
Who are you listening to at the moment?
This second it’s Rafael Anton Irrasari’s Solastalgia.
What do you like to do away from music?
I love long-distance road cycling, and recently I’ve really gotten into mountain bike trail riding. I’ve also practised as a lay Buddhist for a few years, and I just started digging deep into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Spiritual exploration is deeply important to me.
I love people, but I also really love solitude and I’m really curious by nature, so it makes sense that I set off on long rides or go get lost in a forest with a field recorder. I like feeling like I’m tapping to some other level, and cycling, spirituality, and nature all bring me to this same infinitely generative place.
What’s planned for 2021?
Well, by the time you read this, I may have been vaccinated here in Edmonton, so without shooting too high, I’m hoping our social lives will get more permissive in the not-too-distant future. I miss patio beers. However, the more realistic answer is more audio and 3D work, and because I’m slightly masochistic, probably the beginnings of the next record.
Favourite food and place to hangout?
Oh boy. Get this—a four-layer Slovak bread-pastry with plum jam, poppy seed filling, walnut paste, and tart/sweet farmer’s cheese (“tvaroh.”) It is literally the most advanced taste on Earth, and has been studied by Mensa. My favorite place to hang out is anywhere I can get Sapporo lager for cheap enough.
