Emil Amos

Prolific songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos is active with a wide variety of projects, from avant-garde folk and heavy psychedelia to cinematic electronic music. He developed his long-running Holy Sons from a lo-fi home recording venture to a more produced, fuller-sounding band across numerous adventurous releases beginning in the early 2000s. Concurrently, Amos formed the instrumental post-rock band Grails, and the group's increasingly ambitious sound has grown to incorporate elements of progressive rock, dub, Italian film scores, and many other genres. He joined folky indie rock band Dolorean and spiritually informed stoner rock band OM during the 2000s, and additionally performed and recorded with artists including Jandek, Scout Niblett, and Jessica Lea Mayfield. He explored trip-hop and instrumental hip-hop with his group Lilacs & Champagne and released two soundtrack-inspired solo albums, Filmmusik (2017) and Zone Black (2023). As a grade school student, Emil Amos took piano lessons and started playing drums. He became obsessed with skateboarding and the hardcore scene and started recording and playing with local bands in Chapel Hill, North Carolina around the time Merge Records started up. He began Holy Sons as a solo singer/songwriter project in 1992, recording hundreds of songs as a form of personal therapy. He drew from this lengthy archive of recordings for his debut album, 2000's appropriately titled Lost Decade, and then continued releasing albums at a prolific pace. After relocating to Portland, Oregon, he formed a group called Laurel Canyon, who soon changed their name to Grails. Performing instrumental post-rock influenced by Eastern modalities, the group released their debut album, The Burden of Hope, in 2003. Holy Sons would frequently perform as the opening act for Grails, and both acts gradually began embracing the recording studio for their more ambitious and experimental subsequent releases. Amos played guitar as a member of Portland-based group Dolorean, and he also played drums during some of Jandek's first Pacific Northwest live appearances in 2006. Amos joined Al Cisneros' group OM in 2008, first appearing on 2009's God Is Good. Amos and fellow Grails member Alex John Hall started a beat-driven instrumental group called Lilacs & Champagne, blending live instrumentation with hip-hop breaks and samples. Their self-titled album appeared in 2012 and was followed by three additional releases, including two volumes of Midnight Features. Amos continued making cinematically inspired music with his solo effort Filmmusik, which was released by Pelagic Records in 2017. Additionally, he played bass and keyboards in Alyeska, the indie pop group formed by singer/songwriter Alaska Reid. Meanwhile, he continued making albums with Holy Sons and Grails and was commissioned to record music for the legendary KPM music library, which eventually ended up informing his second solo album, Zone Black, issued by Drag City in 2023.
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