January 4, 2025. Mangled ceiling vines frame Tobias and their guitar in a leaf patchwork. Across the room, above the heads, from my ladder’s perch in a Brooklyn loft forest, I can watch concert preparations. Tobias rummages through an oversized grocery bag full of eBay-sourced cassettes. (Some, as we’ll soon hear, contain overdub artifacts, like the reversed vocals of Joni Mitchell.) Fresh off the I-95 from Philly, it’s the singer-songwriter-noisebender’s first show in six years.
Many in attendance have tuned in for much longer: since the Soundcloud beat days, through the True Panther Records releases, and now the recent run of peak-form projects, Hymn of the Pearl and Sink. One fan flew in just to witness.
When they’re not mentoring other guitarists, reading apocryphal texts, caring for pawed creatures, building a life with Mira (their partner and artwork confidant, who took the photo above), or helping raise funds for Palestinians in Gaza, Tobias is probably recording with a trusty dusty Tascam deck — acquired before the craze. It’s one of the few unchanging pillars shared by most of their discography. Hymn of the Pearl, Sink, Electricity, Thread, Toby, Sputnik, and “Matthew,” their most recent single, all started on magnetic tape. (Two Birds and Clay did too, but using a reel-to-reel helmed by Aidan Elias.) Beyond that, the guitars transmogrify, tempos hibernate then sprint, vocal mixes shift, and electronic influences (from ambient to noise) make cameos. Even grief, which permeates many of Tobias’ lyrics, wears dozens of faces. Blatant here, camouflaged there.
On “Strange Days,” Tobias nods to sober hallucinations over Berkshires rock. “House On Fire” could soundtrack an Adam Curtis documentary (or improve the songwriting of a Simple Plan track): “The crawling death of an empire / rolling trick dice / you’re all vampires / have a good life.” Blood’s spilling on danceable fan favorite “The Flood,” with its instant-classic opening riff. My favorite songs of theirs have a terraforming quality — taking pain, finding purpose. The cat runs away but finds its strays on “Guts”; there’s life after death on “Comet,” on which personal regeneration traces a space rock’s orbit.
After meeting and chatting in real life, Tobias and I traded ~1000 texts over the span of a month. We hope you enjoy, or at least glean something worthwhile, from the result. Thanks for reading and listening <3
Tobias gets paid the second you buy their music on Catalog.
Siber: Let’s start with your own lyric: “What’s that thing that makes you a person?”
Tobias: A soul. I think all sentient things have souls, including plants.
Siber: So if you eat a spinach leaf…
Tobias: Fortunately, you can’t eat a soul. What makes a spinach leaf a spinach leaf is immaterial.
Siber: Our eyes make the spinach leaf.
Tobias: You are a spinach leaf. And I am too.
Siber: We are the photosynthesizers.
Tobias: Exactly.
Siber: Before the Mk.gee craze and everything analog went back en vogue even more, you were having the time of your life with a tape deck. How did you and your Tascam meet?
Tobias: I bought the Tascam in 2017 off eBay for $200. Didn’t read the description that said it came without the power supply. Back then, no one was jury-rigging their own and selling them, so I had to seek out an original, and that cost an extra $100. I learned my way around it from the manual and YouTube tutorials. What they taught me didn’t work — I thought I was just stupid, but it needed refurbishing. [Laughs.] Being limited to digital just started feeling inhuman to me. My life doesn’t feel ordered or sane enough to be communicated through something as clear as digital synths and DI recordings.
Siber: Is there ever a time and place for it?
Tobias: Perfect digital sounds can be great for conveying how unreal everything is—I’ll use it for that sometimes. Boards of Canada has an interview where they talk about how using tape is sort of a roulette process, where you have no idea what sort of mistakes and artifacts may arise in the recording, and I sort of worship that. But digital synths and DI are also cool now in a Twin Peaks: The Return way.
Siber: The number of times I’ve heard a demo over FaceTime that I ended up longing for when the final version came out… For other people, that audio quality is a dealbreaker. Doesn’t matter how incredible the idea. It’s just different for everyone.
Tobias: SOPHIE is a classic, great example of digital distortion done right. Some of the older Oneohtrix Point Never records too. They don’t feel like plastic to me.
Siber: Why do you think some things feel like plastic and others don’t?
Tobias: It’s not the same thing as something sounding clean, that’s for sure. My initial thoughts feel kind of surface-level. I think substance, to me, is when a work feels like more than just a reference. But I also love symbolism. I guess you’re kinda just left with intention. At this point in my life, all I really care about is a combination of honesty and effort, and I only have a gut feeling that tells me whether I did both justice.
Siber: I don’t want to romanticize the creative suffering aesthetic or pry — do you want to talk about your version of “insane” that leads you toward using these imperfect machines?
Tobias: I think the maladaptive sides of me are based around an obsession with morals and choices. Like, dreams will start normal, then everything tears away, and the last thing I’ll hear before I wake up in a sweat is high-pitched screaming from all directions. When I was driving back to Philly after that last Brooklyn show, I hallucinated that there was a strange blue woman with stringy black hair climbing toward me. But that was just a sign to pull over and rest. I had been listening to this long talk about Sophia in Christianity. [Laughs]. The rabbit holes I go down might seem strange, but that’s something I appreciate.
Siber: Counting blessings you survived that drive. Fixations, night terrors, they ripple across our lives… I appreciate you sharing that much, the acceptance of it. It can still feel taboo to discuss.
Tobias: I feel like a crab at the bottom of the ocean, looking for primordial vents, sometimes. That’s another reason why I value the warmth of tape. It’s an opium-like warmth to me. This physical sensation is what Boards of Canada, My Bloody Valentine, and Duster brought to my life.
Siber: A place to take a break from the 24/7 psy-op.
Tobias: Yeah. At best, I think most media in the U.S., and even lots of experimental art, it’s all just controlled opposition. On top of everything else he did, Elvis walked into Nixon’s office and begged to be used as propaganda. That’s on record. [Laughs.] Pop stars manufacturing consent last year for the genocide, Boiler Room’s ties to Zionism…I love what Noname does. I think she has a lot of courage
Siber: Censorship is alive and well in America.
Tobias: Can I re-answer why I use tape? I think I regurgitated what I would have said when I was 20.
Siber: What’s the Tobias of 2025 have to say?
Tobias: I still subscribe to the idea of tape’s mistakes being a motivator. But I don’t think of digital as lifeless. I think that just came from my frustration of starting out with nothing but a DAW. Tapes help me make music Guided By Voices-style: recording to tape, focusing most on performance.
Siber: Has tape been a constant presence across your discography so far?
I used that machine to make all of my work except for Two Birds and Clay, which used a reel-to-reel. Aidan Elias recorded those for me at Corpus Studio. Ableton’s always been my DAW, though I want to learn Famitracker, which you can use to produce music for NES games. I needed a push to break out of my producer mindset, which was my starting point. I’d make beats for hip-hop artists I still love like MIKE. So I began to use tape as a tool for vocal demos. Now, I really only do production work — sound design and overdubs — after I’ve finished the performance, finished the lyrics, and I’ve moved those tape recordings to digital. I still feel like I’m new to the journey of songwriting. I might be trying to rationalize something that you can’t rationalize... Boil it all down to: “I like sound.”
Siber: Why do you think songwriting is something you wanted to quadruple down on?
Tobias: When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was write songs, but my issues with self-worth pushed me toward production. I felt like I was endlessly creating backgrounds while the foreground was struggling to break through. Writing lyrics was the dawn of that foreground. With production, I could tell I was touching people, but it was more passive. Nowadays, I make a concerted effort to be more grounded with my writing and then let the production burrow that message into your subconscious. It’s deceptively about words: Repetition is a powerful political and spiritual tool. I think lyrics are in this spiritual interim between stories and instrumental music.
Siber: Your wordless music speaks too, I think. “The Mirror” does. It also takes me to that “Got a light?” scene from Twin Peaks: The Return. And then there are melodies I hear from you that bring me back to hearing Sheryl Crow on the radio. And then there are lyrics on songs of yours like “Comet,” or “The Flood,” or “Guts,” that hold my attention after the music stops.
Tobias: It’s important to me that melodies from that era break through my music. Which reminds me: I can’t believe I forgot Modest Mouse as an influence. [Laughs] Also: “Eye Know” by De La Soul. I found my brother’s CD rip of 3 Feet High and Rising and fell in love when I was 12. Other than that, my favorite music was Third Eye Blind. I had Stevie Wonder and every Atmosphere album on my iPod. [Laughs.] All of it’s in service of mind-burrowing.
Siber: Have you felt like your words or ideas don’t receive attention outside of music?
Tobias: I think autism can make you hyper-aware of the fact that lots of people just won’t trust someone who’s autistic. They might not even realize. I’ve found that people either instantly gravitate toward me and spill their guts out or kind of place me in chronic isolation. It’s definitely a reason why I make music.
Siber: What do you choose to pay attention to?
Tobias: Religious themes and redemption, like on “Solomon.” Making characters to express parts of me, or ideas within me, even if they’re not reflective of who I am on the day-to-day. David Lynch just passed away… his work manages to have a permeating sense of love and an unrelenting look at the horror of being human. On Two Birds, I was trying to express love and fear as part of one whole. That record was lightning in a bottle — I was gonna vomit from laughing so hard. Every memory of me and the band (Paulie from Blair, Adam who has a solo project, Violet who goes by Eraseer and just put out an amazing record, and Kimmy who is my friend from high school) is a fond one. Then I can look back at an earlier project of mine, like Thread, and it’s this clear snapshot of being very hurt, making music to try and understand my own faults when I wasn’t taking care of myself. I enjoyed working on the video for “Head” with my friend Arthur, but he passed away shortly after. I think I was able to express a vulnerability I hadn’t before, but that whole process and period of my life was an obstacle. It’s a tragic listen.
Siber: Is the fact that it feels tragic almost a victory? You’re no longer in the middle of that storm, in the thick of that pain, so now you can identify enough of a distance to feel uncomfortable?
Tobias: I would definitely say so. I have a lot more self-respect and knowledge about who I am now. Writing characters for songs is a huge part of world-building to me, but it’s also just a tool to not repress the more difficult parts of myself, which helps me avoid projecting onto others. Everyone is complicated with their own issues in my music, and everyone is also deserving of love. And capable of it too.
Siber: Is there a memory or note about Arthur you’d like us to include in this?
Tobias: We used to send each other all the art we were making and then meet up every week to putz around on skateboards and talk about our feelings during a really rough time in both of our lives. He injured himself skating as a teenager and I was never any good so we just messed around. We’d meet up at the triangle on 9th street outside this nightmare of a bar where we used to drink underage. Me and Arthur would get beers and onigiris from the Sunrise Mart and do slappys until we got bored. I’m still trying to find a way to tell him how much I appreciated that, through music at least. So much of my music has been focusing on the negative aspects of grief but at some point that gratitude is something I need to get across. “Grief” is specifically about him. Hymn of the Pearl really started from a dream I had where we got to speak. I ran into him packing up a hatchback on a desert road in the middle of the night, standing outside some lone country home surrounded by nothing. We had a conversation that just registers as dream babble now, hugged each other, cried, then moved on.
Siber: You’re making these capsules of grief, and aspiring toward early 2000s top 40 melodies, and crafting veiled references to holy stories... How varied is ‘good’ songwriting to you?
Tobias: It’s formless. I also think you can ideally read good lyrics like a poem. Musical writing can also turn lyrical writing into something better. A lot of old Alex G is like that: “I know something you don’t know.” Jason Molina’s got great examples of lyrics that sound good on their own to me. Like pretty much the entirety of "Whip Poor Will." I think D’Angelo is the perfect middle ground: he buries the vocals so you have to read them. I love the deception of my song “Matthew.” A casual listen just sounds like a love song.
Siber: How did “Matthew” begin? And where’s the religious intrigue come from for you?
Tobias: “Matthew” started with that tambourine, which I think is funny. And I figured out a new distortion technique where I run the guitar through a mixer feedbacking on itself, which boosts the signal really crazy. That song was me letting myself use things I once considered trite. Certain chord voicings, strumming patterns. I did all of it as a treat. [Laughs] The lyrics took me two hours a day for a week. I’m into religion outside of their organized contexts because that iconography exists everywhere and it’s a functional tool. The church is one of the greatest evils on earth, but I consider myself somewhat of a Christian. The type of Christianity I am referring to is my own, and based mainly off of things unearthed in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, as well as Jung’s Seven Sermons of the Dead and the Kybalion.
Siber: Are sacred texts a benchmark for storytelling and lyricism for you?
Tobias: Absolutely.
Siber: Do you see ‘Tobias’ as a religious project? I think about my own relationship to your song “Comet,” my play count on “Matthew,” and I don’t think it’d be a stretch to call them something like places of worship for me — like the gravity that an empty church can have after mass.
Tobias: I guess ‘religion,’ which feels like a ‘bad’ word, is hidden inside you, in all of us, in the form of our souls, and it’s our job to excavate and nourish that. Music’s part of that process. I had to stop listening to “Matthew” on loop on Spotify because I realized it could get taken down. [Laughs]
Siber: Did you ever see that Crisis album Valentin Hansen did? He promoted it by posting a video of a streaming farm he built with like 200 phones running his own music.
Tobias: Did he not get in trouble??
Siber: He went viral. [Laughs] Now he’s got an infinite album experiment going on.
Tobias: That’s insane. A demo of “Matthew” was just going fake viral. 20,000 plays on TikTok, 600 new followers, but zero translation to dreams. I mean streams. Well, both. [Laughs] Metrics are bullshit, but unfortunately, I did feel disappointed. I hate releasing music right now. I remember when we released Two Birds and we got a Fader article that led to like 20 streams. The advertising didn’t really work, but I was also pretty hard to work with at the time. It was a goal of mine back then, working with True Panther, to get flown out and have a video budget. People I really looked up to when I started making music, like King Krule, were part of that world. A lot of kind and supportive words were said about that music, but nothing seemed to leave a lasting mark, which is disillusioning. If Spotify and Pitchfork didn’t care...
Siber: It was hard to cut through. Even for you, who wasn’t myopically focused on playlisting. But here we are, talking because of, and about, what you’ve shared over the years. I asked you earlier about your lyric, “What’s that thing that makes you a person”...
Tobias: When I wrote that, all my ideas were intuition and reaction. Now I feel like I have more intent in my life. Something changed when I remembered where we come from, which can never be understood in words. The more I try to pin it down, the more frantic I get. You know, that’s what the namesake of Hymn of the Pearl is about. It’s a Syriac apocryphal text about a king who sends his son to Egypt to retrieve a pearl. The son is wowed by material things and gets a spell cast on him that makes him forget himself. Then he receives a letter from his father and his memories come flooding back. The king is meant to represent the Godhead, the unified field, whatever you want to call it, and the son is all of us. It’s about how the world functions in a way that makes us forget our nature, so we become cold and distracted.
Siber: Has transitioning been an act of reclamation in that vein
Tobias: That’s a huge part of it. But I also had my challenging dark night of the soul. Fully confronted everything I could. That’s what Hymn was born from — not the finished transition, but the pain before it. Now that I’m sort of on the other side, I’m really excited to see what the end result will be creatively. The music I made when I was down and out wasn’t very emotional. At least, that’s how I see it.
Siber: See, Hymn of the Pearl is, to me, the perfect Tobias album (so far). Bursting with feeling. Not mired in some monotone, down-and-out gloom but very vibrant. It’s fascinating to hear your self-assessment. Beyond the tape machine, what were the pillars of that recording process?
Tobias: The original “Guts” was made in 2020. I came up with the riff for “Solomon” in New York, in 2021. “Comet,” “Birthday,” and “Grief,” I wrote in Denton a year later. They were all loose songs out of a large collection. The album only began as an idea when I made “Crushed by Waves,” then “The Mirror” finished it off. During the last few months of me and my girlfriend living in Texas, we moved in with her parents. The deals I signed had run out, and I couldn't afford rent. I had started recording final versions of Hymn in my car until it got stolen. [Laughs] So I ended up doing that it in my girlfriend’s parents’ car to record the last vocals. I finished a line on "Solomon" that goes, "Returning of the stolen," and two days later my car got returned.
Siber: Was it shyness driving you to record in the car? Feeling like a burden?
Tobias: It was a little of both. It was the most private and best-sounding setup. I’d only do it at night, or I would have died of a heatstroke. They were 110-degree days, and you can’t have the AC on while you’re recording. It was me, my SM57, the tape machine and a mixer. I had my amp at a practice space in Denton that I apparently shared with the band Lift to Experience. Pretty barebones. It was 60 to 80 degrees at night. Not awful. That whole experience was about letting go, letting karmic debt be paid.
Siber: What do you remember of Texas at that time?
Tobias: I remember vast blue sky over new uniform housing. The smell of cement particles and storms and the sound of grackles. In Denton, I think of stray dogs and Christian sober living. A place with no gentrification cubes. It was before all of my favorite nature spots were destroyed to put up shitty houses. Cheap rent, food was alright, and I hadn’t experienced the road rage yet. Also: I realized something else about why I use tape.
Siber: Hit me.
Tobias: It’s definitely become more of a utility as time has passed because it’s a quick, cheap way to glue a song together. My joints make it hard to sit and work meticulously, but tape lets me let go and let God.
Siber: Meanwhile, “Guts” hits me like it is meticulous. Hits me like a wall and a tailwind at once.
Tobias: What’s funny is “Guts” is the most ungrounded song to me. It’s the perfect example of what I’m not focusing on: pure abstraction. I can’t help that it’ll always be in my music in some way, but I’ve fleshed that out enough. I’m trying to pinpoint my feelings better. It hounds me for attention at all hours.
Siber: Do lyrics like these have a place in your future songwriting: “The crawling death of an empire / rolling trick dice / you’re all vampires / have a good life.”
Tobias: I have complicated feelings on this because I think U.S. hegemony is rapidly decaying right now. But I’ve accepted my perspective on people is reflective of how I’m feeling about myself in that moment and what I’ve been through before it. When I wrote that, I was abusing drugs, being taken advantage of, and this is what surrounded me. Or what I surrounded myself with. Now I feel more cagey and suspicious, but this actually lets me feel better about humanity. I see myself in everyone now, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. That can be painful, but it’s a rewarding path overall.
Siber: Famously, when suspicion rises, appreciation of humanity does too. [Laughs]
Tobias: Maybe I just have better boundaries now. [Laughs] The meaning of life isn’t some material secret—the meaning of life is life. You create to create, no other option. Also, music isn’t just something one person makes: it’s made by the musician, the listeners, and the space between.
Siber: Are your cats your muses?
Tobias: Yes.
Tobias gets paid the second you buy their music on Catalog.
