Interview with audry

Junk Dealers: Hi Audry! Thanks for agreeing to answer some questions. How are you doing today? Is this your first interview?

Audry Thurber: I’m doing fine. I just got back from the post office. Suehiro Maruo book and Depop dress came in. Going over to friend’s house later to help her with mixing her own music. First interview! But I have a bad memory. If I’ve had an interview prior I don’t remember it. I don’t think I have.

JD: I really want to say: you put out a lot of music but your run since 2024 has been very impressive to me. Very consistent, engaging and fresh albums. Have these been planned beforehand or how are they coming out?

AT: I don’t plan anything at all, let alone in music, really. I’m a very impulsive person and I just like to see where things take me. It’s more the music is leading me than I am leading it. Shit, I don’t even really remember recording any of the music I’ve recorded/”written”/what have you at all. It’s almost dissociative. Something else taking me over. I’m a curator, not a creator. Even my collaborations are very spur-of-the-moment things. Gabi Losoncy has this quote in her book(? It’s stapled together at the spine, it’s really more like a pamphlet or something, I’ve never seen another book in that form) “Second Person” about letting the structure suggest itself—not a novel idea to me, just the concretization of it as that was. Her words explain it better than I ever could. I have no idea what the last album I expressly planned beforehand was, and that’s not just out of a fault of memory, because I can go on music aggregation sites and go through the pages that list my albums and jog my memory.

JD: When and how did you start making music and was there a point in your discography when you felt like you were finally doing the kind of music that you wanted to make?

AT: I’ve been doing music for as long as I can remember.

I was in piano lessons when I was 4 or so but got taken out because I would rather play piano than play piano. At 7 I figured out how to download the FL Studio demo from the Image-Line website. By this time I was already quite abnormally online for my age group; I had musically alienated myself already. I was really into uplifting trance stuff. I still get Hoyaa’s Iceland Falls stuck in my head a lot. I imagine the certain bougie sentimentality of that music influences the sort of perceived “unreality” of mine. So yeah, I was trying to do EDM stuff like that. 2014 Filterdata from Bittersweet Naivete 2014-2020, I really made that in 2014 when I was 9 years old. It’s not obvious until that drum roll. That song was originally called Raspberry Pi after the little experimental computer thing.

As a kid I was a fan of this guy Sam Sutherland’s YouTube channel This Exists after watching a video he did on Black MIDI (the Touhou thing, not the band). He did a lot of videos on niche, conceptually amusing music scenes like that. He did one on taqwacore I liked a lot. In I believe 2015 I watched his video on vaporwave, from there I discovered Vektroid and INTERNET CLUB, Oneohtrix Point Never and John Oswald, Girl Talk… I think that was when I really got into making music. Still in FL Studio at this time.

I was really into YouTube Poops as well. A lot of the people making those are also very online, sort of musically-alienated-from-childhood people who have really specific tastes. But there’s a lot of them, so you get to hear a lot of quite disparate sounds. In 2016 through YTPs I found The Ecstasy of St. Theresa and Cocteau Twins. Thorn In Yr Grip and Aloysius. Those are still my favorite tracks from them, respectively.

I think when I joined Next Year’s Snow in early 2021 and was playfully goaded into installing Ableton I really started making the music I wanted to, at the time anyway. I was really into Elysia Crampton as well by this point which syncretized very well with all my other musical influences up to this point, especially in a DAW like Ableton whose workflow is just so much more sensible to me. I still go back to FL sometimes, you can do some really cool things with the Patcher that are just so impractical with Ableton.

By the time Go to Corner...No Fault in My Perception released all my work up till then seemed like scrimmage in comparison. Again, I started as a kid, and as a kid I only knew of music artists had released and I didn’t know artists could have unreleased music, so I had always just released pretty much everything.

JD: Do you think there's a good starting point to your discography?

AT: Just pick your favorite album covers. I’m a very visual person. Otherwise, Short Cool Summer Migratory Species; that’s really what I’d love all my guitar music to sound like. I think that’s what the people want. But generally, yeah, that, Cryptographic hash of the holy ghost, and the 3 Bittersweet Naivete compilations, those are the big 5. Then after that pick your favorite album covers.

JD: Sometimes the stuff you upload does get changed around a bit or revisted, I think Vampiric Premonition's vocals were changed halfway through last year, why did you make that particular decision?

AT: Didn’t like them. The vocals on that release were only so off-key cause my autotune stopped working, and I wanted to get that album out on New Year’s, so I made myself rush the vocals in like, an hour, hahaha. Most of the time I change metadata it’s just because I like throwing people for a loop. I’m a provocative person. And people would like for things to last but nothing’s forever, of course. Everything in this world is fluid.

I feel culturally alienated from a lot of zoomers but really I’m no better than them with regard to the generational neurosis around authorship. I’m just taking it in an orthogonal direction.

JD: Recently too, I think your releases have really tried a lot for your various styles to be able to coexist organically but there is a moment in Short 'Cool Summer Migratory Species', 'Freestyle edit' that took me off-guard. It did make me realize that somehow that bit of music felt weirder than any noise section you have included in other releases. Maybe noise is becoming more of a normal thing to experiment with. Maybe that's me speaking through my own bubble. Anyways, what's the story behind that track?

AT: Oh yes, that’s another thing! Around the same time I got into OPN and co I got really into Hanatarash and co through that This Exists video on “danger music”. So I’ve been into noise music forever. I don’t know. I find most noise music since maybe 2000 boring. Same with emo. I guess because they’re both just punk and punk fell off. The guys from The Pine do folk now. I’ve always been drawn to punk and emo aesthetics. Tension. Kafka. My favorite OPN album is Garden of Delete. I like Squirrel Bait more than Slint.

Lil Baby is a really great rapper, really beautiful person. “If she won't fuck, I won't make her.” Sage put me onto this documentary about him called Untrapped, I’ve seen it at least three times now.

And I finally started reading Umineko. I just noticed that “Hope” from that visual novel’s soundtrack and Lil Baby’s Freestyle were the same key and tempo. It was trivial. I think a lot of my albums are really just a representation of my mindset at the time. And my mindset at the time was thoughtless and sedated. I mean, I don't mean to imply that Lil Baby or Umineko are thoughtless...and it's not like I've finished the former's discography, or finished playing the latter.

JD: And I recall a point in time, around April, where your discography was unavailable on Bandcamp and I'm kind of sure the Migratory Species SoundCloud became active around this timeframe, too. Did something happen at that time?

AT: I quit guitar music. I’ve done what I wanted to do with it at this point. I’m Fine was a substance-induced lapse in rigor and inhibition. And I left my guitar over a vent in my room so the strings got rusted to shit, so it’s not like I could play it without giving myself tetanus anyway after May. I just wanted to pivot to newer sounds, I was thinking of how Dave Quam does footwork as Massacooramaan, figured I might separate aliases like that. For the audience’s sake, I guess. But why should I offer any help to the audience? I don’t want to treat them like children. So I backpedalled. I just use that name Migratory species when I produce for other people now. It just feels like another person or something.

JD: I bought the searchq discography and I just shuffled through some of those releases. Funny shit, sometimes. Some really cool stuff. I think what mostly caught my attention was the 'midisrupta quick(...)' one. A lot of stuff ran through voice message compression. I feel it makes for some interesting textures. Reminds me of the headache that Discord voice recognition thing is. Care to explain how this one happened? Also the Tomodachi Life apartment icon as cover art.

AT: Me and cloudy were sending voice messages to each other just trying to see how hard we could fuck up the voice recognition. I almost crashed my bike on the road recording one, just speeding down and holding my phone out into the wind. Then I got some more people involved. janis lago put me onto this program “Praat” around the same time that I was just dicking around in a lot to pass the time, it’s a program linguistics professors and speech language pathologists alike use. It’s very archaic and confusing. I haven’t really used it since.

I just like Tomodachi Life and I like how that icon looked with that text shoddily superimposed onto it. Sounds nice.

JD: I'd say the cover art for most of your releases available right now ranges from very busy digital collage works to actually very minimal landscape photography. About the latter, these are very atmospheric and in particular the Twice cover art made quite an impression on me. Did you take these pictures yourself? Any memories attached to them?

AT: Most of them I took. Just on my phone. I know I got the cover for To Cuba from an Imgur randomizer. And October-December 2020, and Drone Suite. The Kitsch and the Foible cover I took at Cattle Point in Victoria, BC. That afternoon is still burned into my memory. Probably the prettiest location on this planet I’ve been to. I don’t remember when I took the cover for Twice because I’ve gone on so many nightwalks along that path. I used to take a lot of nightwalks but I just kinda stopped, I don’t really know why. But yeah, I know it’s taken just up the road from where I took the cover of More Stretched by the Curtain. I thought someone would’ve pointed that out by now.

JD: I think you've previously expressed your liking for Daddy's Hands and I've just recently noticed it actually shows a lot in your music. I love Daddy's Hands, too. Anything to say about this or any other Dave Wenger adjacent projects?

AT: More Ache Hour Credo specifically, but yeah. Everything Wenger touched is golden. M Blanket, Moral Decay, and Breakwater, too. When I was fucked up and nervous and isolated his music was the only thing that felt real to me. His lyrics are so incisive and tragicomedic, his melodies and progressions are infectious. Twice is mostly entirely indebted to him. That moment on Scabby Corsage about a minute and a half in where the guitars synchronize and start strumming that one note in a chorus together still blows my fucking mind. He’s really good at doing that with the simplest licks, it’s almost frustrating, hahaha. The riffs to Breakwater’s Five and Ache Hour Credo’s Smegma come to mind.

A lot of other PNW stuff is like that too, though! Even Unwound. The basic riff on Dragnalus, just those 2 dun-DUN low-high notes over and over… the Unwound fans reading this should check out Dave Wenger’s work, but also Lync, Republic of Freedom Fighters, Wrought: Ironsmile, From Maggy to Margaret, New York City Rhythm… I like when music sounds like it’s on the brink of collapse.

JD: Canada, in general, has had it's own bit of history with post-hardcore. I've always found the British Columbia scene to be a very interesting subject even if it has gone a bit unnoticed. Would you say anything interesting is happening over there right now for music?

AT: I saw Perra, Entwine, Chaser, Abrupt Decay, and Jisei at a show in May this year. All great bands. I don’t actually know much about current music as I might let on. I’m a prodigal. I skim and take what I need. I drift. I know that Victoria is a very beautiful city and I hope to go there again soon.

JD: *Nardwuar voice* FrankJavCee, what does that name mean to you? His old tutorials were a huge influence to you…

AT: Ha, wow… yeah, I loved his tutorials when he was still making them. I remember the cloud rap one really well. Got into Yung Lean and Grimes through him at 9 too. 2015 seems to have been a really massive year for me… 2025 has been a really massive year for me too. Go figure.

JD: I think that influence is very apparent in none other than 'Ideation No Longer Pt. 2'. That's a song that I think most of your listeners would undoubtedly catalogue as one of your masterpieces. How did this one come to be and how did this version end up on More Stretched By The Curtain?

AT: I liked the song a lot and I had to run it back. No one listens to 3 hour albums on the Internet Archive.

JD: I've read your article called 'last year' and also the text on your neocities site that reads: "As an artist I am primarily interested in the felt undifferentiable qualities of a concretum or a set of concreta; how a set of concreta can be, or is, an abstract object". I'm guessing the 'emo inhumanism' tag has to do something with this too and I guess this philosophy is fundamental to the music you do, is it?

AT: “Vibe” is a really great word. A really overrated word. But I think there is conceptual value to it. It’s really just the undifferentiated totality of latent actions in a given space. “In the gestalt of lunch, pizza is included” - Matt Johnson. As soon as you remove an image from a moodboard, a collage, a poem, it can and will convey wildly different things between people. I think Peli Grietzer summed it up as “Aristotelian poetics” in this great essay called A Theory of Vibe. I came to my own conclusions about Vibe independently, I was shocked at how closely that essay elucidates and elaborates on them. Great read. This happens a lot, again the Losoncy thing from earlier, I think it has to do with how I don’t really know what I believe until I express it.

Emo inhumanism. I think I got inhumanism from that 2-parter Reza Negarestani essay. I don’t know if I actually still like those essays or not. But I think the basic idea (of my term, not his) was about how every emotional investment is implicitly political (this is often dumbed down to “all art is political”, alongside the more obvious statement that every sexual investment is implicitly political, etc), and the therapeutic quality of funnelling ego-dystonia into something productive. I am thinking of Baby Kia. Hell Can’t Save You is the greatest album of last year.

But yeah, all I’m really interested in is images. A lot of music is really quite boring to me. I’d rather be a writer than a musician. Cocteau Twins’s music is just about this, really. The sublime is necessarily alien to humans = it necessarily presents itself with a level of “unreality”. Philip K. Dick’s pink beam.

JD: I don't think this ended up on the final edit of the interview, but on Octa Möbius Sheffner's Sonemic Interview, she stated that your "path and philosophy is totally different from [Audry's]", do you know how?