Music
How to Dress Well Is Stepping Out of His Comfort Zone
Tom Krell talks diving into new sonic territories, touring adventures and Los Angeles in this cover story.
Tom Krell
© Cara Robbins
“What’s the equivalent to, like, terraforming Mars?” The question is rhetorical. Tom Krell is trying to think of an adequate metaphor to describe the painstaking process of creating an emotional continuity within the lyrics, the sonics, the visuals, the everything of his latest album “The Anteroom” — his fourth released under the moniker How To Dress Well for Domino Records.
Krell is full of many well-reasoned, hard thought, and occasionally grand opinions about his own work and, as I soon learned, also about how “piping hot” Congolese basketball player Serge Ibaka is. Both on the album and during this afternoon in Los Angeles, Krell is an artist concerned with honesty and ontology. He has a fascination with the body that extends far beyond admiring the Adonis-like physique of a seven-foot tall professional athlete. With “The Anteroom,” Krell crafted an album about the cruelty baked into our bones and the inherent violence of existence. The songs are an emotional space one must wade through, a sonic stream to float down as you contemplate a universe wholly indifferent to your suffering.
We meet on a sunny Wednesday afternoon at a self-described “Tropical Vintage Junkyard” in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Northeast LA. Krell is fresh off a 20-hour journey from Athens, Greece, where he spent a few days after wrapping up his European tour in Lithuania. He was tired and experiencing nicotine withdrawal and saying something about how the Greeks smoke more than other Europeans.
Having shaved some of the edge off thanks to a drag, Krell — whose tall, exceedingly narrow frame is reminiscent of an Olympic high jumper’s — lowers himself into a rusted barber chair in the middle of the backyard and begins to recount how, just a few days prior, he and his tourmates were nearly poisoned. “In Athens, there is an invasive species of citrus that look like normal oranges and smells the same. it's made — chemically, biologically — of the same stuff as skunk musk. People are sent to the hospital! Your body thinks you've been absolutely poisoned. A friend of mine was about to eat one, and our Greek host was like, ‘Whatever you do, don't eat that!’”
He’s glad to be back in in LA where the citrus is comparatively less harmful and where, over the course of the last 26 months, he feels his professional and personal life have achieved a harmony that has eluded him for most of his career.
Tom Krell's Advice
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Appreciate Beauty
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Pay Attention
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Oops
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Unlike the solo projects of many of his indie peers — Blood Orange’s New York, Beach House’s Baltimore — How To Dress Well doesn’t really have a city it calls home. Krell has a tendency to not stay in one place for too long. He was raised in Boulder, Colorado; went to college in Iowa; spent a few years in New York; and, for most of the last decade, has moved around between Chicago where he is a PhD candidate in the philosophy department of DePaul University, Germany where he was on a fellowship doing research for his dissertation on 19th century German Idealism, and London where he often records.
This constant movement and roaming intellectual curiosity is reflected in the music he’s released over the years: the the lo-fi, ‘90s R&B sampling of “Love Remains”; the melancholic electro-soul of “Total Loss”; the pulsing synth ballads of “‘What Is This Heart?’”; and the crystalline pop of “Care.” Krell’s music, like the artist himself, has never really settled into one location. Instead, it has wandered, fixating on something briefly, then moving on and settling in a new place, sometimes multiple places at the same time.
Get in
© Cara Robbins
How to Dress Well
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Tom Krell in Los Angeles
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How to Dress Well
© Cara Robbins
“The Anteroom marked a definitive break in his nomadic tendencies. “When I made my first several records, I was always living somewhere for school,” he explains, brushing his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. “I moved to LA and time came to start making this record and a lot of pieces fell into place.”
One piece in particular — electronic musician Joel Ford — fell into a really convenient place: Los Angeles. Ford’s move and the studio set-up he brought with him ushered in a sharp pace change in Krell’s creative process.“I had this vibe here where it was like if I was in the studio for two hours and it felt like it was working, I would stay for four more. In a weird way, it allowed me to be way more intensive in my working and less intensive.” Gone were the days of wringing every precious hour out of expensive studio time. A new variable had been introduced to the equation: choice.
How to Dress Well
© Cara Robbins
The result? “This record is just like way more of a single cauldron in which all of these elements kind of got mixed up and coordinated,” he says seeming somewhat relieved.“Rather than, ‘Here's song A. Ok, it's got these seven elements. Let's mix them nicely. Cool. Song B. Let's mix these 12 elements. Ok, cool. Next song.’”
The Anteroom” is a cauldron alright, a witch’s brew of the Krell’s darkest, most desperate, mangled thoughts and purest musical impulses. It’s a record where the songs and the sounds in them are allowed to dictate their own journey. The tracks crash, melt, and dissolve into one another, bearing ominous compound titles like “Brutal | False Skull 5” and “Nonkilling 6 | Hunger.” In the music video for the latter, Krell’s shirtless body dances in a front of a bright projector light, morphing back-and-forth from cold, staticy rendering to human flesh. He sings, “And I could feel in my body time rushing in / The way nothing must have felt when something started to begin.” It’s a morbid poetry housed in an uptempo ’90s house.
Get Outside
© Cara Robbins
The aforementioned “Brutal | False Skull 5” is an album standout, a driving groove with growling bass line and a jagged string sample. At the track’s emotional climax, Krell’s signature falsetto is isolated in a straining acappella, dissociating into a pool of despair, “The smoke that carried us away / Didn't pay no mind / It didn't care if we were hopeful or confused / Or put a moment's thought into our demise.”
“I just got in such an intense space mentally,” Krell says, leaning forward slightly. “If the song was about x, y, z, the lyrics were gonna be about it, every single sound, every single aspect was gonna be doing the work.”
It was at this point that he brought up terraforming Mars. At first it seemed a little ridiculous. Was this guy really comparing astrophysically altering an entire planet so that it can support human life to making his album? However, the more I thought about it, the more it actually did seem like a useful metaphor for the process of making “The Anteroom,” and music in general. Krell realized that the most memorable works were those that took pains to carve out room for the intended feeling of a song to live. In this process, no lyric, no note, no millisec of silence is deployed without the utmost care and consideration.
Tom Krell
© Cara Robbins
Proceeding in this way requires a lot of patience, though. Fortunately, that was a luxury Krell’s new LA life now afforded him. “I think we're talking like 10 to 1 hours on this record compared to anything else I've ever made,” he proclaims. The products of this protracted, gestative process are songs that explore different sonic and emotional terrain, but that all seem to be of a piece. Krell compared the process of each track’s formation and their resulting relationship to how a human body forms, “Like, there wasn't like a heart laying around and one lung here and a lung there that were gathered. Tension in organic, molecular reality started making these parts and wholes that fit together. This record has that kind of like genetic, cosmogenetic vibe to it. All the parts are reciprocally related to the whole.” He pauses. “The whole thing is this kind of big, exquisite corpse of itself.”
As our time together winds to a close, I ask Krell if making “The Anteroom” helped him finally understand the lure that LA has had on so many artists and musicians. Did he get it now? “No. I don’t get LA at all,” he says, definitively. “Nothing about my work is LA, except that maybe lowkey...” Here his demeanor changes. He sits up in the barber chair, making that face that people make when they’ve stumbled upon a clever thought and are figuring out the best way to package it. “Maybe I mean the opposite. Maybe, lowkey, LA is really, really confusing and super fucked up and difficult, and, this whole thing about the nice weather is just like a trick. It's like a ruse. And, it's actually a really hard place to make art and live life, so that's why [this] record is the most LA record.”
How to Dress Well
© Cara Robbins
The Three Best Pieces of Advice that How to Dress Well Ever Got (and Actually Took)
Try to rest your eyes on something beautiful every day.
My mom told me that she tries to rest her eyes on something beautiful every day. And I think that's a good piece of advice just for cultivating a personal relationship with the world. I think she means something way more than 'that's a pretty painting.' She means like really be attentive in a decisive way.
Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.
It’s a quote from a French metaphysician named Malebranche. I guess it's a similar bit of advice, but I think it's extremely easy to walk around acting immortal and acting like the world is just whatever it is. It's much more difficult to actually pay attention and actually trace the contours of reality yourself and not just follow convention.
Don’t take advice.
Low key, there is no determinate advice that anyone can give you. That's the problem with advice. Really good advice doesn't actually advise, right? Like, the whole teach a man to fish shit or whatever. But that's the thing, we always just want the fucking fish, especially from someone who's older, wiser or whatever and they've had the fish. But if they give you the fish, you're not gonna get what you need. So it's better to have to learn to fish, I guess.
Just don't listen to anybody who really thinks they have something to tell you...Unless they're telling you not to eat the poisonous fruit.
