Tim Shiel: ‘I Am Sitting On Lana Del Rey’s Toilet Seat’

From making solo electronic music as Faux Pas to joining Gotye’s band for a world tour, Tim Shiel has been on a serious busy streak. Now he’s mulling different directions and enjoying his first foray into video-game soundtracks. Interview by MATT SHEA.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Tim Shiel disappeared off the face of the Earth in late 2011/early 2012. Such is life when you’ve been seconded to good friend Wally De Backer’s all-conquering world tour. As keyboardist for Gotye, Shiel played stadiums, appeared on Letterman and more or less lived in that bizarre parallel universe where you’re nodding hello to Hetfield and sharing toilet seats with Del Rey.

But all that globetrotting also meant he had to put his own music on hold. When Shiel returned to Melbourne and his Faux Pas recording project in August 2012, releasing a collection of exceptional remixes only to announce he was ditching the moniker, many were left scratching their heads. With the session work, a new baby and semi-regular Triple R duties all bidding for his time, it was an ominous sign for Shiel’s own music.

Thankfully the silence didn’t last long, Shiel recently teaming up with Melbourne indie developer Kumobius to soundtrack a brand new iOS game. Duet is a minimalist, fascinating puzzler on its own, but matched to Shiel’s score it becomes an immersive, addictive experience. The soundtrack’s carefully themed progressions are marked by the typical Faux Pas calling cards of throbbing bass and crackling percussion, but Duet OST is nevertheless a project released under Shiel’s own name.

With things back to normal, M+N shared some time with Shiel to discuss how he’s placed in 2013. We wanted to know about the burial of Faux Pas, how he came to be working with an indie game developer and, of course, some Gotye tour stories.

You said last year that you were wrapping up Faux Pas and releasing all the music for free. Is Faux Pas gone for good?
I think so. I mean, some day I might wake up and regret being so final about it, but at the same time it felt like I needed to do it. I think I assumed that I was going to start making music that would sound wildly different. Maybe because a lot of music that I was listening to last year or the year before and a lot of the demos and little ideas of songs that I was starting to write felt like they were going in a really different direction. It’s funny actually: I guess because I had to turn the soundtrack around quite quickly, I maybe rested back on techniques or ideas that have been developing for a long time. If anything, I feel like I have put out an album that probably is a Faux Pas album, that’s not really representative of some big stylistic shift perhaps. I hope that it sort of shows a bit of development. At the same time I feel really good. It felt so good to say that Faux Pas is over. For some reason, for me, that felt really, really good.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Did coming back from such a big tour change you? Was there any element there of turning over a new leaf?
I think so. I just wanted the opportunity, even just in my own mind, to be able to start again – whether in terms of the kind of music that I am making or whatever, I’m not sure. But I sort of feel happy now looking at the few Faux Pas records and all of the remixes and different things I uploaded to the internet over the years. I am really happy to look at that now as a stage, a path or a chapter or something, and now I can start the next thing or next group of things. For me personally, it felt really important to that.

The flipside is that I have had a few friends asking if I’m making it a lot harder on myself by starting again – new names and new projects. How much easier it would be to put a soundtrack out and say, “Faux Pas is back.” Faux Pas is like a thing, a deal – maybe it’s a big deal to me. I think one day I will wake up and say, “You know what, Faux Pas is not really a big deal.” So it’s not a big deal and I’ve put it under the rug and started something new.

The thing about Faux Pas was that it was pretty broad. Duet does sound like a Faux Pas record but at the same time Faux Pas was a moving target in a way, musically. Would you say that?
Yeah, definitely, I think that’s true. I think, for me, I have really become aware that I do want to pursue a lot of different kinds of music and a lot of different kinds of projects, and maybe it’s not helpful to put all of that under one umbrella or one project name. It can be quite confusing for listeners when you are trying to find people who are interested in what you are doing. This is maybe a more productive way for me to work. Also to think about what I am doing: to be able to juggle different ideas at once but be able to compartmentalise everything into different projects. Just for my own sanity rather than bring it all under the name, Faux Pas.

“There is something neutral about your name. It’s not loaded with anything.”

At the end of the day I actually really disliked the words Faux Pas after a while. I have told this already a few times. When I first started, I named myself Faux Pas and I went to Google to see if there are any other famous Faux Pas bands around. And all of the other Faux Pas that I found, none of them had gained much level of notoriety or anything but they were all quite lame. I never kind of liked that. So, that always stuck with me: the idea Faux Pas was one of many quite lame Faux Pas around the world. [Laughs] For this soundtrack, to start with my own name – it’s my name. There is something neutral about your name. It’s not loaded with anything.

Talking about that long, long tour with Gotye: at home there was that sense you guys were off conquering the world. But did it feel like that in the group? Or were you cocooned from that a little bit? What was it like being on that tour?
In a sense we couldn’t help but notice that great things kept happening to Gotye. We travelled around the world for a long time playing to the crowds that were really excited and interested in the music. At that level we knew something was going on. Every now and then someone would come in and tell us that Gotye had gone number one in the 22nd or 23rd country in the world.

That stuff happened constantly, but then touring is sort of glorious and mundane at the same time. There was a rhythm to being on the ground after a while. I guess that the whole Gotye tour was at once surreal and really real, which is I think a lot of people’s experience of touring. You can’t help it. I’m in a French TV studio walking past, like, Lou Reed and James Hetfield to find the unisex toilet and coming out is Lana Del Rey. She walks past me and I go to sit down and realise the toilet seat’s still warm. I am sitting on Lana Del Rey’s toilet seat. You know what I mean? That’s not normal, obviously. At the same time, it’s just a dude who’s at a job going to the toilet. It’s very normal. [Laughs]

Was there a sense with Gotye that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing? That you may never witness or be involved in something like that again?
Yeah, I think so. Definitely. It was a constant pinch-yourself vibe for all of us, really. Even if in the future we can get that group of people together again and go out on the road with Gotye along with the same band and crew, there is no guarantee it’s going to be the same experience that we have all just had. Because huge success is really a once-in-a-lifetime thing for most people to get to that level. At the same time, I hope it’s not once in a lifetime. I had never really toured before getting involved with Wally for that tour. I really enjoyed it. So I hope on some level that I get to do something like that again. Will I get to play on Letterman again? Maybe not.

How did you meet Wally, originally? What was the creative common ground that brought you together?
It was my first day at uni and I went into a philosophy lecture with a friend of mine, Paul. The two of us felt like we had to make a friend, and sitting in the front row of the lecture theatre was a skinny, very pale 17-year-old with a ponytail – he had a ponytail, I want to make sure you mention that [Laughs] – we sat down and it turned out that he was Wally and he loved Depeche Mode and Icehouse and we talked about Soundgarden. That’s how I met Wally. That was quite a long time ago. We’ve been friends for a very long time.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Towards the end of that big tour, did you worry about being away too long from your own projects? Or maybe was there a point where you were thinking, ‘Enough, I need to get home. I need to get back to my own creative space.’
I think I wanted to get home to my family and friends. Particularly at the end of the tour, when I found out that my wife was pregnant. [Laughs] But in terms of my projects, I guess on one hand there were times where I wished I could devote more time to it and I worried – I still worry – that I lost a bit of momentum in terms of having to really focus on Gotye for a little bit.

On the other hand, any kind of doubts about it are put to one side when I think about a) how much I loved being on tour and what a great experience it was, and b) what I have learnt from that experience in terms of not only skills and knowledge but also confidence. I am not gonna sit here and go, “Yeah, I wish I had not gone on tour with Gotye.” [Laughs] You gotta make choices. You go with whatever projects seem interesting and make sense at the time. Of all the choices I have made in the last six or seven years, this is probably one of the better ones – joining Gotye’s band. It is one of the better decisions I have made.

“The last Faux Pas album is definitely pulling in a few directions at once.”

Your professional monikers: Time Shield, Faux Pas, Telling, Tim Shiel. We’ve touched upon this a little bit already, but do you think that’s ever worked against you, chopping and changing your professional names like that?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s hard to tell. It can be really hard to tell about an album, for example, what tracks resonate with people or why people like or don’t like it. Sometimes you just have to rely on your friend’s opinion on that or just on your own gut instincts. I listened to the last Faux Pas album [Noiseworks] and I’m really proud of it, but it’s definitely pulling in a few directions at once. It’s hard for me to be subjective about it, but I do wonder whether I really did make a great record or did I try and make three or four great records all at once, and it just didn’t pull together. I don’t know.

Turning to Duet, I read an interview with you in July and you didn’t mention anything about it. I’m guessing, then, it came together pretty quickly.
Yeah, it did come quickly. I’m trying to think when it was. I’ll look up when it was I actually first we met the guys from Kumobius. [Pause while Shiel checks his computer] You’re right. It was in August, the start of August. I actually have been taking stock over the last couple of days and trying to figure out how it has been going during the last couple of months in terms of my own productivity and what am I actually achieving or what I’m getting finished. I’m sort of having to rethink the way I approach a lot of that because I’ve become a dad. So my time needs to be a bit more managed. I’ve never really thought too much about my own productivity as an abstract concept, but I’m really starting to do a bit of that. Just you saying that, actually, and me having to look it up and remember myself that we started on Duet at the start of August – which is two and a half months ago – makes me feel better about what I’m able to achieve in such short amounts of time. That soundtrack really did come pretty quickly, I guess.

How long do you think it took you to write it and commit it to tape?
A lot of the really strongest themes in the soundtrack – like the guts of it – was done in one day, essentially. So we met for a coffee at their studio on Collingwood, which is just down the road from my house, and we were assessing each other to figure out if we’re going to be a good fit. And I’d seen the game because I went to the PAX game conference in Melbourne just before that. And going to PAX was inspired by me literally waking up one day and going, “Games. I love games! Why haven’t I ever thought of investigating that?” I ended up at the conference and then I ended up having coffee with the Kumobius dudes.

We talked about music. They said that they liked Aphex Twin. I said, “Cool, OK.” I left saying, “OK. I’ll come up with a couple of ideas and I’ll send them to you, and we’ll just take it up from there. We’ll see if it’s going to be a good fit and work it out.” The next day I put some gameplay footage on the screen in my studio and by the end of the day I was done. [Laughs] I sent it to them, “Hey, those ideas I was gonna send you: actually, it’s the finished soundtrack and maybe you’ll like it.” And they did like it, which was great. It was one of those tense moments where you really hope that they love it because I loved it and I can’t go there again.

In what sense?
I’m not sure I could have that inspiration to do a second day on another option. I was really attached to it once I had done it. But from there I had enough time to develop it a bit further as they kept developing the game and the game grew in length. What I’d worked on had to get a bit longer – changes from five tracks to nine – I got a couple of collaborators involved. I had a bit of time to push all of the musical ideas a little bit further. It did come together quite quickly but there is something really healthy about just doing something and finishing it and getting it out in a very quick way. Because some of the other projects that I’ve been working on since being back from tour, they’re tracks or little proto albums – little projects that in one form or another I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years.

“Video game soundtracks [make for] a really interesting alternative music history.”

Did the guys know of you at all before you met them at PAX? Did they know of your work at all?
I don’t think so. We got introduced through a mutual friend. Then I sent them some Bandcamp and Soundcloud links; they had a bit of a listen through, and they really dug it. [Laughs] They seemed to be into it, though, and they really dug [2010’s] Noiseworks, actually. Before recently I hadn’t been much of a student of video game soundtracks and I’m still sort of sussing my way through it. It’s a really interesting alternative music history. But as soon as I met those guys, they were talking about those references. They were like, “Oh yeah, track five from Noiseworks. That’s obviously taking cues from the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 soundtrack.” They were just reminiscing about random Japanese game-music composers.

I was like, “This is cool. Why haven’t I ever really tried to get my music out to gamers before?” Because it actually makes a lot of sense. There is a chiptune-y feel about some of the Faux Pas stuff.

How did you have to approach this differently to your other work? To me, there seems to be two or three motifs that run throughout the album, or at least very slowly blend from one into the next. Was there a pretty different way of working on this?
Yes and no. I think I’ve never really worked on an album knowing that I wanted to have recurring ideas. I restricted the entire soundtrack. I work primarily or almost completely ‘inside the box’, as they say – inside the computer. So it’s all about sessions and projects and stuff. I have never tried to write a whole album inside one project but that’s what I did for Duet. So instead of having different files for different projects that I pull out for different tracks, I would just extend this one session to get bigger and bigger, which forced me to use a lot of the same instruments and sounds and repeat ideas, just in order to not have a session that got ridiculously out of control.

It’s a really good restriction. I actually had a restricted palette of sounds. I was really conscious about not going crazy. Not going like: “Oh, now we’re at this track! Oh, I’ll pull in this completely random sound that hasn’t appeared before!”

In that sense, was there much discussion with Tom [Greenaway, of Kumobius] and the other guys? Was there much direction?
No, they just sorted of trusted me to get the vibe right. They pointed me to couple of Faux Pas tracks that they liked. I think I suggested a couple of tracks that I thought were sort of in the right vibe. There’s a track on the Faux Pas compilation Lostworks called ‘Maximums’, which is an eight-minute electronic music journey which is quite moody and dark at points but has lighter moments. They dug that, but their main reference was an Aphex Twin track from Selected Ambient Works called ‘Xtal’, I think. That was their vague reference point, but I think they trusted me to go from there. The fact that the game had such a simple aesthetic meant that there was so much space for me to go anywhere with it.

You’ve talked for the last year or two about doing more work with vocalists and creating more ‘songs’, so to speak. You had the Telling project earlier in 2013, which was a more song-based thing. How are you going with your own creativity? Do you still have that appetite to work with vocalists, or did doing Duet feed into an appetite to strip things back again or make you realise that you really enjoy working on your own?
It’s a good question. It’s probably something that I should sit down and have a proper think about – this is like a therapy session now. [Laughs] It was a real relief to just sit down and make electronic music, which is what I have been doing with Faux Pas for a while now. In some ways it is kind of a comfort zone to me. I’m really excited about working on vocal tracks and trying to write songs that are bit more in line with the music that I listen to. Because I don’t tend to primarily listen to a lot of electronic music or abstract music anymore. I have become a bit more interested in things that are more in a pop line, I guess. It’s going back to my childhood. I grew up listening to ’80s pop music. The records that have inspired me in the last few years are really smart vocal pop records. Those are the kinds of records that I have aspired to make when I sit down and dream about the record that I would have loved to have been a part of – it’s usually these smart and interesting vocal pop records.

That maybe goes back to me mentally canning Faux Pas as this idea. Faux Pas never got to that world. And I’ve been doing that with a few different collaborators and starting to write songs and send things back and forth. But it’s such a long journey, particularly because in some ways I’m learning a lot on the go. I’m learning a lot about songcraft and songwriting, and also on a technical level how to mix organic instruments and vocals – things that I have not dealt with in a serious way before. There’s a lot for me to learn. In a way it’s sort of a relief to go, ‘I’m just gonna go back into that place with Duet and just try to make some electronic music.’ [Laughs] And to sit down for a day and it just comes out, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I know how to do it.’ And I will keep doing it – I’ll keep finding ways to do projects where that is appropriate. On the other hand, I’ll keep developing these other projects that are maybe a bit wider or broader musically.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The Aldous Massie artwork is terrific. To me it captures the emotion and wonder in your music. Is that what he does for you? Does he turn up with a picture and you’re just like, “Yes, this represents what I was reaching for.”
Yeah, definitely. I love his work. I first found Aldous when I was looking for artwork for the remixes compilation of Faux Pas from last year. I just found his website through a friend of a friend maybe, or possibly even just random Googling. I just felt like the imagery really fit with a lot of what Faux Pas was about. And then I was really keen to work with him again on this, which was cool. [We] actually commissioned him to make something based around the game, which was nice to be able to do, as opposed to licensing a previous work.

It taps into these ideas of childhood and science fiction, and using your imagination to create a picture out of something very simple.
Yeah, I did like that about the art. The guys from the game really dug the art too. I’m not sure if they were surprised by it or what. In their development of Duet, at certain points they did flirt with the idea of making the visual aesthetic more stylised instead of there being just a red and a blue dot rotating around these 2-D blocks. They did flirt with the idea of having two spacemen in little capsules that are flying around these obstacles – asteroids or something. Kumobius have released games with much more complicated graphic ideas than Duet in the past. But here they made a conscious decision to maintain that abstract idea. I thought the artwork for the soundtrack was a good opportunity to explore one of those ideas.

It reminds me of the Atari 2600 box art, I guess.
Oh yeah, totally!

You know what I mean? The box art for the Atari 2600 was always amazing.
Yeah, some amazing dragon is holding a princess while breathing fire on a castle, but when you play the game it’s like a pink block that falls into a red circle or something. [Laughs]

“It can be difficult to get momentum, especially if you are trying to do a lot of things at once.”

So, what's next?
Well, back to doing what I’ve been doing all year. Just juggling 10 different things at once and figuring what the right path is, or just following all the paths at once. I would love to do another game. Apart from that, just trying to write more music and trying to write more stuff with different collaborators. This last year, coming back from the tour, I’m really conscious that I’ve had to start again a little bit and that means there is a gestation period for anything creative that you want to do in your life. It can be quite difficult to get a bit of momentum, especially if you are trying to do a lot of different things at once. So this year has really been about me getting a run-up and hopefully a lot of it starts to come together in the next 12 months and gets released so it feels like I’m making a lot of music. [Laughs] Finding ways to actually pull it together and release it in the right way takes time as well as the actual development of the music.

Are you back presenting on Triple R?
Yeah. Just on and off. I just sort of do fill-ins there, which is great. That’s been really good for me just to be involved, because they are like my family – Triple R. As long as they keep asking me to come back and do fill-ins whenever, I’ll keep doing it. That’s a fun place to be.

Are you happy with where you are creatively? Are you content?
It felt really good to put the Duet soundtrack out. So I think I’ve realised that I’m getting to the point now where I need to start getting things out there. I’m happy with the direction in which my music is going in, but it’s always been important for me to share it with people. That’s always been part of my process. Some people say, “I will be happy to just sit in my room and play guitar and not show anyone any of the stuff I do.” I’ve never been that guy. [Laughs] I have always been the guy that’s uploading a new demo to Soundcloud every week or every couple of weeks. I don’t really do so much of that anymore and I’ve realised that putting the soundtrack out there that it’s pretty important to a) finish things, and b) share them.

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‘Duet OST’ is out now as a $5 download. You can follow Shiel’s work on Soundcloud.