A Chat with Tim Mechling (24.10.2022)

OSR: Was there a moment or experience that led you to know you wanted to make music?

Mechling: I never played video games as a kid, but I watched my brother all the time. Soundtracks for games and movies became an obsession. That led to super-pretentious rock albums, like Pink Floyd’s 70s stuff and King Crimson. To me, concept albums were (and are) my favourite media on earth, and I wanted to make them.

OSR: Your album The Decline of the Flies and the Rise of Spiders is a freak-folk album that brings death and destruction with a Gothic touch. What inspired this collection?

Mechling: A lot of my previous releases were more frivolous and silly. My elevator pitch for it was “Vonnegut rock” for its absurdity and attempts at wit. My struggles with bipolar disorder led me to some serious, near-catatonic depressions that often lasted months at a time. I wasn’t writing goofy stuff then.

The Decline of the Flies and the Rise of Spiders is a distillation of these depressive episodes, mixed states, psychosis, rage and drunkenness that comes with unmedicated bipolar disorder.

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OSR: The album has a little bit of everything, with spoken-word passages, sermons, eerie and ambient tones and rather epic guitar solos. With such a diverse offering, what was your creative process?

Mechling: I think I get bored easily. Albums where every song sounds roughly the same comes off as lazy to me and I can’t make it through an album like that. When I listen to an album, I want it to be full of surprises, and to feel like I’m in over my head.

My love of spoken word comes from Tom Waits and Stephen Jesse Bernstein, mixed with my failed attempt at being a short fiction author. For tracks like that, you need a lot of atmosphere to carry the performance. Creating soundscapes made the little hairs on my arms stand up, which was an unexpected surprise.

As for epic guitar solos, who doesn’t dig an over-the-top freakout on six strings? I think it’s missing from a lot of today’s music, even in the rock genre! I’m not a technical guitarist at all, like those metal guys or those freaks in prog or math rock. The only trick in my bag is bending notes and cranking a little tube amp til the neighbours call the cops.

OSR: While the album includes touches from various genres, is there one style that you are particularly fond of?

Mechling: Good question. I think the best albums have several genres cooked in there. Ween’s Shinola Volume I, the later Beatles albums, Beck’s experimental early stuff, Pink Floyd’s sprawling albums between Syd Barrett and Dark Side of the Moon are all examples of genre-hopping, mind-blowing music.

I think the genre I’m most fond of is rock and roll, but it’s such a huge umbrella that doesn’t mean much. What turns me on most is a super small slice of rock and roll that feels heady, cinematic, moody and just a little bit frightening. I like music that feels doomed.

OSR: The tracks of the album feature Hannah Wyatt, John Swanke and Tad Kroening. How did you connect with them?

Mechling: Tad and I go way back. I was a skinny teen with a huge jew-fro. He was a huge draw at the local coffee shop that had the best open mic of all time. He dressed like a James Joyce novel. He drank like one, too. We were destined to collaborate. He murdered that preacher sermon track with a 0.4 blood alcohol level. That’s a feat, even among drunks.

John Swanke and I met through this bizarre vape-juice-producing sweatshop job in Bellingham. We wore lab coats and squeezed vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol into little tubes and we couldn’t use the bathroom. Everyone that worked there was either a criminal, a substance abuser or an insanely talented musician. Swanke was the latter.

The guy is a gear freak, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Running a guitar through three amps with differing analogue tremolos and sitting in the centre of the room like a spirit in a seance. I had to pull him into the climax of “Sebastian & Kip” to add an extra bit of mind-melting chaos.

Hannah Wyatt is my gal. She’s been a fan of my music across the nation for like five years and she relocated here. Now we share this shabby little house in Washington and we lend each other demented little tracks.

OSR: What was the biggest challenge you faced when creating this album?

Mechling: I’ve never made an album that was a true cohesive piece. It was always a collection of songs because I didn’t have the gear or the know-how to record my own music. It drove me nuts to have my music in other people’s hands and this is my first stab at complete creative control. It took years to accumulate enough gear to make a real album, but now that I’ve tasted self-production, I’m never going back.

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OSR: How do you feel this album compares to your previous releases?

Mechling: It’s my first real album. The others were sketches of songs I recorded with friends and my cousin. Long Live the King was slapped together because the producer that recorded my music gave preferential treatment to the other guy in the band. We laid down that album in the lethargic hours after we’d done the “real” session. I felt like a jokey afterthought.

“The Great Igor was a valiant effort with my cousin, Jordan. That’s when bipolar disorder really got on top of me. I was in a manic episode for a lot of the sessions. I went crazy towards the end of the session and what was put out was a pile of nearly-scrapped songs that never got the mix, mastering or recording the songs needed. I feel bad for my cousin since he did all the work and I went nuts and ruined everything.

The Decline of the Flies and Rise of Spiders is a cohesive whole that’s meant to be heard from start to finish. It tells a story of a life in reverse, with the album beginning with a death rattle and ending with the sounds of a sleeping baby. I don’t want to give too much away, but the album was written to be a puzzle.

OSR: While each song is wonderfully unique and tells its own tale in the body of the whole, is there one that holds a special place in your heart?

Mechling: I would say ‘Sebastian and Kip’ is my favourite track on the album. Murder ballads have always been intriguing to me, but most of the time they’re chauvinistic and detail the murder of some poor gal. Those songs get cheers for the wrong reasons.

I wanted to tell a story about the divides in America, told through the lens of a drunken pair of siamese twins that cut each other apart with a chainsaw. It’s sort of the “house divided cannot stand” quote by Lincoln rendered in grisly, horrific detail. As a murder ballad, it captures the moment of the country.

At least to me, it does.

OSR: All your albums have been self-recorded at home. Do you feel your process has become more sophisticated over time?

Mechling: That’s a huge yes. It’s been trial and error. My musician friends are always trying to convince me to go into a studio and drop a few grand, but when I listen to what they put out, it sounds like the same shiny, over-compressed drek I can’t stand to hear. I’m not opposed to recording studios, but I hate the sounds they make these days. Maybe I’ll try my hand at it sometime, but I record at home because I like the sound better.

If I were trying to “make it,” I would’ve spent all my money on the works. Recording, mixing, mastering, session stooges, promotion, blah blah blah… But I’m not trying to make it. This is a twisted hobby of mine and home-recording is most of the fun.

OSR: If people could only feel one emotion while listening to the album, what would you like that to be?

Mechling: Somewhere between wonder and disgust. I want the listener to barf out of awe or horror.

OSR: What else do you have planned for the coming months?

Mechling: I’m working on another concept album. It’s gonna start poppy and accessible, but it’s going to morph into a dystopian synth nightmare. I want it to be like a Cronenberg body-horror transformation, but auditory.

I’m pretty excited about it.

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Thanks to Tim Mechling for chatting with us! You can find more about him on his Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.