Author: Max Brzezinski
If you’d like us to send you/your group an Artist Questionnaire, message ncmusic@dncr.nc.gov
North Carolina duo Tescon Pol make experimental synth music: as their Bandcamp profile succinctly puts it, “Polyrhythmic pop experiments & dense, digital psychedelia.” Their 2024 record THE LONGER MORROW is an alternately bracing and soothing listening, as it cuts drifting kosmiche with colder incursions of digital sound.
Tescon Pol’s answers to our questions are incisive and particular, fitting for a group that believe (as they say in the interview) that “[b]eing understood is probably more important than being liked.”
In addition to filling out The Come Hear NC Artist Questionnaire, Tescon Pol’s vocalist/rhythmist Mic Finger was kind enough to answer our call for a guest playlist. It’s three hours of electronic goodness, featuring many of North Carolina’s most interesting synth-based outfits. Check it out: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4JkgDKqKjIw9q5tc3rVQSW?si=aS0E5WYySrm7jCGwOlODyA
Capsule summary-style, describe your band(s) (its members, home, history)
Ariel Johannessen (synths) & Mic Finger (rhythm patterns, voice).
Mic: We started experimenting together in the fall of 2011 and evolved into a cohesive project over the following year.
How long have you been in North Carolina, and what's your relationship with the state?
Ariel: I’ve been in Durham since I was three after moving from Chicago.
Mic: I grew up just west of Winston-Salem and have lived in North Carolina my entire life (apart from a 1.5-year stint in Belarus and photography internships in Montréal & Manhattan)
What North Carolina artists do you listen to most?
Mic: There are a lot. A number of our favorites have moved away over the years, sadly. Latchwork (from the western reaches of the state) is one of my favorite projects, on a national level, at the moment. Brandon Juhans, Streak of Tigers, away msg, Clouds Without Water, ultrabillions, and Action Group are a few local (or intermittently local) favorites. It’s almost better not to mention any at all because of how many are inevitably going to be left out.
Ariel: Spookstina, subterrene, Secret Boyfriend, countless others.
Earliest North Carolina memories?
Ariel: Probably the first time I went to Ocracoke when I was five. There was one paved road, very isolated and beautiful. The Land of Oz at Beech Mountain made a strong impression.
Mic: All of my earliest memories are based in North Carolina. One that comes to mind is tobogganing in the snow with neighborhood friends behind my childhood home a few months before I turned three. We have a beautiful state, and I miss being closer to the mountains.
Has North Carolina been a good place to be a musician?
Mic: We might not have the best insight into that. Because what we’re doing is admittedly a bit “weird,” we understand that there are a lot of venues and scenarios that wouldn’t be a good fit for us. The Triangle’s electronic and “experimental” music scenes are vibrant, but we routinely lose some of our most interesting acts to other states and larger cities, which is probably due to a combination of work-related, school-related, and scene-related factors.
Ariel: The fact that Nightlight in Chapel Hill is currently on hiatus comes as a blow to the outsider music community.
What would make it better?
Mic: Fewer acts moving away. Perhaps less cliquishness.
Ariel: More venues that are open to experimental and / or new styles.
What is the musical community around you like?
Ariel: Pretty friendly.
What are the important shared sensibilities between you and your collaborators? Divergences?
Ariel: Tastes. Openness to pushing the envelope. An ability to devise new material together quickly and organically.
When did you know you wanted to be a musician?
Mic: I was exiting adolescence, probably.
Ariel: I was probably five. I enjoyed beating on chairs, especially, and other cool-sounding objects.
Were your inclinations towards music encouraged?
Ariel: They weren’t discouraged.
Mic: I was a bit older, so encouragement came mainly in the form of a vocal effects processor or drum machine I’d ask for at Christmas. Not discouraged.
Do you have a good ear?
Ariel: Mic probably has a better ear than I do. For notes, correct pitch, etc.
Technique, feeling, and concept — what's the relation to you as a musician? As a listener?
Mic: Taste is much more important than talent. Technique is, maybe, a bit like talent but with less loaded connotations. Concept and feeling are both probably more analogous to taste, and they’re both more important to us. You need enough technique to somewhat efficiently convey what you have in mind or to discover something that you can wrap your head around and work with, but we’re more concerned with contextualizing and conceptualizing.
What would your fans be surprised you love to listen to?
Ariel: Depending on your perspective, it’s probably not surprising that I love dub reggae and classical Indian music.
Mic: I don’t know that it’s surprising, but people might not expect that Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are likely my most important vocal influences. They were crucial, in my mid-20s, to my retraining myself not to sing with a British accent as a result of having previously spent so much time singing along to Gary Numan, etc. Maybe it’s more surprising but less relevant that I have a deep and unironic love for Christmas classics (early pop, carols, hymns – all of the good stuff and only the good stuff).
Are there misconceptions about you and/or your music you'd like to correct?
Mic: I don’t think that Ariel feels as strongly about this as I do, but it’s never our intention to make music that’s “dark” or foreboding. We’re not interested in conveying anything overtly pessimistic or grim. There’s a quasi-moratorium on acknowledging mortality in the lyrics, for example. I bristle a bit at the term “goth.” Aesthetically, I’m much more “EPCOT” than I am “goth.” I think that’s true of our music as well, but, as much as we might strive for utopia, life is densely populated by disappointments; It’s not inappropriate for music to reflect this. Outside of creative expression, I intentionally focus on gratitude and seem to be somewhat wired for optimism, but I do spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to articulate what’s getting under my skin. It’s possibly because I’m more deliberate in externalizing my concerns (as opposed to externalizing, say, joy) that the thoughts and phrases which strike me as more compelling or conducive to lyrics are probably not my happiest ones. As something of an idealist, I have a pretty robust capacity for dissatisfaction with life’s obvious imperfections (many of which seem readily avoidable), and there is therapeutic potential for examining these imperfections. And even unhappy observations can become entertaining when that examination is done through establishing unexpected parallels (between, for instance, the stinging cells of cnidarians and the cognitive dissonance precipitated by gaslighting). It also occurs to me that what might come off as ominous to many listeners (a preponderance of minor chords, etc.), often register more as suggestions of momentum or determination for me.
Do you view your music as self-expression? Or is it more abstract? Or both?
Mic: It’s almost always concretely expressive, but the two of us may be expressing different thoughts or feelings. We sometimes discuss that or have something like “prompts” for one another, but we’re usually each contributing our own initial feelings and subsequent associations into to any given track without making sure that we’re on the same page. It tends to work.
How has your work changed over time?
Ariel: Earlier, there was a lot more improv.
Mic: I would say that we’ve gotten a bit more overtly song-based. There are still freeform pieces, but the scale has tipped toward song.
Is there a red thread that connects your earliest work to your most recent?
Ariel: Rhythmically and texturally, we established our way of working very early on.
Does humor have a place in your music?
Mic: Absurdism in the traditions of Kafka, Beckett, Cronenberg. Carmen Miranda-inspired hats are intermittently part of our stage attire.
Ariel: We have buttered scones for tea.
23. Does spirituality?
Mic: My overarching aesthetic sensibility is very secular. I’m comfortably spiritual, but that doesn’t fit comfortably into my art.
Is your music political?
Mic: Yes, but rarely in an outwardly identifiable / significant way. Check out “skyypixels” from The Longer Morrow for an exception.
Do you care about gear?
Mic: We make technology-dependent music. We don’t acquire new hardware or software often (it’s roughly the same setup for the past ten years), but what we’re using is pivotal to Tescon Pol’s identity.
Ariel: I’m more interested in the composition than the gear. Gear is the conduit. it’s the means.
Do you care about music critics and what they write?
Mic: Being understood is probably more important than being liked. I always want to feel that we’ve been somewhat successful in conveying whatever we’ve attempted to.
Ariel: There’s not really an attempt to suggest something somber or dark. For me, it’s just that chords and notes suggest other chords and notes, and I often have a feeling that minor chords are more initially engaging. We go from there.
What makes good music? Bad music? What do you love in a great song, hate in a bad one, and what renders you indifferent in a blah one?
Ariel: Tonal and timbral things can really perk up my ears. Unexpected structures. There is a lot of electronic music that has become almost trite, lightweight, generic, and common to the point of being threadbare.
Mic: Authenticity is very attractive, but it’s kind of difficult to identify. Or, at least, I think It’s probably easy to unfairly accuse something of being inauthentic. Anything that celebrates stupidity or cruelty or pessimism would be unattractive for me. But the boundaries between “celebration” and attempting to work through something can be difficult for a listener to discern.
Do you have your audience in mind as you write?
Mic: We care about how translatable our ideas are, so we sometimes modify what we might otherwise instinctually do in order to better get a point across.
Ariel: We might, when playing live, alter our setlist to what better fits with that show’s expectations based on the other acts and the anticipated audience.
What is the typical "workflow" for one of your songs from beginning to end?
Mic: There really isn’t a typical workflow. Some songs get fleshed out more or less completely in a single session, and we work on others for years; there are tracks from our earliest jams in 2011 that we’re routinely playing live but that we don’t yet feel are quite ready to record.
Do you theme and conceptualize projects beforehand or do you prefer spontaneous creation?
Mic: We usually have several album or EP concepts going at any given time, so our tendency is to sort any new, unaffiliated piece into whatever preexisting group it would seem to best belong. Sometimes, we’re starting from a concrete idea (words, chord progressions, a vocal melody), but we’re often kind of jamming and discovering something that we like. We remember previous rough drafts that might be compatible with new sketches, and we figure out ways that they might be combined. I often think about poetry I’ve written that could work with some new musical idea, and it finds its way there.
What's the relation between electronic and mechanical/acoustic instruments in your work?
Mic: We’re entirely electronic apart from field recordings, samples, and voice.
Are lyrics important to you? How do they relate to the music you make?
Mic: Words are very important. They’re intermittently my primary focus. Sometimes, I’m attempting to convey something specific and meaningful from the outset, but I’m often starting with a few phrases that have recently occurred to me at times when I’ve not been dedicatedly trying to write anything. I enjoy figuring out how to reconcile them with each other and then how to make that reconciliation / collision somehow tangibly or tangentially relevant to my life.
Are genre concepts meaningful to you?
Ariel: Yes and no. I really don’t like the compartmentalization because it changes all the time to the point of becoming effectively meaningless. But it’s also an unavoidable touchstone.
Hopes and schemes for 2025 and beyond?
Mic: We have an album in the hopper at our core label, Concrete Collage Records (Lyon, France) and another that’s almost finished. We have a few tracks which will be appearing on compilations courtesy of Unexplained Sounds Group (Napoli, Italy). Our recent album The Longer Morrow from Concrete Collage is available through Bandcamp both digitally and on CD. We’re also currently compiling a collection of favorite live versions from the past seven years but aren’t yet sure how it will be released.