Emil Amos has been making music for over twenty years. As he was stopping in Montreal for a gig with his one-man project Holy Sons, Beatnik sat down to chat with Emil about coming down from a breathtaking performance, taking time—serious time—to complete a song, and his slightly odd place in the music industry.

The hunch that an interview will turn out to be interesting usually makes its itself known early on. As Beatnik and Emil Amos cross the street from Sala Rossa, the venue where his Holy Sons outfit performed at Pop Montreal, Emil’s lamenting of the performance—which was far from bad, we’ll have you know—suggests that our visit to his hotel room will be an interesting one.

“You can’t do that twice in a row,” Emil says, remembering his band’s “best ever” gig in Toronto the night before. “You show up the next night and it just can’t happen, mathematically. So you show up the next night thinking ‘I wish they could have been there to see that.’”

Thankfully, Emil’s disappointment has not made him less talkative.

Instead, the cause of my worries as we enter the double room Emil is sharing with his band member Ben Nugent—who, as we enter, is almost naked and almost showering—is how quickly we’ll be able to get the conversation underway. “He’s doing a spray-on tan procedure,” Emil tells us. “Would you guys take a couple of pictures of us like this? How much funnier could it be?”

Eventually, we sit down to chat. Doing that with someone who has spent over twenty years recording music—aside from the one-man project Holy Sons, Emil forms one half of Om and is Grails’ drummer—and longer deliberating over why he’s doing so… is daunting. In absence of a more obvious starting point, we begin at Emil’s creative process. This man spends years—calendar years—completing songs.

When it comes to song-making, is perfectionism only a virtue?

“Well… let’s see. I think that in some deeply ancient, philosophical way, there’s a Platonic idea of a song, or something, being realized. At some point, it’s about your ego wanting you to be in control of it, and then at another point, it’s just it wanting itself to be real. And I think that when you’re working on something and you give yourself to it totally fully, completely resign yourself to it, you’ll go to the furthest place. A place that destroys your body, a place that destroys your life… but the artist wants that thing; they want to hear it happen, or something.

“Every artist has their own obsession with sharing the exact colour that represents the damage that has been done to them. You want to exact a sort of revenge on people that have fucked with you, or you want to honour the sorts of rare beauty that you’ve experienced. You’re sort of salvaging a very rare experience and you’re trying to put it on the canvas… fast, you know. If it doesn’t work, you try again, and again; a real artist tries for years and years. Throughout the process, you’re dealing with this idea that the experience can still be encapsulated.”

More than any of his projects, Holy Sons is the most candid expression of Emil’s self and creative process. Anything from his bafflement at conformity, exclusion from whatever is the real world (involuntary or otherwise) or belief in himself or lack thereof is contained in the music. ‘Reckless Liberation’ from Survivalist Tales—Emil’s third album as Holy Sons, released last week—tells a tale of his emotional frailties, and how explicitly he is exposed through his music.

Aside from being carefully crafted music, Emil’s tracks are the end product of treating any given topic to the point of exhaustion—even repulsion, he tells us. His urge to extrapolate all impressions from one moment, one idea, has grown stronger with time. It’s an approach that requires a certain distance, figurative and literal, to the initial moment of inspiration.

“I think when you’re young, you want to take as many drugs as possible, shatter yourself and just record it. You want everything to be immediate. And then as you get older, the poet sensibility wants to kind of file it down to what really means something, what can communicate really directly and bring the concepts into a tighter form. You don’t just want to throw a bunch of crap out there.

“On the one hand, the poet instinct is trying to only record every raw experience you’re going through. Morally, you’re throwing everything out the window; you just want to know what you’re capable of. You feel like you don’t know yourself but you’re going to find some sort of truth by abandoning everything anyone has every told you. At some point, distancing yourself—scientifically and philosophically—serves a massive purpose, one that has a different meaning for everyone.”

And what does it mean to you?

“In my songwriting, I believe in a science of art. I believe there is something that makes the brain react in certain ways and I’m trying to control the mind of the listener in some degree… If you don’t hold yourself to that kind of scientific standard, then you’re basically just throwing a bunch of psychic bullshit on the world and the world has so much of it, and is not bettered by it. So you might as well try to confine the shit that you’ve gone through into some form of ‘I found this out’. There is some form of decision made on this, instead of just ‘oh, I woke up, another day, here’s a piece of art,’ you know?”

Emil’s perfectionist work ethic stands contrary to the music industry that he (knowingly) forms a part of. During our conversation, he bemoans the fixation on songs as end products in commercial music, saying he would much rather listen to someone who has “cut out all the fat” and landed at real expression.

To Emil, things began going haywire around the time riding a skateboard became a means of obtaining social acceptance (“everything’s fucked up after that!” he informs us), and today, he sees a commodified culture that is as astonishing as it is revolting.

“[E]verything’s been done and people are kind of living in a time where clean and dirty sounds are being exploited to the fullest extent. You can’t feel through the surface if a person is being upfront with you or if they’re fucking with you. It seemed like, in 1990, you could tell. But things started to change right after that. I remember people starting to imitate insanity. At one point, insanity was an outsider’s genre… ‘oh, that record. That crazy guy.’ After 1990, culture generally began to turn back. The ’50′s, ’60′s, ’70′s, ’80′s all have their own identity. The 1990′s was the first decade where I felt like… ‘what’s that?’ 2000′s—what the fuck is that? There are small, instinctual, natural movements but within six months they’ll be in a high fashion magazine being sold right back to you—and you’re not going to buy the penny loafers that you wore because you were poor for $1000 from a high fashion magazine!”

The world of recycled fads has inevitably absorbed Emil’s music too. Grails have released a handful of celebrated albums, while Om, the band he joined in 2008, have recorded two records with Emil on the drums. Critical acclaim and a general hip-factor have resulted in sales that have sustained the projects. Regardless of the original intention Holy Sons, Grails and Om make music that is in, but Emil insists that there was no such initial intention, and that his work cannot fully be absorbed by commercial forces.

“I guess I have always felt I was doomed. I don’t see that changing. The Holy Sons project—the attempt to document yourself and explain yourself in the rawest form—I don’t see that rising into some commodified movement. I don’t think that’s possible, because society can’t absorb it, it can’t assimilate something where someone is actually being real. They will buy the Hollywood version, they’ll make a movie out of it—they’ll make the Facebook movie, they’ll make A Beautiful Mind—but nobody will pay attention to the real person that A Beautiful Mind was about. That’ll never end.”

Doesn’t that leave you be in a way, knowing that you will remain outside of the process you’re describing?

“Yes. It’s kind of a perverse satisfaction, realizing a truth about the world. You’re sitting in your room at night, reading a book by Dostoyevsky or something, and you realize: everything is fucked. You read it, and it’s like you’re getting high. Maybe there is an ego-inflation in that. There’s some sort of weird satisfaction in knowing that everything is an apocalypse slowly happening.”

The relentless rebellion of the punk scene lives on in Emil’s music, particularly in his approach to the creative process. Obscurity is a virtue, and personal expression without compromise the goal.

Nonetheless, some things have changed. Emil admits to having become more accustomed to the process of packaging his music and treating it like something that could, potentially, bring home the bacon (“it would be crazy if I didn’t learn about the nature of selling things to people,” he says). And unfitting as it may sound, he has made a material leap as well.

The man behind the Holy Sons, who used to make music by cutting and pasting cassette tapes in his bedroom (“I wanted cassettes that were just pieces of shit… the autographed, triple-thick, picture LP”), now uses a computer to put together his songs. It almost seems like too convenient a device for his expression; that resorting to a laptop would, in itself, be an act of conformity. But Emil insists that his music would be no different without the help of fancy technology.

“The computer didn’t change anything, but it gave me more control. So I’m looking from even further overhead, being able to change things after the fact. In the old days, you got really angry trying to get that one take. Now, I don’t have to get that one take. And I really, really appreciate that. I don’t think humanity, in music, has to be that one take. I kind of find that a disturbingly simple idea that a person would have to play, in one take, a two-and-a-half-minute pop song. I don’t think people care about how something’s recorded.

“If someone’s trying to communicate to you by controlling a piece of art, then let them control it, let them say what they mean. Why shouldn’t they say what they mean? Why should they be confined to a certain palette? I’ve always found that really unintelligent, people saying, ‘oh… you ought to do this, you ought to do that,’ it’s like… that’s what we’re trying not to do. Just do whatever you want to do. It’s not like I’m trying to come out on stage with trampolines and ballet outfits, lighting my head on fire; I’m not trying to change the nature of the performance, I’m trying to get down to what I meant in the first place.”

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Album: Survivalist Tales (out now—buy it here)

Holy Sons website, MySpace