fot. Agata Hudomięt
Author & Punisher is celebrating 21 years, and Tristan Shone – engineer, composer, and vocalist – has released the project’s heaviest and most organic record to date. On the new album Nocturnal Birding, instead of cold sequences we get grit, mistakes, and raw energy: all played live. We talk about what it means to be an “industrial uncle,” why birds can inspire just as much as synthesizers, what it was like collaborating with Arca, and how volunteering at the U.S./Mexico border shaped Tristan’s work. It’s a conversation about an artist growing older, who after two decades on stage still manages to surprise. Both himself and his audience.
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Before we talk about your new record, we have to mention that Author & Punisher just turned 21. How is that even possible?
Ugh, I know. I’m getting old.
Author & Punisher can now legally drink in the US. That’s something.
When you’re 21 and in a band, you think, “No way I’ll still be doing this at 47.” But then you realize—you actually are. This never ends.
When you look back at all that time… I know it’s a big question, but what really changed? Your approach to music? You as a person? Technology? So much must have shifted.
Yeah, someone asked me something similar yesterday. I tried to answer, but I’m not sure I did it well. In some ways, now I think much more about how the music comes across. I want it to feel powerful not just to me, but to the audience too. And… the sad part is, I take it a lot more seriously now. Over time, I’ve learned what my body needs and what my gear needs on tour, so I can avoid technical problems and cut down on stress. Touring is less “fun” now, because I’m not just out there to party. It used to be all about playing super loud and getting drunk. That works for part of a tour, but then you just crash. Now I focus on mental health. I’ve never had serious issues, but I can get worn down and irritable. So I work to stay balanced. I need to show up every night and give my best, and I want the music to reflect that. It’s just maturity – keeping Author & Punisher steady through a whole tour.
When you first started out, you were this weirdo with strange, custom-built gear—something totally different and unexpected. Today, what you do is still unique, but do you feel you can still surprise people like you did back then?
Honestly, yes. There still aren’t many people bringing machines or custom controllers like mine into live shows. Sure, there’s a lot of great gear out now – the modular synth boom happened, Ableton Live keeps evolving – and lots of smart people are doing cool things. Especially guitarists. With tools like the Quad Cortex pedal, some of them are making sounds similar to what I do with my machines, with pitch bending and all kinds of tricks. I think that’s great. And I’ve got a lot of respect for those so-called metalcore nerds – bands like Animals as Leaders. Some of the more artsy, avant-garde metal folks tend to look down on metalcore, but I love the innovation those players bring. And they do it live – it’s not just backing tracks. For my own project, I’ve got a new manager and team, and she’s been a huge help. Maybe you’ve noticed we’ve been reposting old videos this past year?
Those posts blew up – they actually doubled my Instagram following. My manager pointed out that a lot of those clips were buried on YouTube and most people had never seen them. So a whole new group of listeners discovered my work that way. That’s why on this tour I’m not bringing just the stripped-down setup I usually bring to Europe to save money. I’m bringing a much more aggressive rig, with more machines – something closer to what people see at my shows in the US.
Finally!
Yeah. But it’s tough. I travel with about ten cases now. That adds around $2,000 per flight – so roughly $4,000 extra on top of the tour budget. And merch sales just aren’t as strong in Europe as they are in the US. People here are a lot more careful about what they buy.
That’s interesting.
Yeah. In the US, merch sales are crazy. If you’ve got a crowd of a hundred people, it’s like almost everyone buys a shirt. In Europe it’s less than half that. So we can’t really count on merch to cover costs.
That’s surprising. I always thought we buy a lot of merch here.
We’re capitalists over in the States – that’s what we do.
Okay, I planned to ask this later, but since we’re talking about gear: you built equipment for Arca, right? How did that even happen?
Yeah. She reached out to me in 2022 or 2023. She had a show in Los Angeles and wanted to use some of the machines I’d built earlier. Then there were shows in San Francisco and Arkansas – she rented my gear for those too. I even went on stage with her once at Primavera to perform a little. She was using my machines in her set, partly as a spectacle and partly for extra noise textures. Later she had a big show at the Armory in New York. It was more like an art installation that ran for five days, with a special setup and lighting. She asked me to build something custom for it. I made a proposal, but the budget got out of hand, so we scaled it back to gear I’d already designed. I reconfigured some pieces I’d been developing for my company, Drone Machines.
I built her these platters and throttles that worked with her CDJ decks. They were suspended from chains – a beautiful, tactile setup she could push, move around, and tweak. After that, I made another configuration for her Coachella performance this year and for her European tour, which she used for maybe two or three shows.
That’s a really interesting collaboration. I always wondered, how did she even discover your work?
She’s a total tech nerd. At heart, she’s a producer – she’s worked for people like Kanye West, FKA twigs, and others. These days she’s more of a glamorous pop star with a strong visual side, but underneath she’s still a hardcore Ableton Live wizard. She knows how to tweak every little detail. Earlier in her career, she was closer to someone like Aphex Twin -that’s really her background. And she’s always been drawn to artists who mix music and technology in unusual ways. Have you seen those photos of her wearing robotic exoskeleton legs that look like hooves? She’s constantly searching the internet for people who build weird, innovative stuff.
Nocturnal Birding is a great album, but I think it’s your heaviest so far.
Honestly, I always feel like the latest record is the heaviest one while I’m making it. But when you look back, you realize each album is heavy in its own way. Beastland was raw and gritty – maybe because Kurt from Converge mixed it. Krüller also felt heavy, but it had this shoegaze, atmospheric, synth-based side, even though the tones themselves were heavy. On the Krüller tour – we played something like 170 shows – Doug and I realized that all those atmospheric and sequenced parts, some of them created by other artists, were holding us back live. We felt like we were in straitjackets, stuck to a strict framework. Eventually we started playing older songs that were looser – just guitar, me playing and singing – where we could really riff off each other. That felt raw and incredibly heavy.
So for Nocturnal Birding we flipped the approach. I started everything on guitar. I’d sit down, write a riff, record it, and then layer my sounds on top in the studio. Doug was right there, bouncing ideas with me – he’d rewrite guitar parts, I’d tweak them, and so on. I deliberately avoided bringing in synth collaborators, which I usually do, because that would mean more sequenced material to reproduce live.
You know the whole EBM trend right now? Tons of bands sound like New Order or Boy Harsher. I like Boy Harsher, but a lot of acts are basically one person pressing play on some mystery boxes while the other sings, and they both dance around looking sexy. And it’s exactly the same every night. To me, that’s not industrial. I want it to feel alive. So we went in the opposite direction. Everything had to be live. We wanted mistakes, messiness, dirt – no sequences. When we play these songs, you’re hearing a truly live industrial performance. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy uncle saying, “Back in my day, kids actually played live…” but yeah, that whole approach is kind of disappointing to me.
Oh my god! Do you feel like an industrial uncle now?
I’m starting to. Like a grumpy uncle saying, “Back in my day…” But the truth is, I really love DJ culture. When I see someone like Mala or Arca mixing live on the decks, I totally respect that. But if you’re going to call something a live show, then it should actually be live. No pretending. What bugs me is when someone stands there hitting drum pads, and in the mix they’ve muted the snare so they can “play” it live. Then they add it back in and quantize it so it sounds perfect every time. And I’m just like – why? Just leave the snare in the mix. Nobody needs to see you fake it. It’s so precise that it never sounds bad, and that’s exactly what bothers me. I guess I really am that grumpy uncle.
(laughs) You should do an industrial stand-up tour.
Yeah, nobody wants to see that.
So at what point in your life did you suddenly think: birds?
Pretty recently. During the pandemic I started hiking a lot. Somewhere along the way I found this app called Merlin – you know it? It identifies birds. I used to listen to music on my phone while running or hiking, but then I thought: “Why am I doing this? I should just listen to what’s around me.” So I stopped with the music and just listened. It slowed me down, made me more aware, and honestly it really helped with my anxiety.
For the first time I noticed birds – their presence, their songs. They’re everywhere. And not only are they beautiful, but at different times of day it almost feels like they’re talking to you. Some of those sounds are surprisingly industrial and moving. The thrush call, for example, inspired the chord progression in my track “Thrush.” It’s like a perfect song on its own. “Rook” has this really industrial tone too, and I tried to capture that. I had even more bird-inspired ideas that didn’t make it onto the album because they felt too glitchy. But I’m sure producers like Squarepusher or Aphex Twin have pulled inspiration from birdsong as well.
That’s really interesting. I’ve had a similar feeling lately. I come from a small mountain town, and sometimes when my mom calls me the birds are so loud I can barely hear her. I only started to notice this about a year ago. Maybe at some point in life you just become more aware of it.
I think so. I used to spend all my time worrying about what’s next: what I need to do today, what I’m behind on. And then you realize you’ve lived your whole life like that and never actually enjoyed the moment. You never just sat with your feelings. I love drinking – beer, wine – but drinking can easily become part of that same cycle. You end up looking forward to the drink instead of enjoying the moment you’re already in. These days I actually like mornings more than late nights. Sometimes I’ll have two beers and think about a third, but then I realize, “If I do, I’ll ruin tomorrow morning.” And mornings are what I really value now. Birds help with that. They keep me grounded. When I just sit and listen to them, my anxiety fades for a while.
I also read that this album was influenced by your work with Border Angels. Can you tell me more about what this organization actually does?
There’s another group called Ajo Samaritans, from a small town in Arizona. Like Border Angels, they focus on leaving water for migrants. Along the U.S./Mexico border – from the Pacific all the way to Texas – people cross either over the fence or through stretches without a wall. Back in the 1990s the border was militarized under a policy called “prevention by deterrence.” The idea was to build walls at the easier crossing points so people would be forced into extremely dangerous terrain.
If you’ve ever been to the American Southwest, you know it’s vast desert. Even European tourists hiking in Utah sometimes die because they don’t realize how remote it is. They run out of water or gas, and nobody comes. Migrants face the same conditions, often walking for days. In the mountains east of San Diego, where we work, thousands of people cross hidden trails every day. Many spend five days out there, carrying some water but never enough. Sometimes they rely on guides – called coyotes or guías – who are often tied to Mexican cartels. People pay for this service but only get a limited amount of water. Many die along the way.
The U.S. Border Patrol has cameras everywhere and knows where crossings happen, but they let people hike for days to make the journey harder. They could just pick them up, but they don’t. So we go out and leave crates of water in key areas. In San Diego there are about three main groups doing this work: Borderlands Relief Collective, Al Otro Lado, and Border Angels. I work with Border Angels and sometimes join Borderlands Relief Collective as well. We drop water, Gatorade, medical supplies, canned food. We also create memorials for those who have died—you might have seen photos I posted of wooden crosses.
Last September, during a heatwave, nine people died in just one week in the area where we operate. And this is only about half an hour from downtown San Diego. From the mountain tops you can literally see the city and housing complexes. Nobody should be dying there. Authorities could easily set up aid stations, but they don’t. They want migrants to tell their families, “Don’t come , it’s too hard.” All of this happens because there’s no effective immigration process for people seeking asylum or refugee status – whether they’re fleeing climate change, cartel violence, or gang violence. And a lot of these problems are tied to U.S. interference in Central and South America. People try to come here, and we don’t let them in. It’s totally fucked up.
I remember the last time we talked, it was the anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, and we discussed how messed up things were in the U.S. And here we are.
Yeah, it’s really bad. Things feel very tense right now. I just got my COVID vaccination, but in most states you can’t even get vaccinated unless you’re 65 or older or have a health condition. I’m in California, which is more progressive, so here on the West Coast you can still get it. But across the country, they’re scaling it back a lot. They’ve even been canceling late-night shows with comedians.
It’s fucking crazy. At some point there’s going to have to be a huge public outcry, maybe even a strike. In many cities there are already soldiers on the streets with guns—something most of us have never seen in our lifetime.
For a long time Author & Punisher was entirely your project, and now you’ve said that you and Doug wrote this new album together. Was it hard for you to give someone else that kind of space?
When we started writing, we were already on the same page about where we wanted to go. Doug knew I’d been running Author & Punisher for 20 years, so naturally I would start the songs and make the big decisions. But I also gave him a lot of freedom to write and bring his own style – composing leads, shaping the sound. It was a bit like what Phil Sgrosso did on the last album, but Doug really added something unique. He brought in almost a noise-rock element – closer to Killing Joke – rather than that super-tight, Fear Factory–style approach. That was great, because when I wrote riffs, they were usually just sketches. He would play them differently or even change them completely.
I tend to write like Godflesh – super tight, sticking to the lower three strings. Doug immediately added all kinds of melody. That was exciting, because otherwise I probably would have filled that space with synths I couldn’t even play live. His approach made the record sound much more alive. On stage it makes a big difference. Now guitar is about half of the whole sound. My own tone is deeper, more like a bass player. With Doug riffing, I don’t have to fill the entire spectrum. I can weave my basslines in and out of what he’s doing, which I’ve never done before.
There’s a lot more integration now. We really sound like a full band. I’ve been rehearsing and already have six of the eight songs from the record ready. Going back to older material, like Krüller, it feels more mechanical. It still works, but the new songs are so much rawer and more alive. I love it. Playing them is a lot of fun.
The video for “Thrush” has this medieval vibe. Where did that come from?
I found Lucy, the artist, because I think we were at Roadburn the same year, maybe 2016. She messaged me when I put out a video last year, and I started following her tattoo work. She’s also a huge Elden Ring fan. I play a lot of Elden Ring and Dark Souls myself, and I loved that aesthetic. Since the album already had this bird theme, I thought it would be cool to add visuals with a similar Elden Ring vibe.
We started chatting and she sent over sketches. In the end, we went in a different direction for the album cover, it wasn’t hand-drawn or tattoo-style, but our collaboration had already begun. The image of a hand in knight’s armor holding a bird was her idea. She even went to a bird sanctuary to get inspired.
I told her, “Just make a video in your own interpretation. Read the lyrics and go from there.” My lyrics are more about Indigenous, Native American views of birds and the destruction of nature in certain areas, but she took it in her own direction. Living in the French countryside, she created something that mixed medieval, Elden Ring fantasy with real life. Sometimes when I’m hiking, I even feel like I’m in a video game – like I see something glowing, a special item, and think, “I need to go pick that up.” Super nerdy, I know.