Lee AdcockWhen you enter JD Walsh’s studio, a menagerie of colors stand out in the tiny room. Pastel mosaics adorn the right wall, and one rests on a square table like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle (all his wife’s work, he quickly points out). A flimsy whirligig of paper and wood sits under the table on a stool. On the other side, fluorescent lights blink within a diamond design, like some slick logo for a new wave band.
Back in New York, Walsh shot and edited video for various clients. But bit by bit, his eye for saturated color and pop art geometry turned to music, dialing lines and shapes into African guitar work, vibrant synths, and lyrics distilled unironically into vocoders. By 2016, his lush waveforms under the moniker Shy Layers (a nod to Adobe’s layered image editing) coalesced into a breezy debut, dished out by Hamburg’s picky boutique label Growing Bin; Pitchfork later declared Shy Layers one of the best electronic albums of the year.
Personally, Walsh’s work stuck out to me after I’d culled through some press releases in my inbox. Midnight Marker echoed of a purgatory from another time, some serene pseudo-future where surveillance states, self-induced anxiety, and all that modern riff raff dissolved between Eno’s Another Green World and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Not even pop culture’s drooling Stranger Things fad fazed this anachronistic playground; sunlight and palm trees beckoned here, not bloodshed or monsters. (As it turns out, a Shy Layers track did land on a TV show, not long before we met—but definitely not one that entailed a romanticized version of the ’80s.) Only when my editor tapped me later about the groovy “Gateway” video did I realize that Walsh’s lush meta-lounge awaited just behind the Atlanta Contemporary Museum, tucked away behind a heavy gate.
In an interview for Uproxx from 2016, Martin Rickman asked Walsh what he thought of Atlanta, but the move was so fresh, that he couldn’t form an answer. Two years on, I pressed the question again—our ensuing discussion delves into our city’s idiosyncratic sprawl, an unlikely remix, and hired hands from Craigslist. I remark, at one point, that his music evokes colors and shapes. The point seemed almost silly in my humdrum apartment, but in Walsh’s sanctum of mosaics and neon, the visions made perfect sense.
JD Walsh in his studio | Credit: Lee Adcock
I understand that you moved to Atlanta because your wife had family here.
Well, we also have a kid, a six-year-old. And living in New York—we’d been there for 15 years—it’s totally possible to have a kid there, and we were doing fine. But the time was right for somewhere new. And with kindergarten looming, we were like, “Well, it’s a good time now.” But I’m glad we did. It’s nice here.
Yeah, it is. I wanted to talk a bit about how moving to Atlanta has influenced you, and how this new environment suited you.
I feel like I have a better handle on the art world than the music scene. I wish I had a better sense of the music scene. It feels, not unlike the city itself, very sprawling.
Right. And it’s very fragmented, too.
First of all, I have dear friends in the music scene, and I see that there are very talented people here, and there’s even a lot of support. There is an abundance of venues, and they seem to be doing fine, and I think that’s great. But if you can characterize what the Atlanta music scene may be, it seems to be all variants of punk and post-punk, and a bazillion different variants of that. Which is fine, and I believe the best venues are the ones oriented toward that sort of music. But I wish I were aware of more of the hybrids.
At the same time, though, I was going over what I knew about you, and I realized that you did a remix for Ben Trickey! How did that come about—because that’s a VERY different world for you!
Well, Ben, I’ve known for a very long time. We played with each other my first time around in the ’90s, because he was my student (I was a kid [too], I was 22-years-old). He was a video student; I was teaching video. So we’ve remained acquainted the entire time. So when I came back, we hung out every once in a while. And when he put out that record, he asked me to do a remix. Which is fine—it’s actually the only remix I’ve ever done!
Wow, that’s impressive. And it fits in so well with the rest of the album, which is that alt-country sound, but mixed in a way that could really only happen in Atlanta.
He’s got very specific ideas about music. And it’s not always aligned with what I do, but he’s got this really strange side to him that’s into noise and new age. It seems at odds with his alt-country things—but then, I think he’d take issue with me calling it that. But there are those references there. I saw him play last week at the EARL, and it was so good; it was so much more abstract and experimental, like film soundtrack-esque. I’ve always tried to figure out this kind of looseness for performance, especially in a band, almost a jazz-like structure, where things happen on their own terms. And he was really able to navigate that well. I thought that was really, really impressive.
Speaking of soundtracks, your music definitely has a soundtrack-esque quality, and in fact one of your songs was recently featured on that Netflix TV show, Easy. How did that come about? Did they contact you, or…
Yeah, they contacted me. It was Chris Swanson, the guy who works with the Secretly Group [Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguar], but they also have a big licensing aspect to their business. So he was the music supervisor for this show—I think he’s friends with the director—but I think he did last season, too. So he curates the music that’s on there. And I was excited about that, because I was actually a fan of the show before I was asked to do it. And the episode that my music is on is by far the most raunchiest one in the entire [season], so I wanted to share it with my family, but I was like, “Ehhh, maybe I’ll hold back.”
Well, that leads naturally to the new album, which has more voices on it than the previous one. You said you were just hiring different people?
Yeah, it was a very similar process. I’m just interested in all sorts of vocal manipulations, whether it’s really natural and organic, like using someone else’s voice other than my own, and what that does to the more literal processed voice like talk boxes, vocoders, harmonizers, pitch shifters. I’m interested in how it relates to content, in a way, [and] how it changes the perception of what the words are saying. So I wanted to go for that cornucopia of sound treatments.
So it was a very similar process. It’s funny, though. When I did it in New York, I did the same thing, put an ad on Craigslist. And I’d just get tons of responses. Here I got less. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions about what that means—it could have been the time of day. But the two people I did end up working with were wonderful. It’s always a little awkward, and a little weird, but it’s also a satisfying adventure.
There was the woman’s voice that I spotted, and then there was someone else, that deep baritone. Was that someone else?
Yeah. The man is TaCarr Freeman, and the woman is Jasmine Pollard. And they were both super pros. TaCarr said he was on Craigslist looking to buy a car, and came across [the ad] randomly, and he said, “OK.” I asked him to send me samples, so he sent me this video of him, in his car, belting a capella. So I was like, “This is the guy.”
Yeah, he sounds like the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers! And that comes out really well in “Lover’s Code,” as well.
Yeah, he was really, really good. I wish I could be more engaged with these people after the fact, but it is sort of a transaction. I always send them the finished product and all that, but communication is sometimes hard to communicate.
I wanted to talk a bit about your influences. You mentioned Wally Badarou in your press release, which I’d never heard of before. How did you get into this whole future jazz sound world?
It’s hard to say. I was probably raised on a strict diet of rock and roll. And then, like anything, you get older, and hungrier for more out there stuff, or just stuff you hadn’t heard of, and that was just the direction it went, for one reason or another.
I think that I was lucky to come of age right when music blogs were starting, like Dream Chimney out of California. They’re a long-running music blog, which is still around. And then, of course, the Growing Bin. I really knew it more as a blog, back in the day. So when I made my first EP, I thought, “Well, this one’s cool.” And Bossa wrote back to me right away, in a personal email—he was wonderful.
That’s amazing. I just read that thing about him on Resident Advisor. He seems like such a character!
I’ve actually never met him—we’ve only just FaceTimed. Anyway, so how did I get into that? I think I just gravitated. And I do like African music. I don’t know. I think it’s just my frequency.
Yeah, totally. I also can’t explain why I have a minor affinity for house music, that’s part of me as well. Which, I thought I may have heard that in here, too.
Yeah, I’m definitely not as familiar with that. But that’s not to say it’s not there, in some zeitgeist-y thing. It’s funny—in the last record, someone compared me to LCD Soundsystem. At the time, I really didn’t know anything about LCD Soundsystem. But now, Tim Sweeney from Beats in Space is actually pretty tight with James Murphy (well, from what I gathered). I know he’s had him on the radio show, and they’ve worked together more than a few times. So anyway, that’s not to say that it’s a wrong comparison. But it’s much less dance-y.
And I think I wanted to talk more about the lyrical content. I know you’ve mentioned before that you use lyrics more as suggestions, but I’m definitely thinking of “Gateway” and “Lover’s Code.” There’s definitely a romantic undercurrent there.
For sure. Lyrics, I’ve always treated [them] as impressionistic, economical—trying to do the most with an economy of words. But at the same time, I have an idea about what every song is about, that it is a concrete image, if nothing else. Lately, I’ve been challenging myself to write longer songs. The last song “Draw the Shades” has many more words and verses, which is something I wanted to do. It’s not a Bob Dylan song, but there’s more to it.
And like a lot of people, I keep a running list of phrases on my phone, whenever something jumps out at me. And it’s just a long list of evocative phrases. So when I’m writing lyrical content, I’ll just glance at a few of them, and try to make connections. It’s one strategy.
Yeah, I do that, too. I have a running list of potential band names and album names on my phone.
Band names are hard.
Although I think you did a good job with yours, naming your project after a visual concept, because your music is definitely very visual. There are several artists that can conjure shapes with their music, and yours does that for me, too.
Oh, thank you, it’s very good to hear that. I’m so close to it that it’s nice to hear that from a less biased source.
Speaking of that, I wanted to talk about the videos you’ve done as Shy Layers. The most recent one you did definitely has lots of pop art elements.
Well, my visual art background was foremost in video. And I got a degree in film and video. And my day job is in video editing, so I am steeped in that world. Which is why I’ve moved away from it and started making more object-based things. There are some time-based elements in some of them, though.
But yeah, I did “Gateway” all here. I just hung a green screen up there, and shot over here, and edited it myself. I wanted it to have this look of ’70s, ’80s image processing—that’s the school of video I come from. I did a few residencies at this place called the Experimental Television Center—it’s now defunct, but it was in upstate New York. And it had just a room full of—and this was before modular synths were cool—but just a room of video modular synths, and all these analog video processing machines, many of them custom-built. So it had that same effect that you saw in “Gateway.” That was definitely a digital recreation of that. But I wanted it to have that look, because I just love that look. And I wanted it to have that intense color—not too perfect, kinda grungy.
Yeah, it reminded me of Peter Gabriel a lot.
Yeah, I could see that. And I love him. Great videos. Great songs.
More Info
Bandcamp: shylayers.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @shylayers
Instagram: @shylayers
SoundCloud: @shy-layers
Twitter: @shylayers