Photo by Kate Ray Struthers

Doldrums: "She Is the Wave"

"Dreamy" seems to be an especially important word in 23-year-old wanderer Airick Woodhead's universe-- during our recent conversation, he talked a lot about the tangled lines between the unconscious world and modern technology. The Montreal artist who currently makes music as Doldrums has even devised an elaborate dystopian science fictional story. The premise: A new drug puts everyone in the same dream realm after they fall asleep, which eventually leads to a rebellion. (Read on for a more detailed explanation.) The idea is equal parts The Matrix, Brave New World, and The Neverending Story, and its sentiments are reflected in the lyrics of his upcoming album, which follows a couple of EPs filled with cracked pop, tribal thump, and glitchy textures. The new record features "She Is the Wave", above, and "Egypt", below. 

The album was mostly recorded on a laptop he borrowed from his friend Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, over an 18-month span. By the time he was done with it, the computer was broken. "I'm immune to technology," he said, going on to list the various machines he's destroyed, either accidentally or intentionally. In addition to recording some of the record in L.A., he also mixed a song in XL Recordings' studio in London after the label released his cover of Portishead's "Chase the Tear" as a B-side last year.

Woodhead-- whose falsetto hangs high over his songs, sounding at once like Siouxsie Sioux and Avey Tare-- grew up surrounded by folk thanks to his musician father. By the time he was a teenager, he was experimenting with making sounds in his basement. "[My dad] would be recording a folk album and I'd take all the drums and speed them up 100 times, and then just make some noise," he says. "He'd come down and be like, 'What the fuck?'"

Talking with him, it's clear that this high school dropout (he finished his diploma on the internet) is not the type of person to stay in one place for too long. After his band with his brother, Spiral Beach, dissolved a few years ago, Woodhead started wandering around Europe, eventually heading back to his native Toronto before finally moving to Montreal. He sounds like a Beat poet when describing a recent drive into the Canadian countryside: "We were picking vegetables out of farmers' fields, listening to rockabilly, picking apples out of trees, and then we came home and made pie. It was the nicest fucking day." Now, even though he's found a comfortable place in Montreal's brimming music scene, he's got a romantic notion of building a house in the desert somewhere.

Musically, he's also already moving on to the next thing. He's hard at work on new material, which he compares to Caribou leader Dan Snaith's dance-oriented Daphni project. And by the time that music surfaces, there's no telling where he'll be. Which seems to be the point.

"There's definitely a thread throughout a lot of my different projects that's trying to get back to this naive and pure childish sensibility."

Pitchfork: You've already created an elaborate mythology behind Doldrums, which plays out in your lyrics and drawings. Could you break that down a bit?

Airick Woodhead: It starts in a sleep clinic where a doctor administers a new drug to try to help trauma patients deal with the psychological damage by exploring the trauma through dreams. They develop this chemical that allows the patients to have higher lucidity, so they're revisiting the same things again and again, and they draw a map to better solidify and manifest these places. And that map that you draw in this dream world is what you would call Fantasia, because that's the [fantasy world] from The Neverending Story.

The doctor then discovers all the patients who had taken the drug share dream maps. Then the patients start seeing each other in their dreams and hanging out. So the interconnectedness transcends even technology and becomes this weird, holistic, spiritual entertainment, which is administered by the government to everybody as mandatory. The dream world becomes this extremely fucked up, dystopic place in which everyone's wildest, darkest fantasies are being realized. Just huge orgies and sadistic fields of killing.

Then the rebel faction-- who's led by a protagonist who was there at the beginning when they first administered this drug-- is trying to preserve dreams as the individuals' way to know themselves on a deeper level, as opposed to just this viceful entertainment. There's a battle in reality and in the dream world. It's about this feeling of losing yourself and being forced to participate in a community.

Pitchfork: How much of this have you written down?

AW: It's all just in my head.

Doldrums: "Egypt"

Pitchfork: Do you read up on science?

AW: I've always been interested in some parascience, maybe neuroscience and developmental psychology, too. The most exciting forefront of human technology right now is genetic engineering. There's this book called Biopunk about the DIY gene-splicing movement, which is the coolest thing ever. Gene hackers are changing their kids' genes so they don't have DNA that leads to diseases like Alzheimer's or Leukemia or whatever. They've been fired from their jobs, but the technology is getting way smaller, so they can do it in their own homes with limited resources. Pretty crazy stuff.

Photo by Aaron Stern

Pitchfork: What was the earliest music you made as Doldrums?

AW: The first thing I did was a VHS tape that I collaged out of a lot of tapes from my childhood. There's definitely a thread throughout a lot of my different projects that's very nostalgic, or trying to get back to this naive and pure childish sensibility. I was splicing together these tapes and I made the songs to go with them, and the Portishead song ["Chase the Tear"] was one of those.

Doldrums: "Jump Up" (via SoundCloud)  

Pitchfork: You've mentioned that after your previous band Spiral Beach ended, you wandered around Europe and considered moving there.

AW: Yeah, when I was 18 I lost everything. I was in Europe because I had been playing there with my old band, so I went to Berlin to see if I should move there. I didn't know anybody, and I met a girl from Toronto and stayed with her for a little while, but nothing really stuck. So I came back to Toronto, where I met people who were starting this weird DIY live space, which is now such a codified lifestyle to me, it's become the way I operate in the community: You throw shows at your place to pay your rent, you live a little bit more off the grid, and you're granted the peace of mind and inspirational time that you deserve.

Last summer was like the millionth summer of love. I was living here and there were two or three shows a week, going until the sun came up. There would be like 300 people dancing, and the noise musicians who lived here would usually do a set. A really interesting cross-genre pollination happened, because the noise people were playing alongside a lot of dance people. That's where I take my most influence.

Pitchfork: Are you living in one of those spaces now?

AW: No, I got an apartment. I was tired of throwing shows.