Have you ever heard of Todd Tobias? How about his brother, Tim? Does Robert Pollard ring a bell? Being an avid Guided by Voices fan, Tobias is a household name in my world. I recently uncovered his Circus Devils discography and decided to find out more about this man. Whether it’s making his own music with his brother or Mr. Pollard or mixing the sounds of some great bands from all over the globe; Todd is one of the most passionate people I have ever met when it comes to his craft.

What do you think of the current music scene? Any new bands you like or we should know about?
I don’t know much about new music. I hear it in passing. Even when I was a kid, I found it difficult to keep up with the vinyl in record shops. I relied on my brother Tim to keep me up to date. So I’ve fallen behind. Way behind. That’s more a symptom of my resistance to being plugged-in to the online world than any feeling of animosity toward new music.

I’m interested in the way music and other art forms change and evolve as a result of changes in technology and how our minds adapt to it. The more I listen to older music, the more I notice something is missing in newer music. I don’t hear much of what I would call pure, disassociated imagination going on in new music.

I don’t think the explosion in imagination that marked the music from the late 60s and early 70s was the result of drug use alone. The minds of people back then weren’t flooded with reams of entertainment and chatter. Instead of a sense of distance and mystery, we experience the world today as something we stay plugged into and stimulated by all day. This isn’t a complaint. It’s acknowledging how our minds are going through a change. As artists and consumers of art, we’re all going through the change together.

If the human brain is on the road to becoming a contact point to a digitized universe, then imagination is reduced to an act of referencing. The concept of a creative imagination cut off from the world and spontaneously reaching for some enchantment in its isolation will someday be a foreign concept. I’ve tried my best in my own way to preserve some of that distance from the world that I experienced as a child. Scott Walker is an example of someone who is serious about keeping his distance. Whatever you think about him and his music, he has succeeded at preserving his imagination. For me it might be a losing battle. Keeping our distance from cable TV and the online world might help to preserve the open spaces around our heads, so to speak. But there are downsides to tuning out, like being left behind, or else never being part of the game. Missing out on good new music is another risk. I know this was not the topic of your question.

What is your musical background? Do you have any musical training?
I’m self taught. Whenever I was obliged to study music, or take a lesson, I lost interest. I don’t have any objection to studying music, but it didn’t work for me. I don’t like to think about music.

List all of the instruments you play.
Drums, guitar, bass guitar, and I mess around with keyboards. I also like to manipulate sounds made by standard instruments to get new variations that are hard to recognize. A lot of Circus Devils songs contain manipulated sounds.

What instrument do you begin writing songs with? (guitar, piano, etc.)
I usually start with acoustic guitar. If I’m not in rock mode I’ll start with a sonic germ of some kind that I collect and manipulate on a sampler. It could be anything, like a snippet of voice or a loop of some kind or the kind of manipulated sound I mentioned earlier, and the music gets built over that foundation, layer by layer until I think it’s done. I like writing this way because it feels more like discovering something than inventing it.

Were you in any other bands?
My older brother Tim (Tobias) recruited me to be in all of his bands as either a drummer or bass player dating from junior High school. I was always a reluctant performer. Playing gigs was uncomfortable for me. Once in a while the music, audience and vibe would all come together and transport me, but not often. Almost never, actually. So I gravitated toward recording and away from performing. For years I worked on cassette 4 track before I had the chance to work in a studio. Among those bands Tim and I were in, the names that might be recognized are 4 Coyotes and Gem (with Doug Gillard). And then Tim joined Guided by Voices in the late 90s. At that time Tim and I formed Circus Devils with Robert Pollard. And after Tim left GBV, he and I started Clouds Forming Crowns. Those two bands (Circus Devils and Clouds Forming Crowns) are still going concerns.

Do you have a day job?
I have a part time job with the County here, and I look after my daughter. She’s one year old. Doing production work in moderation feels good to me. It makes starting a new project seem like I’m recording for the first time.

When did you begin producing music? Where is your studio located?
I was asked to produce an album called Universal Truths and Cycles by Robert Pollard after Guided by Voices left TVT records and went back to Matador. That was in 2001. Bob asked me to do that based on an experiment that he, my brother Tim and I did just prior to that called Ringworm Interiors. That was our first Circus Devils project. And that was instigated by a cassette that I had given to Bob a year before that, either in 1999 or 2000. That tape had a bunch of strange sounds that I came up with. So, all of this eventually led to Bob (Pollard) asking me to produce Universal Truths with GBV. It was my very first studio experience as a non-player, which is kind of crazy. I engineered and mixed as well. It was a trial by fire. Looking back, I’m surprised that Bob had so much faith in me. I knew that he (Bob) was looking for a grittier sound after doing the high budget productions for the TVT albums. I guess that’s where I came in. My work has been called “mid-fi.” I guess that means my production falls somewhere between Lo-fi and slick. I’d rather not think about it. It makes me think of the color gray.

About the studio . . . At first I worked wherever Guided by Voices was recording. Then we started to work steadily at a place in Kent (Ohio) called Waterloo Sound. Eventually I took over there when the owner moved away, and now the studio is in my house. It’s located not far from Cleveland.

When did you realize how important music was in your life?
I guess I realized it when I found myself sitting for long periods in front of the stereo as a child, and changing out records, whatever my mom had at home, stuff like Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel. Then I heard (Igor Stravinsky’s) The Rite of Spring.

What artists have influenced you?
The music that’s swimming around in my subconscious is a lot of 60’s and 70s rock. That was what I listened to as a kid. My taste was artist-specific, and not style-specific. So for example, I would listen to Devo and Jethro Tull at the same time. Sometime in the 80s I tuned out. I lost interest in new music and never recovered. I talk about it (the 80s) like it was a trauma. Tom Waits and Peter Gabriel were still doing good stuff in the early 80s, but I can’t think of much else that I liked from that time. Then I discovered the clique of musicians who worked with Brian Eno at the time, people like Harold Budd and Jon Hassel. At some point I started listening to film composers like Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone. And then classical composers from the early 20th century like Debussy and Stravinsky. One thing I always go back to is The Rite of Spring. It’s still my favorite piece of music. Taken all together, the musicians and composers that influence me are not a cohesive group.

If you could work with any other artist (dead or alive), who would it be?
Maybe Scott Walker or Brian Eno. It would be fun to work with Eno just to get into arguments with him and listen to him talk.

What was the first CD/record you ever bought?
It was a 45 single of “Smoke On the Water.” I was too young to handle money, so I begged my mom to buy it for me. When they first started to play that song on the radio, I would search the dial every day until I stumbled upon it. I was fascinated by the energy in the distorted guitar, and the way the single bass note played under the riff. For some reason that mesmerized me. Up until then I had heard stuff like Three Dog Night and Jim Croce on the radio, but this was my first encounter with distorted guitar. I still write stuff for Circus Devils that has the same kind of ham-fisted, gut-level feel to it. So I guess it made a lasting impression.

What was the first concert you ever went to?
My brother Tim took me to see my first couple of concerts. We saw Devo in 1982. And a couple years later, Tom Waits. Those two are still the best concerts I’ve seen. But I haven’t been to many concerts. I don’t like crowds. .

Who plays on your latest album? Where did you find them?
Do you mean Circus Devils? I’m in three bands. There’s Circus Devils. I play the music in that band. I mean, I record it myself. Tim co-writes with me. Then there’s Clouds Forming Crowns. Tim is the songwriter for that band. He and I both perform the music on the recordings. And there is another band called Brother Earth. That’s me and Steve Five from The Library is on Fire. I do the music for that one too. Finally, I do instrumental music on my own. My first bona fide album under my own name is coming out in 2012 on Hidden Shoal Recordings.

How did Brother Earth come about?
When I send Circus Devils music ideas to Bob (Pollard), I will send a lot more than he needs, because I want him to have enough to choose from that he feels comfortable working with. As a result I have lots of leftover music. I had been recording Steve Five’s band The Library is On Fire, and we decided to do something with all this leftover music I have. So he began to write melodies and lyrics for some of it. We have a full album and an EP so far.

How do you as the musician, decide if a new song goes to Circus Devils, Moping Swans, etc.?
It’s complicated with all the artist names under the Robert Pollard tent of projects. There are so many, if I try to list them, I’ll forget a few. Let’s limit this to the records I produce with Bob. There are other bands and projects that I contribute to as an engineer, like Boston Spaceships, but I don’t do full production or perform on those albums. So the projects I produce and play on include the Robert Pollard solo albums, Circus Devils, Psycho and the Birds and the one-time EP project called The Moping Swans. Bob writes the songs for all of these projects except Circus Devils. To summarize, Bob writes everything on the albums we do together except Circus Devils, which he co-writes with me and Tim. I hope that makes sense.

Who is in your back-up band when you tour?
We don’t tour. All of these projects I mentioned are recording projects aside from Clouds Forming Crowns. Tim has a band that backs him up when they do gigs. But no touring I’m afraid. Our bands are pretty much under the radar.

When you write songs, what comes first, the music or the lyrics?
I write music exclusively. I let the people I work with (Robert Pollard, Tim Tobias and Steve Five) handle the lyrics and melodies.

Have you ever felt the lyrics didn't match the music you wrote?
No, it’s always great to hear what Bob does with my music on the Circus Devils albums. He tunes into the music in an intuitive way. He breathes life into it and gives it a face. Part of the inspiration for me is the surprise factor when I hear Bob perform the melodies in the studio for the first time. Suddenly it’s a whole new creature. It’s the same with Steve on the Brother Earth songs.

If you were stuck on a desert island what five albums/CDs could you not live without?
I don’t do well with questions like this. First there would have to be The Rite of Spring. The Pearl, by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. Chopin’s nocturnes. The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann. And probably the soundtrack to the original King Kong by Max Steiner. That’s funny. I just realized that none of those recordings has singing on them.

Where can people find your music?
On Bandcamp.com. Everything by Circus Devils, Clouds Forming Crowns, and Brother Earth is up there, and coming soon, some of my instrumental music.

How is bandcamp working out for you and your bands? Would you recommend it to other bands starting out?
We haven’t had many downloads, but that’s not the fault of bandcamp. It’s not their job to promote. I don’t think a lot of people know about these bands I’m in. They may have heard of Circus Devils in connection to Robert Pollard, but they probably don’t know that our 9th album is coming out this year. So there’s a lot there to explore. None of our albums really sounds the same. The other two bands, Clouds Forming Crowns and Brother Earth are even deeper down under the radar. This interview might help us out, so thanks for the push, Eric. I would definitely recommend Bandcamp to anyone who is looking for an artist friendly outlet for offering album and song downloads. They are album-focused, which is nice. But in the end it all depends on a music buying public willing to support the artist with their dollars.

Are vinyl and CD releases a thing of the past?
Not as long as people associate artists with albums, and a product they can store away on a shelf. But that may disappear one day depending on how all-pervasive the online music delivery system becomes, and to what extent the kids embrace it. Personally, I think the new technology is bad news for artists who want to focus exclusively on their art. Instead of focusing on their music, the artist of the future will have to spend their energy and money on exposure. Some people might argue that art doesn’t need to be divorced from commerce. My response is, yeah, that’s true, when the art is insipid and soulless and void of imagination.

What are your future plans?
I hope to be doing more instrumental music of my own in addition to the albums with Robert Pollard. Right now I’m working on a Circus Devils related film project, and I’m looking forward to doing the soundtrack.

Here’s an up-to-date list of Todd’s production history:
http://tobias-music.com/id4.html

Here are the bands he’s currently working in, but I’m sure more are to follow:
http://circusdevils.bandcamp.com/
http://cloudsformingcrowns.bandcamp.com/
http://brotherearth.bandcamp.com/