Why Angus1 is no longer playing by the rules of the music industry
The genre bending Aussie producer shares his unique methods to making music — and to navigating the music biz
Angus1 in the studio. Image: Seiya Taguchi
“When I go into the studio, my little ritual is to hit record on the mic and just sing or say whatever comes into my head, for too long — like, to the point where I’m bored of it and I’m thinking ‘Okay… This is ridiculous.’ Then I’ll push beyond that discomfort for maybe 15 minutes.”
Angus1 doesn’t have the most orthodox approach to music-making. His dull experiences of playing the bassoon at school — an instrument he calls “limiting” and “ridiculous” — led him to shun the traditional conventions of music and make his own way. It’s actually fitting for him, then, to record his vocals in this anguishing manner.
“I could just be saying the same word over and over again, but it’s that, like, popping the hood on my brain that I want to achieve,” he explains. “The whole reason I do that is so the judgmental part of me doesn’t stamp out ideas before they’ve been born. I’m like, ‘Well, you’ve said stupid shit already, you’ve embarrassed yourself, you can’t go any lower than that now with whatever you write.”
Angus1, real name Guy Tarento, is speaking to us from his hometown of Sydney, Australia. His vocal recording approach might sound a little woo-woo, but the 32-year-old is a down-to-earth realist with a suitably dry sense of humour. After our chat, he’s heading to the pub for a cold one with some friends.
His latest EP, Open For Business, was self-released in April in a similar environment: a listening party that hosted around 70 pals , beer for everyone, and a conversation about each of the five tracks after they played. Guy admits it was a weird experience — “ordinarily, you’d only open up in that way to one or two friends” — but found that being open about the project was helpful to gauge honest responses.
The brash opening of the intro track, also titled Open For Business, is reminiscent of the crunching and gritty distorted bass sounds of Justice — we ask how he created such an erratic synth patch. It turns out it’s actually an old “cringy vocal recording” that he slowed down, pitched, reversed, and “distorted to fuck.”
Guy flits through different styles on the EP, seemingly effortlessly. In Run, lush, enveloped synth stabs complement a chopped-up Desi vocal loop over breakbeats; The Path takes a more emotive angle, with Fred Again-esque vocal stutters, woozy pads and UK Garage beats; The Hunt, for which Armand Van Helden’s You Don’t Know Me was a mix reference, is a four-to-the-floor indie dance banger; and Over The Hill features French-style sample chopping and Toro Y Moi-style vocal production.
“I appreciate a lot of different types of music,” he says, “and rather than letting them be their own discrete thing, I will childishly, try to smush them into one [track]…I just want to go weirder and wilder and continue exploring.”
His efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by key tastemakers . He’s released tracks on prestigious alternative labels Kitsuné Musique in 2020 and Future Classic in 2020 — the latter of which we both jape as a rite of passage for Australian artists. Does Guy consider these high-profile cosigns validations as an artist?
He sighs; “They are…I’m learning to wrangle my own ego and expectations as I go along. It’s really nice getting a nod, and it helps in some ways. But ultimately, the only relationship that exists is with the listener and me. If the music starts to bleed into too many other areas — one of which is to make me feel good about myself and get a tip of the hat from the right people — the music isn’t as much at the forefront. But, yeah, I’m not an overly confident artist, so when you do get those little wins, it’s great to celebrate them.”
Guy assures us that it’s not such an easy path to those wins — as an artist, there’s often a lot of rejection and uncertainty before these triumphs come by. Besides, as an independent artist without a team, he isn’t so bothered by the influence of labels. In fact, one of the reasons he ended up producing his own music and releasing a debut single in 2019 was thanks to a bad experience with a label.
It went like this: While DJing in his late teens and early twenties from 2010 onwards — before he knew how to properly use a DAW — Guy started dabbling in writing tracks with a producer friend. One they wrote ended up on the friend’s EP, who “had a bit of a buzz going,” Guy says. Though he was involved in making one of the songs, the label seemingly had little interest in paying him his dues.
“The label just tried their best to get me out of the way, both in credits and contractually [because] I wasn’t anyone. I was just some young guy,” he explains. “I get it from a marketing perspective, but they went about it the wrong way. It could have been way more respectful. They were trying to get me to sign a licencing agreement only for the instrumental but, I’m like, ‘You’re not releasing the instrumental, therefore there will be no royalties from the instrumental.’”
Guy dismissed the agreement as “dog shit” and decided that he wasn’t going to let that happen again. His end goal was always to have a career in music. The best way to achieve that, in his mind, was to teach himself how to produce, make his own music, and not rely on other people.
That put several items on his to-do list. Firstly, he parted ways with DJing as an outlet for creativity. He gradually came to find it uninspiring and says that, in Sydney at that time, “subcultures weren’t really valued, so the club scene wasn’t particularly interesting; someone will be upset about [me saying that], but I lost myself along the way while DJing in terms of thinking I had to play trash to please people.”
Second on the list was to learn to use a DAW, properly. Although Guy tinkered with GarageBand to procrastinate from his short-lived career as a bassoonist, he needed more expertise. Fortunately, he had music theory knowledge but turned to YouTube to learn how to use Ableton Live. “That world has exploded,” Guy says, thankful that there are tutorials for “literally everything.”
He also needed a studio space and managed to figure that one out pretty quickly, too. He reached out to Jack Prest, a mix engineer who he later enlisted to help as a mix engineer on Open For Business, and set up a studio sharing situation with him. Despite being independent, Jack has become an invaluable collaborator for bringing “a creative, human approach to mixing,” Guy says.
“Jack and I have a really good relationship, and I usually will let him know early on, like, ‘With this one, go wild with it; With this one, the mix is basically there. Just give it a nudge; I want the hi-hats to fizz like a coke, not a ginger beer.’ We can talk about music in an abstract way, because sometimes it’s hard to put it into words, so we’ve got a bit of a language going.”
There’s another big item on his task list, though: getting the live act down. Guy wants to tour his music but is still figuring out the logistics, and politely asks if we have any advice on the matter. In his mind, the Angus1 project could be a band, but the vast palette of sounds and arrangements means it could get complicated.
In his productions, Guy often samples his own recordings, building a collage of sounds in a way, he says, like The Avalanches or Daft Punk might bring multiple records together in one song. He chops and processes snippets from old recording sessions and builds textures out of them — triggering those in a live setting is essential.
We land on a solution of bringing Angus1 to stage as a two-piece — a collaborator will join him onstage with another laptop running Ableton Live and other hardware, all connected via Ableton Link.
“That’s the thing, it’s about giving me freedom to sing. Like, am I Thundercat? An incredible bass player who can just rip while I’m singing as well? No,” he laughs.
But the Angus1 project needs vocals — it’s vital for Guy to convey his emotions in this way. From those self-embarrassing moments in recording sessions to turning his vocals into basslines, and, crucially using lyricism to understand himself better. “Often, I will come to an understanding of what I’m thinking or feeling after I have written a song. Some ideas come out of it. It’s like, I think that’s on your mind and now you’ve blurted it out, and you have to deal with it.”
Guy has more to do, more to discover. But he’s certainly not looking in the rearview mirror with Angus1. Funnily enough, the label who offered him the “dog shit” deal expressed interest once he started dropping releases as Angus1, not realising who he was and the role they’d played in spurring the project on. With a tight-knit listenership, a plethora of interesting ideas and only himself to rely on, we imagine Guy is sipping his beer in triumph.
