Absent Sounds: Hey Alexei, how's your day going?

Alexei Shishkin: Good, for the most part — I run a video production company and just recently moved to a different state, so I've been on the phone all day with the State Department, the New York Department of Tax, dealing with all of that. That's what I'm trying to say.

Absent Sounds: I think the worst parts of life, for everyone, is filling out forms. What's the worst form you've ever had to fill out?

Alexei Shishkin: With this situation it wasn't even really filling out forms — it was more like... these are such first world problems, but just look at my day. You know? It's a bigger problem with the American tax infrastructure to begin with. There's no easy way to do it yourself — you have to jump through all these hoops, file a hundred different forms, and it's not even easy to move your entity from state to state. It's a big rigmarole. I wish someone could solve it, but it's not looking solvable right now.

Absent Sounds: I can imagine. And considering you're not going through the easiest time — what would a good time look like for you? Which is also the name of your upcoming album, coming out in September, which we'll get into. But tell us: what does a good time look like?

Alexei Shishkin: A good time for me is probably just relaxing, having a beer, watching a soccer game. That's always a good time. To be fair, today has been good too — I got to sleep in. It's not like it's been bad. Sometimes things are annoying, but generally, good times all around. I'm pumped that I can go sit on the back porch, chill, listen to podcasts. That's fun. That's a good time.

Absent Sounds: I have two questions. First — what have you been listening to?

Alexei Shishkin: Do podcasts count? Because I honestly listen to a lot more podcasts than music. It used to be 90% podcasts, 10% music. Over the last year it's become more like 70/30. I do a show on Brain Rot Radio where I play music every week, which has helped me get back into listening to new stuff. In terms of podcasts — there's one I was listening to right before we got on called Get Played. It's hosted by Nick Wiger, Heather Anne Campbell, and Matt Apodaca. Really fun video game podcast, but it's mostly a comedy show, so even if you're not into games you'd probably enjoy it. Actually, it was through that podcast that I learned about a game called Disco Elysium, which ended up inspiring one of the songs on the album. Little synergy there.

Absent Sounds: That's really cool. Is that the same ratio you would have said ten years ago? I think it's easier to track change in music taste, but do you also listen to the same podcasts you did ten years ago?

Alexei Shishkin: That's such a good question. Ten years ago — no, very different ones. The longest-tenured ones I can place are Dough Boys and Comedy Bang Bang. I've been listening to those for about eight years. If you're a podcast fan, you'll know where my allegiances are — I'm into my stupid improv comedy. Some shows get boring, or just go away, because a lot of these are independent labors of love. Even Dough Boys went through its rocky ups and downs — for a while it felt like the two hosts were actually fighting and it might not be a bit anymore. But they came through it and now it's one of the biggest comedy shows in the world. They talk about fast food, so it's a bizarre premise, but it's pretty funny.

Absent Sounds: I definitely have to check those out. I circle a lot of podcasts but never quite dive in. Maybe I need to change that.

Alexei Shishkin: I don't know if you need to change it, honestly. For me, music and podcasts serve different functions. I do a lot of video editing for work, and if I'm editing something where people are talking, I'll throw music on quietly in the background — it just plays. If I'm doing motion graphics, I'll put a podcast on. You don't need to get into podcasts — they're longer commitments. An hour, as opposed to a ten-minute song you can just throw on. Can't exactly do that with a podcast.

Absent Sounds: You know, I've been in and out of doing graphic media stuff, and the thing I hate about video work is that I can't play music in the background. I'm impressed you can do it quietly.

Alexei Shishkin: Yeah, I tend to lean toward instrumental music a lot. Even 50/50 with and without words. I love instrumental music — when I first started making music it was all instrumental. And there's so much good jazz being made right now, it's insane. But instrumental music is also what AI is coming for. Study beats will be the first to go.

Absent Sounds: I won't even be that sad about the disappearance of study beats, to be honest. But before I get more into the album — I wanted to talk about the documentary you recently released. I watched it with my sister and we both thought it was really inspiring and beautifully put together. Congratulations on having it out.

Alexei Shishkin: Thank you.

Absent Sounds: Thematically — a lot of working musicians admit that even though there's glamour to the idea of making art your main job, realistically it's more stable to have something else going. Where do you stand on that?

Alexei Shishkin: From my personal perspective, I try my best not to cross the lines between my work and my art. I don't play out, I don't tour, I don't try to make money from music — because I know that's not the lifestyle I'm after. I always call it my art versus my craft. Music is my art. Filmmaking is my craft. Filmmaking is what I've studied most of my life. I can confidently take money from a client and deliver what they need. With my art, I keep it completely separate. I also actively tend to avoid film jobs that offer creative freedom but no money — that's actually a red flag for me sometimes, because "total creative control" gets walked back the moment you make something they didn't expect.

Absent Sounds: So with the documentary — was that where the two worlds collided?

Alexei Shishkin: Yeah, that was a special case. The people who organized Treefort basically — and I worked with them for a while, which you may already know — so the way that started was I was living in Portland, Oregon, and my friend and I had made a music magazine. But before even that, I just had a blog. And when I was in college, the logic was: if you have a blog, you can get into shows for free. Treefort was in its third year when I reached out for a media pass. Worst they could say was no. They said yes, gave me two passes. My friend and I brought our Canon 7Ds and shot a bunch of stuff. I made one little video, it made its way to the festival organizers, they loved it, and after a couple years they asked if I wanted to help with their social media video coverage. I did that for about seven or eight years. By the time the 10th Treefort rolled around, I'd moved to New York and assembled a team of filmmakers from New York, Portland, and Texas — we'd all fly to Boise, do the coverage, go home. When the 10th anniversary came up, they had all this footage from across the years and asked if we could make something longer. I said, what if I make a documentary — not just about Treefort, but about artists and the questions around making music? I don't think they knew what they were getting into. I have a feeling they wanted an eight-to-ten-minute best-of reel. Instead I made something asking why Idaho isn't liberal, or why you make music if you can't make money doing it. I'm pretty sure they watched it and thought: okay, thank you, but this is not what we asked for. It was fun though. I learned a ton, and I can't wait to make another one someday.

Absent Sounds: What would you pivot to next?

Alexei Shishkin: I've always wanted to make a documentary about lower-level soccer — specifically those levels that are high enough to be considered professional, but low enough where you might still need to work another job in the off-season. I think that story is really interesting. It's the same questions I was asking in the Treefort doc: why do you do this thing that gives you no career stability? What makes you show up and play lower-level professional soccer every weekend — riding eight-hour buses to play on a repurposed baseball field, only for a goal post to break mid-game? That actually happened this weekend at a Richmond Kickers game. The goal broke, they couldn't fix it, then it rained, and they had to drive all the way back from Knoxville. I just want to look at the working-class soccer player.

Absent Sounds: That's so interesting. Even before I ask about your connection to soccer — I wanted to bring up Tiki Taaka, because soccer shows up there too. It seems like a recurring theme.

Alexei Shishkin: Soccer is important to me. I've played my whole life. Team sports in general are really useful — they teach you how to work together, they teach leadership, communication. I love soccer specifically because you get to see all of those things happening in real time alongside improvisation and creativity. It has its own language, and I've noticed that language always creeps into my work somehow. Like in that song — the refrain is 'I watched them move it around,' which is about watching a good soccer team maintain possession. I was improvising in the booth and Brad had some soccer highlights playing on a monitor in the background. One of the games happened to be from 2006. Another was a team called Sevilla losing badly — a landslide, like six-nil. So that's where the lyric comes from. Landslide, 2006 — it just rhymed and fit.

Absent Sounds: You mentioned that a lot of the lyrics were improvised. How does that feed into your sense of what feels true? Is improvised material more in-the-moment for you, or does it take on different meaning over time?

Alexei Shishkin: I mean, those are all true, but if you want the real answer — it's just that I'm lazy. The writing process is fun, and improvising is the quickest way to write and edit simultaneously. Even in comedy, improvising is the most fun because you don't have to beat a line into the ground and run it over and over until the cadence is right. It hits the most when everyone discovers it at the same time, including yourself. You can go back and refine from there. A lot of people will loop a track and mumble over it to find their melodies, then fit words in. I just try to start with words right away — sometimes it's good, a lot of times it's not. You're only hearing the parts we kept.

Absent Sounds: It just feels really playful — fun to listen to, and I imagine fun to make.

Alexei Shishkin: A hundred percent. My philosophy has always been: if you're making art at a hobbyist level, it's a bonus if other people enjoy it — but I'm going to hear it regardless, so I want to enjoy my time with it. I remember showing a song to a friend once and she said, 'it's good, but you should make more electronic stuff, people like electronic stuff.' And I was like... that's not really how this works. I don't want to make things because other people want them.

Absent Sounds: I never even considered making music based on what's trending. That sounds like a miserable way to operate.

Alexei Shishkin: If your goal is to go viral or make money, then yes, that approach makes sense — figure out what the market wants, try to hit it. That's valid. But what if it doesn't work? Then you just spent all that time doing something you don't even like.

Absent Sounds: Exactly. Okay — before I go through the other tracks, which songs do you feel took the most dramatic shape between start and finish?

Alexei Shishkin: Probably Disco Elysium, the first one. We wrote the music first and fit lyrics later. It was actually one of the last to get lyrics because I didn't know what to write about. I'd been playing the game a lot, and eventually it just clicked. And then at the very end, we added all four of the game's skill-check sound effects at the top of the song — physical strength, mental awareness, and the other two. Before any lyrics start, you hear all four. It was the last thing we threw in, just a little Easter egg for anyone who might recognize them. But really, all of the songs evolved because our bassist Dave Kahn — amazing bassist from Providence, Rhode Island — was only available for a few hours the first day. So we pulled up random drum loops and had him improvise bass lines over them. We used whatever he laid down as a starting point. After he left, me and Brad went through everything: this one's good, this one's not. We took some in totally different directions. It was a lot of fun.

Absent Sounds: That's such an interesting approach. A lot of people feel they have to arrive in the studio with a finished product mapped out from A to Z. Where did this record even start for you?

Alexei Shishkin: Honestly? I just wanted to get out of town for a few days and hang out with my friend. That was basically it. I figured: if I book some studio time, Brad will have a great time because I'm a pretty easy client, we'll eat lunch, play some music, have fun. I've done the other thing — shown up with chord charts, everyone's parts mapped out. This was way more fun. Without a doubt. And there's a soft skill that's hard to develop in studio settings — the ability to tell someone you didn't like the part they played, without damaging their ego. I'm not great at it. If someone plays a part, I'll just be like, 'yeah, sounds good, let's go' because who am I to say it's wrong? When it was just me and Brad, it was easier — only two voices, and he's way better at knowing when to play something again. I'll usually just let things ride.

Absent Sounds: That actually ties into what you were saying about team sports. I leaned toward individual sports because I didn't want to have to tell anyone they weren't performing well.

Alexei Shishkin: Individual sports are a whole different mental exercise — all that communication is internal, you're fighting yourself as much as an external opponent. I couldn't do individual sports competitively. I like playing tennis, but for fun. If I had to compete, I'd hate it. Way too stressful. Soccer is like a metaphor for life to me. It's more like art than sport — a lot of fans give it a bad name, but in reality it's one of the greatest ways to learn how to exist in the world.

Absent Sounds: There's a lot of interesting source material in this record — not just soccer, but Disco Elysium, and then the track that references Carl Dennis. That was one of the coolest finds for me personally. I couldn't even find the poem online when I went looking.

Alexei Shishkin: Carl Dennis is incredible. He has this gift for taking a small, ordinary moment and finding the humanity in it. The way I first came across him was years ago — I was driving and NPR was reading a poem at the end of a program. They read something by him called "Drugstore." As soon as I got home I was like, I need to find this. I thought it might be called "Pharmacy" at first. Eventually found it. That was about twelve years ago, and ever since, every time I dig into a random poem of his, I'm blown away. I've always wanted to use his work to make songs, and that's basically what this track was — I took one of his poems and tried to reimagine it from a different character's point of view.

Absent Sounds: The things that stay with us for twelve years — we tend to find pieces of ourselves in them. What part of yourself did you find in "At Home with Cézanne"?

Alexei Shishkin: Honestly, I don't know if this particular poem was a direct reflection of me. I chose it to reimagine because I liked the way it used character and moved between settings — it had these two distinct spaces I wanted to explore. But the Drugstore one is the one that resonates most personally. Carl Dennis does what David Berman does, or what Cathal Coughlan does for Microdisney — writes things that seem plain on the surface and then completely floor you. Berman will have one line and you're like, damn. Coughlan will write about an escalator in the rain, but he's actually saying a generation of townies will never leave but always talk like they're going. That's the kind of writing that gets me. It's fall in Buffalo, and suddenly you're confronting your own mortality.

Absent Sounds: Have you seen Past Lives? A lot of the themes from that poem made me think of it. Debut film, Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen did the soundtrack.

Alexei Shishkin: Just from the imagery I can see it — taking small moments and going deep. There's actually a movie I was thinking of along those lines: A Ghost Story. Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham. Very quiet film about a ghost that haunts a house across thousands of years as different people move in and out. It's strange and slow but I found it pretty captivating.

Absent Sounds: Okay — I want to spend some time on "So Lucky." The wordplay — glum, bloody, lucky, ugly — I thought that was really intentional.

Alexei Shishkin: That was inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 — 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' The thing I found interesting about it is that he's not just saying everything is beautiful. He calls out the rough winds, the short lease, the days when the sun is too hot. He's acknowledging the bad things even while making the comparison. I was like, let me try that. So I took summer, fall, and winter — I skipped spring, I don't know why, we only had three verses — and tried to write three lines per season, all about things that are normally negative but framed as 'but this is something you do, so it's great.'

Absent Sounds: That brings up "I Like to Sit in the Cold" — which reminds me of a poem by Éireann Lorsung: 'I'm going back to Minnesota, where sadness makes sense.' One of my favorites. I first heard it on Poetry Unbound.

Alexei Shishkin: I'm just reading the first couple lines of that and it ties in so nicely to the last thing we were talking about — seeing beauty in the hideous. Though I'll be honest, "I Like to Sit in the Cold" is way less deep than that. That one was: I told Brad about a progression, we each plugged in a guitar, he played something, I tried to play it back to him, and we just called and responded. And for the lyric in the middle, I was literally just talking about how when you go to a sauna or steam room, they sometimes have a cold room — not a cold plunge, just a cold room. The sauna gets too hot, the steam room gets too hot, the cold plunge is way too cold. But in that little cold room, I like it. I like to sit in the cold. That's the whole thing.

Absent Sounds: I love that. And where does "This Philosophy" fit in?

Alexei Shishkin: That one was another where Brad put on some YouTube video while I improvised. I think the technique we used was a random word generator — he'd hit enter every two seconds from the other room, and it would generate four new words that I could latch onto. I think the first word generated was 'philosophy.' The most interesting line in that song to me is the one about watching the neighborhood blow up — which is about gentrification. It's framed ambiguously, like it could be literal, but it's about a place getting popular and exploding in a way that's not actually good. The rest of it came from the word generator.

Absent Sounds: I love that as a technique. I've been trying to do something similar for a comic — pulling words from random pages of random books as a starting point.

Alexei Shishkin: It's a great thought-starter. It'll just lead you somewhere unexpected.

Absent Sounds: The next track — Magpie. I noticed you'd mentioned it as a working title, and then realized it's actually the title of the album.

Alexei Shishkin: Yeah. There's a soccer team called Newcastle whose nickname is the Magpies — their jerseys are black and white and magpies are black and white. I was researching them and stumbled onto a short film also featuring a magpie. It's an Oscar-nominated animated short called Robin. Really sweet little film, great animation. So between that and Newcastle, I just had magpies on the brain. I had Brad pull up magpie facts on Google while I improvised lyrics over the instrumental. The song is literally about magpies. Not super deep — but maybe fitting, because magpies collect things and bring them back to their nest. This album is a collection of stuff. Maybe that's why it's called Magpie.

Absent Sounds: Coming back to something I noticed — in Tiki Taaka there's this background chatter or texture. What is that?

Alexei Shishkin: Because I do so much video editing, I've built up a pretty large sound effects library over the years. We were going through it and there was one called something like Impact Four — a sweetener for big drum hits — and Brad added that in a few places. But while we were browsing, we also found a police radio chatter loop and just threw it in there as texture. It never left. It got tossed in and we were like, okay, I guess this is part of the song now.

Absent Sounds: What about Invincible? That one felt more intentionally written from the start.

Alexei Shishkin: You're right that one was written. The inspiration was being in a cab in New York during rush hour — not standing-still rush hour, but full, fast-moving traffic. And there was a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen, on a bicycle, just weaving between everything with no helmet. I was like, what are you doing? One slip and you're done. But also... I probably would have done the same at thirteen. Can't really blame him. Can be disappointed in him, though.

Absent Sounds: That tension between disappointment and recognition — when did it shift for you? That moment when you stop being the kid on the bike?

Alexei Shishkin: I don't know if I can point to an exact moment. I think it happened gradually. But the one thing that comes to mind: I suffered a knee injury playing soccer about a year and a half ago — the first injury that was genuinely like, no, you can't play through this. I tried a couple times and re-hurt it. That was a big psychological moment. I just turned 35, and it wasn't like a magic transition at a certain age. But everyone has that moment where something happens and you look at things a little differently. Even when I do play now, I tell my team before we start: I'm not going to make the runs you'd expect from me. I know it looks like it's there. Just play it wide and I'll find you. You make the runs. Trust me on the pass.

Absent Sounds: I also wanted to ask about Baltimore — is that a literal place in the track, or something more metaphorical?

Alexei Shishkin: You give me too much credit. I started with a phrase — 'nothing less, nothing more' — and then thought, what rhymes with 'more'? Baltimore. Then: what fits syllabically before it? 'Drove right past Baltimore.' And then that made me think of The Wire, which has crooked cops in it — I've never actually seen it but I've been told I need to — so there's a line about crooked cops. The imagery that developed was either two people driving past Baltimore having a conversation, or one person driving past a city where they once knew someone. It started with the phrase and built outward. Take it wherever you want.

Absent Sounds: I think that's actually why it hit me — I was driving from Windsor to Toronto and it just felt like I was in the song. It gave me room to put my own thing in it.

Alexei Shishkin: That's genuinely cool to hear. Honestly, I think I've written all my love songs and can't write them anymore and feel connected to them. Now I just want to explore the process of writing itself. Write about a video game. Write about soccer. Use a random word generator. Copy a poem. Write about a bird. I don't have anything to say, so I just say the bland thing in an obscure way, and maybe someone goes, 'damn, that's deep.' And I'm like — no, it's about a bird. But if it means something to you, that's completely valid and genuinely valuable. I think about Pavement a lot in that way. A lot of what Malkmus wrote, I suspect, just sounded cool to him. But I heard those songs at sixteen and thought they were profound. Maybe they were. The communicative part is the interesting part.

Absent Sounds: What about the last track — Ugly Ghosts? That title has some specificity.

Alexei Shishkin: So there's an author named Claire Donato who once followed me on Twitter after I put out an album. She said she liked it. Then she published a book called Ugly Ghosts and I bought it to support her — it's a great book. I had it in my bag at the time of the session and was like, let me throw the name in as an homage. The song itself is pretty vague — 'we take off, grow old, grow soft, toss it aside, grow bored, get lost' — big picture stuff. But Ugly Ghosts is the one specific anchor in it. The rest is fluff. But there is a reference, and that matters.

Absent Sounds: That was actually my favorite track on the record. The piano just sways and flows.

Alexei Shishkin: I thought about making that the opener at one point. There's an alternate track listing I'll send you. Tiki Taaka was the last song at one point — because I knew that long fade-in would annoy radio DJs — but I also knew it was the one that got stuck in my head, so I moved it to number two. I always think the second track is the best track on most albums. And I almost always end with an instrumental. I don't know exactly why, but you could look at probably five of my past albums and they all close that way.

Absent Sounds: Any final thoughts on the album before we wrap up?

Alexei Shishkin: Just a genuine thank you for talking about it. I love doing these. And a big shout out to Bradford Krieger in Providence — he's a literal genius, and if it wasn't for him, this record wouldn't exist.

Absent Sounds: Shout out Brad. We love Brads everywhere. This is a really cool album and I can't wait for it to come out. Thank you so much — I'll be sure to circle back with everything. And watch A Ghost Story.

Alexei Shishkin: A Ghost Story. It is very, very slow — be prepared. But I think you'll love it.

Absent Sounds: I'll catch you in another life somewhere.

Alexei Shishkin: I'm going to write you about being on the podcast. I'll send that later this week or early next.

Absent Sounds: I'll keep an eye out. Have a good one, bye.

Alexei Shishkin: Bye.