TJ Dumser (Six Missing): Inner Space, Sobriety, and Soundscapes
Austin-based ambient artist TJ Dumser shares how his decade of sobriety, move from New York, and love of vintage synthesizers shaped his meditative project Six Missing and its emotional new EP 'Gentle Breath.'
Today, the Spotlight shines On musical project Six Missing, the musical project of ambient artist TJ Dumser.
After encountering an intense phase of burnout, TJ turned his mental health struggles into Gentle Breath, a dark, lush EP that marks a new direction for this Austin-based artist. It's music that explores uncertainty with stunning depth—think Tangerine Dream meets the cosmic GAS records, but with TJ's distinct voice shining through.
TJ's journey from New York workaholic to finding inner calm through his compositions offers a powerful look at how music can heal. His project name also comes from a supernatural experience at a Revolutionary War battle site …
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Six Missing's Gentle Breath EP)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase the Gentle Breath EP by Six Missing from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow Six Missing on Instagram, SoundCloud, and YouTube
• Six Missing / TJ Dumser: You Can't Be Anywhere Else but on the Run
• Rupert Neve Spotlight: Six Missing
• Six Missing's Ambient Playlists: Amazon Music + Spotify
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: When I was doing my research for our time together, I saw that we both lived in Astoria at the same time.
TJ Dumser: Oh, really?
Lawrence: I wasn't there very long, about two years, ending in the summer of 2016.
TJ: Oh, okay, so I think I had gotten there in 2013. That's awesome. Where were you in Astoria?
Lawrence: It was actually at two different ends. I spent a lot of time on 38th near the corner of 34th Ave, right off of Steinway, sort of in the area near where the studio was and the Museum of Moving Image, that end.
TJ: Oh, yeah.
Lawrence: And then I had a place at the other end, on 36th, just off Astoria Boulevard, between Astoria Boulevard and I think it would have been 28th Ave.
TJ: Oh, so your second location was very close to our second location. We were on 36th between—do you know where Single Cut was? The brewery over there? It was past, more towards Con Ed actually. So I was like a block away from Con Ed. So when that thing exploded that year, do you remember that? When it all turned blue and the sky turned blue, we were like across the street from it. We were like, "We're either going to die or we're going to get awesome superpowers." So I was kind of hoping for the latter, but yeah, it was a good time living in Astoria. It's a good neighborhood.
Lawrence: Do you get back there?
TJ: No, not so much. We went back to Astoria specifically once in the last five years. And it was right after things had settled from the pandemic and people were feeling more okay about being out in the world and being around other people again. And we went home to see family and we obviously flew into JFK and we drove through the old neighborhood and saw our old place and it was great. I mean, I miss Astoria. I miss New York a lot.
Lawrence: Yeah, me too.
TJ: Where are you now?
Lawrence: I am just south of Seattle.
TJ: Oh, so you went real other coast.
Lawrence: Yeah.
TJ: Gotcha. But that's still like a good city though, right?
Lawrence: It's a city. Yeah. I mean, I don't love Seattle as a city, but I love the region. It's very beautiful. I always tell people you can go 20 or 30 miles in any direction and be in a different topography. You want mountains, you want snow, you want ocean, you want island. In that regard, it's beautiful, but the city itself to me is not New York and nothing is.
TJ: I mean, you're speaking my language entirely. I can get very poetic and romantic about New York. I grew up in Westchester and my dad grew up in the Bronx, so I'm New Yorker through and through and I only went away to college. I went to Full Sail for a 12-month program at the time. I went in 2005. And so I was only away from New York and home for a year and change. So I spent most of my professional life, most of my adult life in New York. And being in a creative field and being a freelancer, being a musician, being around that energy that's just imprinted into the cement and every building and you're amongst so many other people that are—it's the hardest place in the world to live but when you succeed there, it's so inspiring. And to me, at least it was like, "Wow, I'm doing this thing." And there's just every other person on the street going through that same thing together. I never felt alone, even though I was mostly solo through the city. You can be amongst so many people, but be in your own lane, your own bubble, having your own day. Being in Austin, I don't have that at all. It's a pocket city. Nobody walks anywhere. There's a lot more ease to a lot of ways of life. And so over the past four or five years, I've had to figure out what my fuel is again. I would imagine maybe you feel a similar way. I've been to Seattle a couple of times, haven't spent any real amount of time there. I've been to Portland a good deal of time. So the Pacific Northwest is awesome, but it's got a different vibe altogether from the city. It's a different thing.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's interesting your point about being alone and amongst people. When I first moved to New York, it was in the mid-nineties and I lived in the Lower East Side, just a really special moment in time, but I didn't really know anybody. And I spent so much time wandering around Chinatown and East and West Village and just walking, going into restaurants by myself, and I realized that being alone, but being around the sound of people was really nourishing. I really enjoyed the solitude and the time to think, but also that the human energy was enough. I didn't need it directly. It was nice to be able to feed off of it. And it's really where I grew to appreciate and cultivate people watching or just sitting alone and having a meal with a magazine or a book. I'm really grateful I learned how to do that.
TJ: Yeah, I mean, even as you're talking, I'm getting emotional just thinking about this because it's the end of the year here. So it's a natural time to pause and reflect and think back on your past year and growth or not. And change or not. So thinking about life in the city and who I became, I attribute all of that to living in New York, existing in New York, because also at the drop of a hat, you could be completely and totally alone on the street and that is magic as well. I mean, how could that possibly be? You're in this city of millions of people and you turn one corner and you're on a block by yourself. It's so, there's just so much happening at all times in New York. And I just really love it. I think it would be a dream to go back in a different way, I think, than we were existing before we left. And maybe it's the type of thing where you gotta leave it to come back to it, because I also know there were days there where I was like, "I understand, I get why people freak out and lose their mind here, because there's so much pressure at all times." So I totally get it. So I definitely needed to leave it, I think, to reappreciate everything that it has and holds. It's interesting that you are feeling the same thing. We left three weeks before the pandemic. So our timing was like—we were laughing about it, not like, "Ha ha, this is funny, we did it," but kind of like, "Are you kidding me?" We would have been in this position three weeks later because we were in a two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, shared building, it was like one of those old kind of tissue box houses type of things. And we wouldn't have had enough space to go through it. We were still here with boxes unpacked and we were listening to The Daily on NPR. And I was like, "I think this might be an issue. I think this thing they're talking about might be a problem" and then three weeks later, it was just bam. So really crazy, but you remarked on the room and I don't know, life's so weird because I would not have had the ability to do this in New York. On the timeline that I did here, it probably would have taken a lot longer to do it there.
Lawrence: Can you articulate or can you observe or maybe can you debunk what I'm about to say? Do you think that there's a connection between physical spaciousness and the spaciousness in the Six Missing music, especially the new record or the new EP?
TJ: Yeah, that's a great question. I think what I have tried to do and what I think has been an interesting side effect of leaving New York is manufacturing that for myself. So that feeling of the chaos, the outward chaos, the outward noise, the kind of speed and pace at which New York City moved forced me naturally to go inward and find that calm and find that place of—like I said before, I really felt that just, I'm in my own bubble here, and I can observe it all from the safety of being almost stepping out of the stream. Moving here to Austin, I lost a lot of that natural inward time. So I think what I tried to do with the music, either subconsciously or not, is allow for myself to find that space again, because I had been lacking it. It let too much of the anxious thoughts, the obsessive thoughts, it let too much of that have too much room in my space. So I had to manufacture it for myself. And how I did that was just moving Six Missing at such a pace over the last few years—writing, being very regimented about the releasing. Through doing that, I think, now having the perspective of hindsight, looking back at the last few years, like you just elegantly put—so much more elegantly than I'm explaining right now—is that spaciousness needed to find a new home and find a new way to come out as it's been coming out in the music as self-soothing almost in a way.
Lawrence: Well, I mean that's actually a skill that not a lot of people come by naturally, the ability to self-soothe. We don't often talk about it that way but the inability to do that leads to a lot of potentially problematic behavior, right? Like you're looking for someone else to soothe you or calm you, or there are all kinds of people and things you can take refuge in. If you don't have that ability to channel and self-regulate, right? It's a root of a lot of destructive tendencies.
TJ: Yeah, and I'm happy to dive into that angle of my life a little bit because I'm 10 years sober, this past April.
Lawrence: Oh, congratulations.
TJ: Thank you.
Lawrence: I'm five and I was five in May, so we're in the same club.
TJ: Oh, wow. Yeah. Congratulations. That's huge.
Lawrence: Thank you.
TJ: So then you'll also maybe really sympathize with this, but I think acknowledging that I have addictive behaviors in my life is something that I've become more acutely aware of just because I'm maybe not doing these on the surface, more destructive things to me. So drinking, smoking, things like that—it doesn't mean that I'm not an addict. I think that my brain latches on to those things and that when you latch on to things that are maybe more outwardly acceptable—I see your awards in the back and I have a few of those too—it's like when we get to do those things and we're rewarded for our addictive behaviors of, for me, at least, being perhaps a workaholic and pushing myself too hard in that way. It's harder to acknowledge that is also like, "Hey, pal, that's also your addiction." Just being like, "This is awesome. We're doing really well. And we should keep doing this" instead of being like, "Are you okay? Are you burned out? Do you need a minute here to catch your breath?" Being that my life is split in two different ways, like professional being film and TV and commercial advertising, and then music and composition. I think it's funny to see how the sand gets poured into either bucket. Like when I'm feeling one way in one, how that affects the other one and vice versa. And I think that the more crazed I've got with the professional side or more intense, I'll say, the music has taken on a different form. Like the pendulum swings in the other way, which is like, it's my refuge, it's my respite, it's my place where I don't receive notes and feedback and meetings and all this stuff—this is for me. And when that thing ticks up a little bit, I notice, okay, maybe work isn't as high of a priority. So it's like this fine dance, continually just being a human being, but then also having that added layer of being an addict in so many ways.
Lawrence: Yeah. It finds its way out. It finds its way to manifest. It's definitely true. And even if some of the other ways it manifests don't initially seem problematic, like you said, you can end up in a similar place in terms of drawn energy, you talk about burnout. There's plenty of people who—I tried to quit drinking years ago, but I did it on my own, so I white-knuckled for a couple of years and before I knew it, I was compulsively eating or other things. It's not like it only wants to manifest in one way. It'll find the way to sprout its head.
TJ: I was actually going to ask you if you were open to talking about it. What you went through and kind of how you arrived at the point of being willing to stare at the issue.
Lawrence: Like my bottom?
TJ: I'm curious. I tried programs before and they didn't vibe for me. So I more or less did what you did, white-knuckle it, but I'm always so curious to hear what other people's perspective or journey through that was, just because I think it's good to know.
Lawrence: Yeah, I'm definitely—I'm probably overly comfortable talking about it. (laughter)
That's just fine. For me, it was definitely always alcohol, although there were other things involved along the way, but that was really my thing. And it started relatively young as a teenager. For a long time, it's almost embarrassing to talk about because it feels so stupid now, but it was a big part of my identity, like being a drinker and being the one that could keep going, and it was wrapped up in my ideas about masculinity. My dad was kind of a guy's guy. He was a cop. He drank, and I just thought it's like, that's what men did. And so that's what I did. But I also always had—I would say lowercase d depression and just a lot of noise in my head, a lot of negative thought patterns and obsessive negative thought patterns and some social anxiety. And so for years, the alcohol was medicinal in a way, you know, it allowed me to feel comfortable in my own skin, but I tell people when it stopped being medicinal, it turned poisonous.
TJ: Yeah.
Lawrence: And once it turned poisonous, it was a pretty rapid switch. And so in 2011, a friend of our family commits suicide while we were on vacation. And I was drinking pretty heavily. I basically just drank all the time. Like people didn't really perceive me as drunk. I just drank all the time. I remember thinking I could walk off a subway platform. I was in a really dark headspace and I was thinking the alcohol, one of these nights, the alcohol is going to lower my inhibition, I'm going to do something stupid. And so I quit. And I quit for like two and a half years. But like I said, I didn't really do anything else. I did some talk therapy, but I wasn't really dealing with—I wasn't in it. And so ultimately I picked it back up, moved out here. What happened was I was running really hard professionally, traveling a lot and just living a lifestyle that was really hard, hard, hard. I was working in a startup environment and it just became untenable. I don't have a specific tale to share in terms of—it wasn't just impacting me. It was impacting my relationship and I couldn't tell the difference between the feelings from the alcohol and my actual—I don't want to say mental illness, but my psychological state. And so I had to stop in order to figure out what was cause and what was effect and really get behind what was going on. And so I went to a meeting the day I stopped. I went to a meeting and it was the first time I had thought about the program because I always had these ideas about what it was like. I'm not like those people.
TJ: Yeah.
Lawrence: Of course turns out I was. (laughter)
TJ: Yeah, we share a lot in common.
Lawrence: And I kind of approached it like I'm not going to try to find the faults in it. You know, I think that's a lot of people bounce out of it because they're put off maybe by the God thing. And like, as an atheist, I just said, I'm just going to set that aside. I'm not going to worry about that. So I just didn't shoot holes in it. I just went and I shut up for a while. And early on, I met somebody who said it's really simple. Don't drink today, get the book, read the book, get a sponsor, do what he says. (laughter) It's like, all right, I'll do that. And it helped. I'm probably not as attendant to my sobriety as some other people are. Like I don't go to a ton of meetings. I like smaller meetings. I like men's meetings, but I don't go constantly, but I do other work. The compulsion was definitely lifted. I don't really think about it. I still—like a lot of people I've heard from—I still have dreams once or twice a year where there's an alcohol dream and it's really weird. Like somehow I'm drinking or I'm in an—I don't know, just alcoholism thematically in the dream, but it never results in me feeling like I would need to or want to. So I feel lucky.
TJ: Well, thank you so much for sharing that with me. I think that's—it just means a lot to hear that and share that space with you. That's really fascinating about the dream. I only just recently had a dream where I was drinking in it and I knew in the dream I was like, I'm feeling bad about this, I know I shouldn't be doing this. I'm letting myself down. I'm letting my wife down, but like you, there was a certain point along the 10 years where I just hit—I didn't think about it anymore. And I don't think about drinking in the same way I ever did. And I don't have a craving. I don't see people or I don't feel triggered by it. And I think that's very fortunate. But I think that the thing that I'm wondering with now, 10 years later is like, I never did the meetings. I never had a sponsor. I just decided it was done. And I don't think I addressed a single underlying issue of the reasons which—I echo what you just said almost to the word. I mean, my story is very similar to yours. High levels of social anxiety, depression, and alcohol stepped in to be that offer in a lot of ways and to help me feel like I could human today. So of course, I loved it. It's like so great. Oh, wow. I can make this stuff stop for a little while. I can make it quieter. I can make it feel more relaxed. I think the biggest thing that I realized when I stopped drinking was even within my group of friends, which were bandmates, music, bars, playing in bars, playing shows in New York City for no money, but getting drink tickets—even when I stopped at that point and looked around, I was like, "Oh, wow, people don't have the same issue as me in that way, like people don't drink as much." When you're drinking and you're drunk and you're in that kind of glow, you feel like everybody's on the same page as me, but I could then have that perspective to look back and be like, "Oh no, I was that person at the party, I was that guy that everybody else was looking at being like, 'Whoa, he's messed up.'"
Lawrence: You mean you weren't the charming talker? You weren't the charming raconteur, right? (laughter)
TJ: Yeah, exactly. Oh, my goodness. I know. But when I got that perspective, I think then that was where I was like, "Okay, this is—I've had enough of this. This is just a mess," and I had all my sneaky ways and I had all my stuff and I knew which booze shop to go to on which day because I knew the person working on the counter wouldn't judge me because I was just there yesterday and blah blah blah—I had the whole map.
Lawrence: Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, both ex-New Yorkers, both alcoholics, it's interesting to think of it through the lens of why maybe I miss New York so much is also because—I say this to my wife all the time—I need my bike to have some resistance on it, so to speak. Like, I can't just free spin because it's not good, it doesn't get me anywhere, and I just expend all my energy with nothing to show for it. So I need the bike to have the gears engaged and I have to have some resistance on the bike for me to push against to move forward. Not looping it back around to the music, but that's how I've been creating that for myself. Not in New York City. (laughter)
Lawrence: I have some specific questions about how this relates to the music, but because I had that sort of two and a half year period in New York when I wasn't drinking, I know I can live in New York. To me, New York does not equate drinking. I don't feel at risk when I go back. And I think that the more time I get under my belt, the more it actually makes me want to go back because I would love to have the experience again, more clear-headed. Not that it wasn't wonderful. I mean, it was a good run, but especially this time of year, I harbor this very irrational fantasy of living in New York from, let's call it like October 1st through New Year's because to me, that's just the most beautiful time of year to be there.
TJ: And it's perfect. Yeah, it's perfect.
Lawrence: Around January 1st or so going maybe to, I don't know, a calm desert or Marina del Rey Southern California, or Austin. Staying there till maybe Memorial Day and then coming up to the Pacific Northwest because quite honestly, for all my cracks about Seattle as a city, there's nowhere more beautiful in North America for July, August, September than up here. I mean, the weather is just—doesn't rain. It's temperate. It's sunny. There's so much activity to do. So that's my aspiration. (laughter)
TJ: Oh, I love that. I love that so much and I feel the exact same way, except I would probably, because I live in Austin, I would probably do the six-month-and-one-day type of thing, like a reverse snowbird type of situation. So I get seasonally depressed in the summer. I always have even growing up in New York. I just, I hate it. I hate the summer. I hate the long days. I hate the bright sunshine. It just makes me feel terrible. Like the smell of grass is the worst thing in the world. I'm such an indoor cat. I'm such a gloomy weather person. I'm such a shorter days type of person. 'Cause I can get a lot done in a short amount of time.
Lawrence: You should be here. This is like nirvana to you.
TJ: I trust me. If I was 10 years younger and not married, I would be out there in a heartbeat, but I do have another person to think about, and we're kind of the polar opposite in that way. My wife loves the sunshine, is not a fan of the heat as we experience here in Austin, but too many rainy days and she gets a little squirrely. So I would love—I mean, your plan sounds great, except I would probably do, I'd probably do May to January 2nd in New York, and then come back down here for the winter months, because there is something in New York where the winter goes on—it overstays its welcome for like two to three weeks and you're like, "Okay, this is bad. This is terrible. We're in the black slush and it is dark and all the Christmas lights are down and it's just freezing on the subway platform." So I will give my wife that at least. (laughter)
Lawrence: What was your relationship with ambient music before Six Missing? Was it something that you were a fan, student, participant? Is this your first foray into the field?
TJ: Yes, is the short answer. I had never really grown up listening to ambient music. I was a big fan of soundtracks and I think that was maybe the primer to ambient music. I really loved film scores. Even as a kid, I would get the cassette or the CD of the original soundtrack to the movies that I really loved and I would play them and I'd listen to them and I'd act out action stuff in my bedroom. I really loved how music created a mood and a vibe and how it could change my perspective of what was happening in my life. So one of my favorite things to do when I was in New York was pop on headphones and just listen to a score, a soundtrack, and kind of float through the streets and see how that changed how I was experiencing my day. And then I got sick. I got the flu once. And I was at work and I had a fever. I don't go down very often and this was taking me down and I had to go. And this is before COVID obviously where people just showed up to work because we had to be there and like, you're sick? Okay. Just stay in your room.
Lawrence: That's what you did.
TJ: Yeah. So I was real sick and I threw in the towel and I put in my headphones. I was waiting for the subway and I shuffled. I was like, I'm going to give—I had seen Risky Business recently and Tangerine Dream did the score to a lot of that film. I was like, I don't really know them though. I'll want to check them out. So I put on Tangerine Dream's Phaedra and between my fevered state and the ambient world that record created, I was like in this magic moment of in-between reality and dream worlds and I was like, "Holy shit. This is incredible. What is this? This track is like 18 minutes long and wow, this is fantastic. It goes to these places. It's hypnotic. It's mesmerizing." It does everything that a film score does but with synths and guitars and effects. And being that I was a musician and am—I was just hook, line, and sinker in on that. So that was kind of the thing that blew the top off the box for me with ambient music. And then I went to the classics like Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Paul Horn, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, like all of these just giants in the world. And I was rediscovering, it was almost like discovering the Beatles for the first time being like, "Wow, there's so much here." That was what got me into it. I've always been a fan of jam stuff, jam bands, and having those long extended periods of instrumental stuff. So it just ticked all the boxes for me as a musician in my very weird niche of checkboxes. So that was kind of like the moment that it happened and I can remember it clear as day. It's one of my favorite records. It's just so cool.
Lawrence: All right. So you brought it up. Who were your jam bands?
TJ: So my very first concert that—and I assume it's a safe place to talk about this—the very first place I ever smoked weed was at a Widespread Panic concert on Halloween at Madison Square Garden. It was insane. It was really crazy. So I started with Widespread and never really got into them, but then found Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead and Phish and Government Mule. And I did that whole kind of festival scene for a good long while where it couldn't be jammy enough. Like, just take me on a ride and let me go. I love it. So I guess not to be totally boring, but the classics, I guess. How about for you? Do you partake?
Lawrence: I'm very, I'm very heartened by your answer because I was very prepared to do some heavy judging. So... (laughter)
TJ: Oh, okay!
Lawrence: But I come at it through—you know, I was a Deadhead and then the Allman Brothers—the Allman Brothers in particular were a very important band for me. I just love them so much, and the Dead for a long time, and Widespread early on. I haven't seen Widespread probably since the nineties, but there was something about their edge. They were a little kind of rough around the edges.
TJ: Yeah.
Lawrence: I'm okay with Phish. I'm kind of indifferent, I guess I would say with Phish. I saw them a couple of times in the nineties. I wasn't really into the obsessiveness of the fan base. It just didn't feel like—I don't know. It just annoyed me.
TJ: You're saying as a Deadhead? (laughter)
Lawrence: I know that's a generational thing. Yeah. No, I get it. I get it. I totally get it. But I did go see the Dead at the Sphere over the summer.
TJ: Oh, really?
Lawrence: Yeah. I wasn't going to go. And then my ex-wife and my son bought me a ticket for my birthday and so I went by myself on my birthday and it was pretty—I was actually, it was pretty emotional. I found it very moving. I thought it was very well done. It was cool to reconnect with that music because I hadn't seen any of it live in a long time. And obviously it was such a sensory overload that you would have had to like almost put up defenses to not be overwhelmed by it. It was pretty powerful. It was pretty and it was beautiful. I mean, it was very well done for what it was. It did make me think like, "Wow, I would love to see what Brian Eno would do with this place." (laughter)
TJ: I know, right? I saw a lot of clips from people and just on social media of the Dead at the Sphere and it looked insane and I would find it hard to believe that I'd be able to be my younger self on certain substances there seeing it and not losing it. It's a really next-level type of experience. And I was going to say on the heels of that, nineties Phish is the peak that people hold Phish at. But I actually feel like the videos and the live stuff that I've been seeing of them of just even this past run this past year that they've been doing—it's like a new band almost, they have this new energy to them. And so I would say give it another shot maybe. But if you can find some of the stuff online, there are some really deep jams that are happening there. And I think that's what I've always loved about jam bands is that communication, that listening, that subconscious connection that the band is having with each other and taking the audience, lifting them up as well, and rising and falling and feeling that breathing energy that happens at a show, especially with a jam. I had a high school teacher who is still a musician, but was a musician. And he turned me on to the Dead in a way that I had never heard it before, because I'd always taken it as surface level. I'm like, "Okay, they're good." And he's like, "Yeah, but do you hear the nuances, the things that they're calling and responding to each other and how they're signaling to each other within the music and the phrases?" And when I heard it through that lens, it was like having a completely new experience and respect for what was happening. So here I am being a lover of being in a band and being a jam band. And now I turn into a total solo artist. It's the polar opposite of everything that we're even talking about. The communication that happens is with myself and with machines and all of this. So I kind of crave that a little bit every once in a while.
Lawrence: Is your music through-composed or is there a generative or improvisational element to it?
TJ: It depends on what I'm feeling at the moment. Like just even this morning, I turned on a synth, just out of sight, the Korg Poly Six, because it's one of those things where I feel like everything is a living breathing thing that has feelings and emotions, and I'm like, I haven't played this in a while. It probably feels bad about itself. I should probably play it and spend some time with it. And I started playing and something started happening. I literally couldn't start recording fast enough and I was like, "Oh wow, that's the pull that I was feeling towards this thing because it wanted to be played" and I know I'm getting a little woo-woo but, yeah. So in that moment, I had no idea what was going to come out, but I'm just kind of running with it now, seeing where that thread goes. I captured it, I put it in the machine, and now I will come back to that improvisational performance, either later today or weeks later, in some cases years later, and come back to it with a different head and take a compositional approach to it.
So there's both aspects all the time. And then within the modular EuroRack stuff, there is a generative element to it that I really like and appreciate because it's throwing curveballs at me that I get to then figure out how to make interesting. And I like that element of it.
Before I left the city and I was doing Six Missing, it looked a lot different. It was improvisational, a lot of guitar pedalboard looping things. And I would invite friends, like I'd book a show and then I would just invite friends to come the night of the show to play with me. And we would just do a total free-form, unrehearsed—I did a sold-out Rockwood set, which I am not tooting my own horn, but I'm just meaning people paid money to come see me. And I invited a friend that I hadn't even seen in two years. And he showed up 15 minutes before the soundcheck and I was like, "What's up, what are we doing?"
So that element of existing without a net is really thrilling to me. So I try to do that in the studio as much as I can because it's just so much fun to feel that feeling and then come back to it with a clearer head with your editing brain. I guess if you're a writer, you do that maybe sometime, just kind of get it all out on the page, get all the ideas out and then come back and figure out what should stay, what should go, or you just scrap the whole thing.
Lawrence: It's really fascinating for me to hear you relate those stories because I don't really talk about this too much on mic cause these conversations aren't about me, but I had a similar experience with a band I was in in the early mid-nineties in New Haven. There were two or three of us that had to be present for us to use the name of the band, but there were nights where we'd be nine people on stage and sometimes a duo and every configuration in between, but we never played unless we were on stage. And a lot of times, most of us didn't know who was even going to be there. Like one of the guys would just take it upon himself to wrangle a few people. It could be anything from guitar, keyboards, saxophone, trumpet, turntable, drummer, harmonium, whatever, and very similar to what you were saying, it would be 15 minutes before we had to do something and somebody would say, "Let's start in D." And I think that, "Yeah, such and such thing was in the news today. So think about that." (laughter)
TJ: Wow, that's—I would've loved to have been in your roster for that because that's exactly—like, on the way to the stage, we'd do the same thing. I'd be like, "I think we'll just, let's start in B. Let's just see where it goes." And it's interesting that you mentioned that because at the beginning of this, you mentioned being in the meetings and having to overlook the God element of it because of atheism. I'm very similar. I don't necessarily believe in that sort of religious element—trying to put this as nicely as possible—for me, music is my church. It's my everything. So when I would get up and commune with other musicians and other people, I never felt nervous about it. Like, "Oh, we're going to be a total train wreck in front of these people" because nah, we're here communicating together. This whole experience is going to be more or less, at the risk of sounding silly, like spiritual. We're really going to go somewhere with it. I would have been, and I still am—that's the type of thing that you were talking about—I would have been so on board to be called up to do a show like that. That's really my bag, because it sounds like you take it as seriously as I do. It's a very real thing. It's just great that music exists. My God. Thank God for it, really. And it's funny because I don't typically listen to ambient music outside of the music that I create or the music that I work with other people. A lot of the music that I listen to is like Beatles. This past summer, I rediscovered my love of '70s AC/DC, which was just pure unadulterated fun.
And I was relearning all the riffs and I was relearning all of Angus's solos and I was watching the videos. Man, there's this great YouTube channel where this guy is using AI restoration to upscale all this old VHS camcorder footage of early Bon Scott videos on tour. And I'm just like, "God, the energy that is there, it was just so fun." And it was so nice to not get caught up in the—it's four chords, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, solo, chorus out, and it's uncomplicated. It's just so freaking fun. So that's the type of stuff I listen to and it's funny that it probably influences Six Missing's output in a certain way that is unique to the project. But I'm not totally sitting and queuing up ambient music all day and day out type of thing.
Lawrence: Yeah, AC/DC is incredible. It's so easy to dismiss them, but it's so—of course, and I've lost touch with them over the last maybe decade or two. I saw them in the 2000s, but I don't really pay a ton of attention to them and probably like a lot of people of a certain age. If I'm going to go back to them, it's probably going to end at Back in Black, but my God, just how they perfected what they do, it's really stunning.
TJ: Actually, it's—you can't replicate it. They had such a tightness, such a sound. I mean, those records are like, Powerage. If you're a musician in a band and you've never heard the record Powerage, like what are you doing? Quit because you don't know what it's like to be in a band until you hear that record. That is the band with microphones in front of them. And the playing is so tight. And there are some YouTube videos of isolated tracks from Live at Donington of Malcolm. It's insane. It's insane, but the man is a machine.
Lawrence: I love those YouTube videos when people do that stuff.
TJ: Oh, yeah. I mean, I could—we could probably spend a whole hour talking about Angus and Malcolm and all of that. But I completely agree with you. It is high art and anybody that dismisses AC/DC, come on, get off it. It's just—they are the most fun and they're 70-plus and they're going out on tour 2025. Like that's crazy.
Lawrence: My sole objection with them is I'm not a big fan of Brian Johnson's voice and it's not great live. It was never a strong voice live, but well, you know, he's like the uncle, they're just the whole package. Although I do admit to some curiosity about when Axl Rose was their singer. I haven't really seen much video or anything from it. And I'm curious if it was any good because I could actually see that working.
TJ: Yeah, I was going to say, I wonder if there's a reason why we haven't seen the video of that, but I agree with you. I heard how that all came about, right? Like he stepped in last minute for them and like, how cool, going from the biggest band of the eighties to the biggest band of the seventies and eighties and nineties. How awesome that must've been. But I'm not sure. I haven't seen—I've seen some videos of Axl lately where I'm a little worried about him.
Lawrence: Yeah, but it's really interesting how they've reemerged as this nostalgia band and it seems like they can come around every year or two. They were the tail end of my interest in hard rock. In the eighties, I was a bit of a metal head. I grew up loving Ozzy and Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, like kind of the big dumb rock from the late '70s and early '80s. And then the Dead took over for me. And I've always been very—I've been very expansive in my musical tastes. I've been lucky that way to have an ear that can appreciate different types of music. 'Cause I don't really think for most people, the judgment is qualitative. I think they just can't hear it because you can train yourself to be able to hear music. And so Guns N' Roses aren't quite in my pantheon the way they are for some people. I understand their importance, but I just don't care as much. But it's really like if you had said to me 30 years ago, "Are they going to be touring in 2024?" I would have said they're not going to be alive. (laughter)
TJ: I know, right? Appetite for Destruction has some of the coolest guitar solos and lyrical guitar solos on that record that I haven't revisited in a long time. And now that I kind of remember—and it's been great talking about this because I'm totally loaded up now, "Mr. Brownstone" and all this stuff, man.
Lawrence: So it's like a greatest hits record, really?
TJ: Totally. Right. Like every single track on there, it's almost like Billy Joel's The Stranger, right? Like every song on that record is a hit and you know it because of that record. It's so wild.
Lawrence: In instrumental music, and this music in particular, how do you convey meaning? I go back to something you said earlier about being into scores and soundtracks. Do you use those sort of tropes and cues? Like if you want to say ominous, do you go low on the keyboard and hit a D minor? Because clearly you have a lot to express, right? There's—music is playing a very important emotional function for you. How do you do that in the absence of words?
TJ: Phenomenal question. One that I'd be happy to start teasing apart here. I mean, I think for me, I'm lyric blind. So whenever I've heard music, there are songs that I have listened to since I was growing up that I don't know the words to, but I know the music and the bass lines and the melodies and drum fills and all that stuff. So I think that for me, getting into instrumental was a very easy leap in that way, but as far as conveying the emotion, I don't know if I actually know. I think that what I'm trying to do is just let the boundary between myself and my emotions and my feeling and the recording process be as seamless as possible. And that's why I really like vintage equipment like synthesizers and things because I feel like they have a lot of emotion in them as well. And you're putting your hand on a physical knob and you're turning the knob and they're reacting differently to the weather even—like if it's cold, the synth is tight and it's uptight and it's not loose and it's rigid, so you get a different sound out of it than you do on a warm humid day where it's looser, more rubbery. I'm like, "Me too, man. Like, me too. I'm different every single day. Let's see how you are today."
And so, I think that I try to use the tools as a way to convey the emotion. So it's selecting sounds and vibe curation. Ugh, I can't even believe I said that in that way. That's what it feels like. It feels like I'm designing the sounds to match up to the emotion that I'm trying to convey and then of course through words and through writing about it and through videos and Instagram and all that trying to maybe give context to it.
Lawrence: What about titles? I ask a lot of artists about that. At what stage does a title come into the process and are the titles meaningful?
TJ: I was in a band where we would change the title of the song all the time and it would get so frustrating. We'd start a session, we'd call it "Dance Shoes," and then for me that paints a picture and a color in my head and everything that I do is within that lens of "Dance Shoes." And then we're gonna go and change it to, you know, actually now it's gonna be "Velvet Suit." I'm like, "Yeah, but now what we're doing with that doesn't feel like what I had done was motivated." I actually try to go with my first instinct and stick with it, because the song title, for me—not a hard fast rule, but the song title often dictates the vibe that I'm creating, so it's very much tied to it, and it's because it's created a literal feeling for me, like a visceral feeling or a color or a cinematic lens in which I'm seeing what I'm trying to do. So that's a great question. And maybe it was also me trying to go the opposite way of the last band I was in and be like, "No, just pick a lane and stick with it." (laughter)
Lawrence: Are you the type of composer who has the notes app on their phone full of titles, they come across little turns of phrase or things on a menu or whatever. And that's a title waiting to happen?
TJ: No, I'm not. I'm very much like the people that don't name their child until they meet him, that type of person where they're like, "We've got some names picked out" and that type of thing. No, I'm very much like, I want to see what it has to say first and then go from there with it. And either change it mid-stream or leave it be and never change it again because also I don't know—I'm a big believer in your gut instinct, your first instinct being the one that actually is the right thing and before your brain gets in the way and starts thinking about something. So I always try to go with whatever my first hit is, like somebody's offering me a job or an opportunity or something like this. And if my first instinct is like, "Oh yeah," but then my brain comes in and goes, "How are you going to do that?" I try to always listen to the gut. So I do that with the song too. If the song says it's "Delicate," that's what it's called.
Lawrence: I've really enjoyed the record. Every once in a while I come across some work that I feel like, "Man, this was target marketed for me. Did they pull my profile and make this album for me?" I'm on a pretty good jag of both instrumental music and ambient music and the modular synths do something really special to the somatic experience.
TJ: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for saying that and for the feedback and that's really great to know because this record in particular felt very personal in that way and that I was trying to work through a lot of stuff. I was worried that that could be potentially off-putting to the listening audience. So I appreciate your feedback and thanks for spending time with it too. That's really awesome.
Lawrence: Was it successful for you in terms of helping you with the help you wanted from it?
TJ: I think so. I don't really see a way in which it wouldn't be. I think it's good to let stuff go so even if it's not perfect, even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted to say—thinking about it back to it now, it's not fair because I'm here where I am now trying to experience where I was then. So I have to trust that what I was doing then in the moment was what was right and what had to happen. So, of course, it just feels good to put it out and let it go. And now it's not mine anymore. It's everyone else's and they'll have their experience with it. And that's the point of it. And that's why making music, making art is just so important and so fun. And that's why I don't know why we would automate joy and automate art with AI. I mean, I get its benefits, but there's something that happens when you come across something that's crafted by a human being for human beings.
Lawrence: I will say this, this topic comes up fairly often when I speak with artists, but it's definitely helped me develop this sort of thesis that the music of the late '70s and the early '80s, especially the synth-driven music of that era, we all seem to return to it a lot, and it always seems to come back cyclically, and I'm really of the mind that it's because of the analog nature of the synths before everything went fully digital. We still feel the overtones and the distortion, like the imperfection, the human part of it, the having to turn the dials and press the buttons, like you said earlier. I think that has created a real affinity for people, even the pre-digital—you know, you mentioned the person that upscans the videotapes, there's something very attractive about those weird washed-out VHS tapes. And I think it goes beyond nostalgia because it seems to be affecting people who weren't there the first time. They're just drawn to the aesthetic.
TJ: Yeah, and that's a big reason—I mean, I've been using a lot of tape lately, a lot of reel-to-reel. And I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine. He's like, "You've been doing that a lot with stuff that seems to be the magic sauce, right?" And I was like, "Yeah, I think that it's because the same way that I find digital photography to be beautiful, I find analog film, 35 millimeter, even movies, 16 millimeter, eight millimeter, real film—there's a depth. There's a depth that you can't just fake because it's this chemical process of light hitting paper and using a human, it's a surprise to the filmmaker a lot of times what they're going to get in that shot when they develop it."
And I think the same thing with tape machines. There's just this—look, sometimes my power fluctuates and the tape goes a little faster and it jumps and it's like, "Hey, how cool. This thing is really alive." And there's just a depth you can't really fake. I think you can get really close to it with a lot of this stuff, which is great because, talking about prohibitive costs to a lot of these things that are analog in this way and upkeep and all of that—and somebody just starting out can't spend $3,000 on a reel-to-reel—like having a plug-in version of it to get that kind of sound is just as good. But I agree with you. I think that there's an imprint in the music specifically, in the synths. There's an echo of humanity that people really latch on to subconsciously that make these things live far beyond their creators.
TJ Dumser
Six Missing
Sometimes we need music that stops us in our tracks…
and reminds us to connect with the moment we’re currently experiencing, and that’s exactly what the compositions of Six Missing provide.
The new music from ambient artist TJ Dumser is a reflection not only on our current life and times but the totality of existence itself—what it means to face true transience in an ever-changing world, and how to welcome impermanence as its own holistic virtue. These sounds are all-encompassing in their beautiful ability to fill every inch of sonic space in their surroundings, composed with a lushness and an intuitive touch that only a truly thoughtful soul such as Dumser could provide.
The Austin-based Dumser began releasing music under the name Six Missing in 2017—a moniker that possesses a literally otherworldly meaning to him. “One of our members had a studio in Pennsylvania, and one of the weekends we’d been out there we were recording for 14 hours and were exhausted,” he recalls on the incident that inspired him to take on the namesake. “We went back to the cabin, everybody went to bed, and I heard the front door to the cabin open. As I went to see what it was, I was frozen and felt this searing pain in my back, as well as an endless sadness. I was having a supernatural experience, and it really shook me.”
Further research revealed that the cabin was near the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brandywine, in which six participants remain unaccounted for—and, when combined with Dumser’s hair-raising experience, the name Six Missing came to be. “I thou… Read More
