Interview: Andrew Dickson of Ex Ox

Ex Ox is the latest music project of former Tricky Woo frontman Andrew Dickson. If you don’t know Tricky Woo, let me tell you a little bit about them. They were a garage rock revival/hard rock band formed in Montreal in 1996 and they were active in the late 90s/early 2000s. If you really want to feel like you’re in a time machine and listening to music that’ll make you go “This isn’t classic rock?” then give them a listen. I’ve been familiar with their music ever since I was a teenager starting to dip my toes into the world of classic rock. One day I stumbled upon some CBC Radio 3 podcast and they featured one of their songs “Don’t Get The Music Worried” and I loved it when I first listened to it. I looked up the band and saw this photo of them where they looked straight out of the 70s:

Anyway, after Tricky Woo broke up in the 2000s, Andrew moved onto other projects, playing in bands like Soft Canyon and Mongrels before embarking on a new solo endeavour, Ex Ox, ambient music/Krautrock style music inspired by musicians like Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Mort Garson. Andrew started working on this music project after surviving a car wreck and that experience inspired the album Nervous Complaint, which he recorded in his studio in the woods of Quebec. Much like Brian Eno, it’s not just an audio experience, but also a visual experience with Nervous Complaint‘s visuals being psychedelic, mesmerising, and trippy. They remind me of old school visuals like lava lamps or liquid light shows mixed with more modern 2000s visualisers from iTunes and Windows Media Player with some nature and eerie imagery at times – reminds me of stuff I’d see at art museums. I’ve been listening to a lot of ambient music lately since it’s often my go-to music for relaxing and I really enjoyed Andrew’s take on ambient music and the visuals that went along with it. You can watch the visual album on YouTube:

Or stream it on Spotify:

It’s even being released on cassette too, for those who love physical media and having collectables! You can purchase a digital copy or the cassette on Bandcamp.

We’re lucky to have Andrew here with us to talk about his music and his journey. If you want to learn more about him and his music, keep on reading!

Angie: How would you describe your music to a new listener?

Andrew: Nervous Complaint is so experimental that it can be hard for me to boil it down to a mix of genres.  I’ll say it’s inter-dimensional, electronic, ambient but it’s also prog rock and drone and psychedelic and even classic rock. Whatever it took to convey the ideas. The album is almost entirely instrumental because I couldn’t find words for what I was feeling or thinking. I had to process and translate it all into sound to get close to communicating what I was experiencing in my body and brain and world. Nervous Complaint is the result of that translation. For a new listener, I’d just ask them to take this 47 minute journey and see where the mind goes, see if it reveals to you some part of your humanity. 

Angie: Why the name Ex Ox? 

Andrew: I was DJing for a couple years at a dive bar under the name Electric Oats playing electro oddities like Mort Garson mixed with the Italian prog of Goblin, weird disco mixed with soundscapes I would record earlier that day (sort of one time sonic events). Those sound scapes took over and Ex Ox was born. I kept the E and O from Electric Oats and Ex Ox just kind of appeared in my mind as a name I could work under. Also I’m a Taurus and I have a tendency to bulldoze. Just put my head down and ram my way through life. Strap a problem to my shoulders and drag it behind me. A real beast of burden vibe.  I’m trying to take a different approach these days. I, myself, am an ex ox.

Angie: How did you get into classic rock and playing music inspired by that in previous music projects like Tricky Woo?

Andrew: For as long as I can remember I have been in love with the musical period roughly between 1967 to 1972. Visually, sonically, all vibeology. From the imaginative wonder of Arthur Lee’s Love, to the fiery, electric joy of The MC5, to the outerworldly magic of Yes. That love affair exploded when I started Tricky Woo in 1996. That band was my love letter to rock and roll. I was on a mission to bring that explosive energy back into rock n roll – a genre that was kind of feeling stale or maybe jaded at the time.

Angie: What are your favourite classic rock albums?

Andrew: So many, but here are 5 I love (in no particular order): Forever Changes – Love. Led Zeppelin I.  Black Rose -Thin Lizzy. Dreamboat Annie – Heart. Seed of Memory – Terry Reid.

Angie: How did you get into Krautrock, ambient, and experimental music?

Andrew: Going back to that sweet spot of 1967 to early 70s. Krautrock and experimental electronic music was very much a part of that creative awakening I experienced growing up. Exciting in a different way. Darker. More hypnotic. Discovering people inventing their own instruments or creating sounds that some people wouldn’t even classify as ‘music’ really inspired and expanded my understanding of the medium of sound as art.

Angie: What Krautrock and ambient albums would you say are a good introduction to the genre?

Andrew: I’d suggest Can – Tago Mago. Tangerine Dream – Phaedra.  Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe

Angie: I read that a near death experience in a car accident was the inspiration for Nervous Complaint, can you tell me the story of that?  

Andrew: Maybe less the inspiration and moreso the necessary byproduct of this confrontation with mortality. I was driving down a rural highway which I drive almost daily. I ran over metal debris, both my passenger side tires exploded at 100km. My truck flipped multiple times on the road, then multiple times down a ravine/ irrigation ditch. Glass, metal, all my possessions swirled around me. A bit like being weightless in space. I landed In 4 feet of bog water. The safety air bags had not deployed.  As my vehicle flipped and rolled the doors blew off. I felt the force pulling me out so I grabbed on to the steering wheel so tight I broke it off. Somehow I survived. All emergency services could not understand how I survived. I did sustain serious injuries, some are with me forever now. But I feel lucky. Plus, for the first time in my life, I had to take some time off work. I had no choice. I had been learning home recording for many years, making pieces of things, but that combination of time off and an existential need to process the trauma of the crash through creativity made me so focused on Nervous Complaint. Everything is in there. Being inside an MRI machine and coming home to the woods and listening to birds chirping.  Political dread and emotional quandary. It all got stirred up while my truck was tumbling, flipping again and again. The album is what my body and brain did when I didn’t know what to do.

Angie: What kept you motivated as a musician after the accident?

Andrew: Music most definitely got me through the darker days of recovery, as the love of music does for most of us. And as I said before, the accident also put my ‘adult’ life on pause. These pauses can be magical creative moments when we have people around to support us through the mundane. Also, maybe it’s cliché, but having a near death experience gave me a kind of sense of urgency or compulsion to leave this mark. Nothing is as motivating as the threat of death haha.

Angie: What was it like writing, recording, and making the visuals for Nervous Complaint?

Andrew: I recorded the whole album by myself. In the past I have gone into studios, worked with bandmates, engineers etc… Over the years I have taught myself, learned from every source I could find about digital recording, mixing and producing. I built a small studio in the woods where I live. As my experiments multiplied, an album began to develop. I started learning video editing software so I could create moving pictures, visual art to go with the sonics. By mid album I was working these media in tandem. Visuals and music at same time. Sometimes the visuals would inspire me to take the audio in a different direction. It really expanded the process in fresh ways. It was a new kind of freedom, taking my time, answering to no one but my own visions and ideas. My good friend Pat Sayers plays drums on one track, and my spouse helped me record odd stuff like using a water jug as a gong, but otherwise it was all me, every bit of it. So the process was very solitary, but at the same time, it opened me up.  

Angie: What were the inspirations behind the visuals?

Andrew: Visual art has been with me since childhood, from cut and paste flyers for punk shows, to the dreamy days of art school studying sculpture and making conceptual installations, to catching prism lights in the mirror while brushing my teeth. I need art like I need oxygen. I hope the Nervous Complaint visual album expands on the themes of the music. Both pieces felt like they needed to be part of the story.

Angie: What themes does Nervous Complaint explore?

Andrew: I think the real theme of Nervous Complaint is me coming to terms with my own humanity.  Like, I always kind of saw myself as an alien or a robot, something about me that was different than other people. Saw the world differently. I thought differently. Introverted. An outsider. But I was an athlete growing up so I brought that sense of athleticism to everything I did: art, music, work. Then the car wreck happened and I was physically weak and I couldn’t think straight. Then I’d look at the news and feel angry and confused about what humanity is doing to itself. The whole album is a push pull tension between humanity and alienation, between order and chaos, between hope and despair, between analogue and digital, natural and unnatural. I’m trying to create a road map, or a neural link, that connects all of these places where I find myself.

Angie: What differences and similarities do you find between the garage rock music style music you played back in the day compared to your current ambient/electronic music?  

Andrew: My spirit and work ethic and musical process is very similar to the boy I was in Tricky Woo. I come from a bloodline of builders. I have always made things. Gone to literal and metaphorical woodsheds and workshops to practice my dark, creative arts. But the music I’m making, the work I’m producing now couldn’t be more different than the songs I wrote for Tricky Woo.  

Angie: What was the rock music scene like in Canada in the 90s?

Andrew: It was the mix of grunge and homogenised rock that polluted the airwaves.  I was a young man in love with Steve Marriott and The Damned, and part of a generation who had been drained of joy by Regeanomics and the AIDS crisis and other crises. I felt something had to be done to re-stoke the fires. The rock and roll people got together and internationally a garage rock/ rock and roll movement started that was a true celebration. A reclamation of sweat and joy. We relied on each other because everything was word of mouth.  Everything was a guy who knew a guy – networks of people who got their information from flyers on record store counters and photocopied zines, and posters wheat-pasted on telephone poles.  It had its pros and cons.

Angie: How would you say you’ve evolved as a musician since the 90s?

Andrew: I am an artist who has worked and lived pre internet and with internet. Again, both have their pros and cons of course, but the sheer magnitude of how those two worlds differ is galactic.  I’ve evolved into a cyborg as a musician. Half man, half computer.

Angie: Any words for your fans?

Andrew: Sharing the experience of music with others is a life affirming event. It is primal. It is love.

You can follow Andrew on Instagram and the website he runs with fellow creative Amy Torok, Torok/Dickson.

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