Holy Sons

Emil Amos, a participant in both Om and Grails, has sustained Holy Sons as a persistent home-recording venture that surfaced toward the end of the 1990s, drawing on lo-fi psychedelia and avant-garde folk traditions. A versatile multi-instrumentalist and exceptionally productive songwriter, Amos has issued material at a near-annual pace across the decades, with key examples such as Staying True to the Ascetic Roots in 2002, Drifter's Sympathy from 2009, and In the Garden in 2016. He initiated the Holy Sons project on his own around 1992 once an earlier band dissolved, turning instead to four-track home sessions that amassed hundreds of songs and fragments chiefly for personal therapeutic reasons rather than public distribution. After relocating from North Carolina to Portland, Oregon in 1999, Amos integrated rapidly into the regional music community and helped establish the heavy instrumental outfit Grails in 2000. Holy Sons' debut arrived shortly afterward as Lost Decade, a compilation of recordings made between 1994 and 1999. The subsequent annual releases Staying True to the Ascetic Roots and Enter the Uninhabitable adopted a more expansive band-oriented approach than the earlier lo-fi work. I Want to Live a Peaceful Life followed in 2003, advancing the recording fidelity. When Grails toured Europe in 2004, Amos frequently opened the concerts performing as Holy Sons. In addition to these activities he served increasingly as a session player in one-off ensembles or pickup groups alongside artists from Daniel Johnston to Jandek, joined Om, and formed the production-oriented electronic project Lilacs & Champagne shortly before moving to Brooklyn in the early 2010s. Holy Sons maintained steady productivity throughout, issuing new albums or archival collections every few years across multiple labels. Thrill Jockey released The Fact Facer in 2014, returning to the project's atmospheric origins; Amos recruited Brain Markham and Adam Bulgasem of Dommengang to perform the material so that Holy Sons could convene on either coast as needed. The follow-up, Fall of Man, was tracked in both cities with co-producers Brandon Eggleston, Al Carlson, and Jeff Saltzman before its Thrill Jockey release in late summer 2015. In 2016 Holy Sons issued the '70s pop/rock-influenced In the Garden, produced by John Agnello whose prior credits include Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Buffalo Tom, and featuring the single "It's My Feeling." Two years later Lost Decade III appeared, followed in 2020 by Raw and Disfigured.