In the vast universe of metal, industrial metal occupies a special place: unlike many other subgenres, it often puts electronic instruments like synthesizers and samplers front and center — usually played with so-called MIDI controllers. For melodies, that might be a USB-connected keyboard; for drums or individual samples, a pad controller; and for effects, rotary knobs or faders are often used.
The basic principle is actually not all that complicated and works like this: MIDI does not transmit audio data, or sounds, but MIDI-control signals (= Musical Instrument Digital Interface). In other words: how hard a key is pressed (= how loud), which key is pressed (= pitch), and for how long (= note length). These control signals are interpreted by the sound generator, the synthesizer — whether as software or dedicated hardware — which then produces the corresponding sound. Technically, that works perfectly well; sexy, though, is another matter.
Tristan Shone, aka AUTHOR & PUNISHER, cannot and does not want to be satisfied with that approach. So for a little over 20 years, the trained medical engineering specialist has been building his own control elements. But these have very little in common with the off-the-shelf controllers mentioned above: for Shone, the fiddly operation of tiny or low-quality plastic knobs had to give way to a more “physical” concept — at the cost of weight and simplicity.
The setup at Feierwerk Munich for the concert with KING YOSEF later that evening makes this very clear: Shone needs up to 20 road cases, each weighing just under 22 kg, for his live performances. That’s the limit for a single piece of luggage on flights, at least if you want to avoid oversize baggage fees. It is therefore understandable that the full-scale rig can only really be admired in the USA, while he uses a more manageable setup for his international shows.
Setting up the entire machine can take almost an hour, and thus significantly longer than for most other musicians — and it rarely goes off completely without a hitch. There are the USB ports, which often need a little contact cleaner to get going, simply because the interface was not designed for constant plugging and unplugging or the rough realities of stage life and is therefore mechanically vulnerable. Or the eight hand-soldered gooseneck piezo microphones, each with different vocal effects, which may be solid and more than roadworthy, but are still not completely immune to loose connections.
During soundcheck, it also becomes clear how much physical effort AUTHOR & PUNISHER’s custom controllers demand. The left hand essentially handles bass lines and melodies, the right hand all the percussive sounds, meaning the drums. On top of that comes vocals. In terms of multitasking, Shone’s performance is no less demanding than that of a singing drummer in MASTODON or BRUTUS. Moving his limbs so independently of one another is no small feat. Shone’s trademark sound — a distorted, low-frequency wall of bass — is a complex combination of two distorted guitars and around eight synthesizers of different origins, all played together and guaranteed to make your ears wobble more than a little, Shone explains between tests of the individual modules.
All in all, it is hardly surprising that the interview can take place much later than planned. Before anything like relaxation can set in, one technical problem after another has to be solved — something Shone, in the finest MacGyver tradition, handles with complete routine.
Hi Tristan, thank you for your time. How is the tour so far?
Tour’s been great. It’s a short one. We were hitting some of the places in the UK with the new album. Glasgow, Bristol, London, and two festivals. It’s great. So it’s basically just 12 shows, a quick European trip, it’s great.
What do you like more, festival shows or club shows?
Festivals are exciting because of the big crowd, and you can definitely pick up some new fans there. But I think I get the most satisfaction from headlining club shows. You get to do your own thing and play the full set, with all the build-ups and breakdowns you’ve designed into it. You can bring your own lighting package and everything, and there’s usually a bit less stress too.
How would you describe yourself as an artist in a few words or sentences?
I’d say that, in general, I see myself more as a gear artist — almost like a sculptor or instrument designer, or just a gadget guy, really, rather than a musician in the traditional sense. I’m especially drawn to the gear I’m building, and honestly, that excites me more than writing an album sometimes. But when I do get into writing, I go very deep into it. So maybe something like a robotic sculptor would be the best description.
There are obvious influences in your music — I hear GODFLESH or MINISTRY, for example — but then you chose to cover a PORTISHEAD song. So could you tell me more about your influences?
A lot of that comes from the late ’90s, which was a really special time for me, especially while I was in college and growing a lot as a person. Back then I was listening to bands like HIS HERO IS GONE, NEUROSIS, GODFLESH, and QUICKSAND. At the same time, my roommates were really into the New York scene — they’d go out to raves and all kinds of shows — and since we were studying upstate, we’d head down to New York City on the weekends. That exposed me to bands and artists like CANNIBAL OX, stuff released on the DEFINITIVE JUX label and a lot more hip-hop.
Then, as the 2000s went on, YOB became one of my favorite bands, and I actually got to play with them a few times, which was amazing. More recently, I’ve also been drawn to more mellow stuff — PORTISHEAD, for example, and bands like MOUNT EERIE. I really like that more subdued, guitar-based music, along with a lot of dub, especially old Jamaican dub.
How do you usually start a song?
When I really start writing an album, I make sure everything is set up in the studio with a loud soundsystem and a lot of bass, because I need to feel inspired and physically feel the sound. I compose on my full live setup. I usually have a few beers and try to keep it fun, because I’ve had to write albums on a deadline before, with the label expecting delivery before I’d even really started — and that just makes it feel like a job. These days, I prefer to sit back and let ideas come out naturally. Once I get a feel for the sound, I switch into a more live approach: no click track, left hand on the controllers, right hand on the drums, microphone ready, and then I just experiment.
Your music sounds a lot like movie soundtracks, it has a certain atmosphere that reminds me of films like „Blade Runner“, much heavier for sure, with certain synth sounds — let’s call them VANGELIS-type synths. Are you a visual person? Do you get inspired by images from movies or literature when you write a song, or is it more abstract than that?
I don’t really use images, no. It’s mostly about whatever vibe I’m in at that moment, or whatever I’m listening to at the time. But of course films like „Blade Runner“ come to mind, and I read a lot of sci-fi, so lately I’ve actually been more influenced by the books I’m reading than by the music I’m listening to.
I also love those older films — „Valhalla Rising“, for example — and a lot of Lars von Trier’s movies. They can be psychologically brutal, even if they don’t necessarily have huge, dramatic soundtracks, and that really affects me. „Melancholia“ is a great example: it’s incredibly crushing, but also beautiful. I like to think in that kind of space sometimes.
My wife always tells me not to watch films like that right before bed, because then I can’t sleep. She says, “You need to stop doing that at night.” I do enjoy a Pixar movie or something mellow now and then, but for the most part I’m drawn to pretty brutal stuff.
I guess I’m a calm, relaxed guy in everyday life, but part of why I feel that way is because I listen to extreme music. I think it’s the same with certain movies and other heavy, intense things — I really resonate with that, and in a strange way it calms me down. When I’m hiking, I can suddenly think of some old film that really stayed with me, and then I get excited about going home, relaxing, and watching something vicious.
Does the need for a new hardware interface arise while songwriting?
Yeah, all the time. For example, I designed this platter that clicks because I wanted a controller with detents, so I could randomly choose samples and not really know what is coming. I’ve got hundreds of samples loaded into a drum rack, and I can just pick anything. For the next album, I’m thinking about a different controller, though. The issue now is that I’m playing with a guitar player, so I need to hit pitch bends more precisely and start on the same note every time. With a regular pitch bend, you can land slightly off, so I’m redesigning a device with four or five keys that slide together and always begin at the pitch I want. That way Doug and I can start the bends together, consistently, song by song.
How long does it take from the initial idea to the fully working controller?
It’s a lot faster now because with „Drone Machines“, this company that I’m starting. I have a partner now, one of my old friends, this guy Adam, a product design engineer, so we can get stuff made a lot quicker now. And he helps me prototype stuff and testing it. If the electronics are already done. I can get something made now in a month from when I think I’ve prototyped it to when it’s done. And I also have 3D printers. As much as plastic sucks, it allows me to prototype it very fast. So I get all the parts. I can put them together. They screw together. They’ll melt in the heat of the summer. But then, once it works technically, I can get the stuff made out of metal.
Does your music also stem from a kind of psychological need?
That’s an interesting way to put it. I’m a very nice person, but lately I’m mostly out here for myself and for making this sound happen. Sometimes I do get stressed, and I don’t enjoy being approached as much as I used to, especially when people grab me and expect a conversation right away.
I feel bad about that, because I’m still a very social person. But mentally I’m older now, and I just don’t have the same energy I used to. So I try to put that energy into the performance instead, while the social side of touring can definitely be tough.
So it’s more the engineer in you who wants to improve things and smooth them out?
Exactly. It’s exciting. I think I’m always building toward something, and that’s a big part of it. Every time I go on tour, I try to do something different. In fact, I’ve got this box of new devices I built that I’m planning to introduce within the next seven days — I’ve programmed them, but I’ve never used them live. I want to debut them in a little video and share them. On the last tour it was lights; this tour it’s these new devices. It’s always a new innovation I introduce. So it’s never just a case of setting everything up once and then forgetting about it.
How come you suddenly have a permanent guitarist with you? What was the idea and process behind it?
I’m a metalhead, really, when it comes down to it. And I love MESHUGGAH. I love all sorts of metal and GODFLESH. When I’m hitting my key, I can… Designing that tone that we’re listening to right now is something that I just love. The GODFLESH Selfless album was one of my favorites because it had these chuggy riffs. And I was like, man, I wish I could do that. So my tone became a little bit more like a bass. With like a… And I sort of retweaked it. And then Doug comes in. So when I wrote this album, I started playing guitar. I would record the guitar riffs and then take those to the studio and play along with them. And so it just worked. Because then now I can weave in and out of the main riff. And I think it’s bigger sounding than it used to be.
Where did you guys meet?
He was in a band called A LIFE ONCE LOST, a metalcore-ish band from Philly. He took AUTHOR & PUNISHER on tour in 2012, and after that we toured together on Phil Anselmo’s solo project, with Doug handling lights. We stayed in touch after that, and when I eventually needed a guitar player, it turned out he was much more than that — he’s also a partner who can drive, help with merch, and keep things running smoothly.
Is it hard after all these years as a solo-artist?
No, it’s actually much better. I do get lonely on tour, and it helps to have someone who can lift me up when I’m exhausted or sick of people. It’s also great to have someone who can take over mentally for me sometimes.
Did you rewrite guitar parts for older songs that didn’t have any guitar?
For the older songs, Doug learned them as they were. On the last album „Krüller“ another guitarist — who was also my manager at the time — wrote the parts, but he was never going to tour , so Doug learned those instead. For everything before that, we’ve adapted things as needed. For example, some songs had to be lowered by a whole step because my voice can’t go as high anymore. Doug brings more of a psych, messy energy and he really loves playing songs like that — almost a bit KILLING JOKE-like. Actually I’m introducing him to more dub stuff. He’s more into psychedelic music, and now that we’re playing and writing together a lot, I want to make sure that when I write new music, the guitar player connects with it too.
That’s a nice contrast to your quantized MIDI machinery, when there’s a messy guitar.
That’s exactly how we felt about it. If you think about industrial music, a lot of guitar players use digital gear and everything is super tight and compressed. We do use the Quad Cortex (= digital guitar amplifier capable of high-quality emulation of virtually all classic analog tube amplifiers), because it’s awesome — but that still isn’t really Doug’s style.
Talking about your latest album „Nocturnal Birding“, the concept felt a bit unusual to me: Bird’s voices are very natural, and not something you’d normally connect with industrial music. What’s the story behind that?
First of all, I’ve never really felt connected to industrial music in the broader sense. I only say that because, aside from GODFLESH and maybe MINISTRY, the whole industrial world — THROBBING GRISTLE, SCORN, SWANS back in the day — is really closer to what I relate to. But all the leather-and-chains stuff that came later, that’s never been my thing. I see myself more as a doom band, honestly.
I hike a lot, I love birds, and I got really into birding and identifying them while I was out walking. I started using the Merlin app and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s huge bird-sound archive, and I went through thousands of sounds, writing down the ones with interesting melodies and rhythms. For some birds, I actually started building songs around those patterns.
At the same time, I also thought a lot of those sounds were strangely industrial. If you slow bird voices down, they can sound distorted, almost like glitchy IDM (=Intelligent Dance Music) or SQUAREPUSHER-type material. The rhythms are naturally irregular, not quantized, so when you distort them, they create really interesting patterns.
You use a lot of samples in your music. You filter and distort them until the original is not recognizable anymore. Often the result is a strange, loud and noisy soundscape. Why use samples if you know nothing of the original remains after you process it? Is that random, or do you already have an idea in mind?
I think you always need a seed for an album, because you can’t really write one in a vacuum. You need something to start from. On „Beastland“ I got really into this Indian toddler drumming, and I found YouTube videos of people recording in their bedrooms in different parts of India. I took the audio from those videos, chopped it up in the Octatrack (= Hardware sampler for tempo-synced playback of audio snippets), and built the material from there. That’s where all those samples for „Beastland“ came from.
With „Krüller“ it was similar: I took a bunch of material from a friend, went out to the desert, recorded a lot of stuff, then brought it back and chopped it up. And with this album and the birds, it was the same idea — I needed something to begin with. I’m not going to sit down and write a punk riff.
The political and social situation in the USA is, let’s say, difficult. Are actual events an inspiration for you as well?
Lyrically, yes. From a musical perspective, it’s more indirect, but it is part of my life. I volunteer with a hiking group that drops water for migrants coming from Mexico into the US, so that hiking side connects there too. A lot of those people are also really into birdwatching, just like I am. On that album, the lyrics tie those ideas together: birds migrate, humans migrate, and there’s a connection there. Once I started thinking about birds, I also thought about the wall and how some species are getting stranded because they can’t cross it. For example, the bighorn sheep in San Diego are now critically endangered, and that’s tied to Trump building two walls. So yes, that definitely feeds into the lyrical side of things.
You’re not really a remix guy, even though you make electronic music. The only remixes I know of are the BONG-RA-EP from 2014. How come?
I don’t know — I think I’ve just been burned enough times doing remixes for other people. I put a lot of time into them, and then they kind of disappeared into the void and never really got many listens. It’s the same with collaborations: I’ve said yes to some things and turned down multiple vocal guest spots and gear guest spots on other projects. I like doing what I do, and I don’t feel like I need to chase that kind of thing. Sure, collaborations can be really nice for fans, but for me they often feel more like a chore — something I should do to get more popular, even though I don’t really want to.
Talking about collaborations, there are some artists on your recent album you’ve worked with. How did you choose them?
I think KINTARI was the first one, because that whole thing started with an Indonesian fashion collective called „Future Lounge“. They’re kind of an electropunk fashion group making masks and cyberpunk-inspired stuff. One night I just wrote to them on Instagram and said, “Hey, let’s do a mask collaboration.” I don’t know if you’ve seen the press shots where I’m wearing that mask with motors on either side. So I got in touch, we agreed to do that, then I suggested making a music video, and that came together too. After that, I asked if we should collaborate with an Indonesian musician, and they recommended KINTARI — that’s how that happened.
With COUCH SLUT, it was my manager who handled it. He put their stuff out on Brutal Panda, which is his label, so he organized that and got Megan to sing on the track, which was really cool. And with FANGE, we’d met at „Rock In Bourlon“-Festival the last time we played there in 2023. I just said, “Let’s do it.” Those guys were completely on top of everything — very organized, very mechanical, methodical, and calculated. That one really turned into a banger. It’s just so easy to play, too, so it’s one of those songs I really look forward to doing live because it almost feels like a break. We sort of do it like this: it’s one of those songs where I sequence the double-kick drum, because I can’t actually play double kick myself, and Doug has to weave in between the guitar parts. It’s kind of funny.
What are your thoughts on current developments in AI?
From a musical perspective, I have no interest in bringing any of that into what I do. I’m sure are already virtual instruments with AI engines built into the synth algorithms at some point, but I haven’t used them and I’m not really interested. I’m happy with the plugins and instruments I already use. I tend to pick three or four synths for an album and stick with them, and I’ve been using the same main drum sounds since „Beastland“, with only a few tweaks. From an engineering standpoint, it’s a little different. I write the code that translates motion into MIDI signals myself, and in theory I could probably use AI for that, but honestly I don’t see the point right now. What I do is simple enough that it’s easier just to do it myself. I know AI has become pretty standard in programming tools, but for me it still feels more optional than necessary. I’m trying to avoid AI at every step.
Looking back at your career and touring life, is there one clear highlight you always come back to when you feel like you’re not sure you want to keep doing this?
For me, the biggest highlights are always the times I get to tour with my heroes. Especially the first show of a tour, when you open for one of your favorite bands — like NEUROSIS or GODFLESH. I never got to play with the MELVINS, but I did get to play with HIS HERO IS GONE back in 1993 in Troy, New York, with my old band EMPATHY TEST. That was definitely one of those moments. It was a really meaningful moment to be up there playing, because you can feel the emotion of it — like, this is a big deal, this matters.
14. Juli 2026 Stephan Gossen
Fotos von: Afra Gethöffer-Grütz und Stephan Gossen
Dieses Interview wurde persönlich geführt.
