Author & Punisher interview: ‘Play it in the recording studio how you’re going to play it live’
Author & Punisher (Photo by Karo Kratochwil)
Speaking from the road while crossing from Denmark into Germany, Tristan Shone sounded exactly like Author & Punisher does on record: blunt, alert, and impatient with simulation. Released via Relapse, Nocturnal Birding pushed the project into a more physical and collaborative phase, with guitarist Doug Sabolick becoming the first real bandmate in Author & Punisher. That shift is all over this conversation: live risk over trigger-safe performance, machines as instruments rather than props, and industrial music as something that should still demand a body.
We spoke with Author & Punisher about border work, improvisation, touring realities, and why too much electronic performance still mistakes playback for presence.
Author & Punisher interview
Karo: When I listen to the Author & Punisher album Nocturnal Birding, the machine seems to do something unexpected. It listens outward. Instead of beginning from industry, weight, or force alone, the album begins with birdsong and migration. Did that change the role of the machine for you, from something like a weapon or an amplifier into something closer to a translator?
Tristan: Yeah, I definitely think the stuff I make is not related to weapons or aggression in any way, but yeah, I would say more of an amplifier for social justice in some way. I mean, that’s a bit of a paradox for me. My connection to machines and then my connection to immigration and border issues, that’s a strange one, because working in industry and working on science and technology sort of contribute negatively to the environment. That’s a paradox that I haven’t really worked out in my work.
Karo: Do you think your volunteer work at the border changed not just the album’s subject matter, but also its moral temperature? This doesn’t feel like industrial music speaking in abstraction anymore. It feels like it has been forced into contact with real bodies, real routes, real laws. Did this record make it harder to hide inside metaphor?
Tristan: I mean, listen, I think it sort of made me realize that when you’re working in tech and you’re working in industry, you’re very lucky. My salary as a mechanical engineer, and my whole life up until being 44 years old, I’d never volunteered my time in the way I have now, and it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. It’s really made me rethink my life and purpose and what I want to work on, and it really has forced me to, yeah, like you said, amplify my voice within music because it’s more powerful than the sounds for me. And that says a lot, because I like to play loud music.
Karo: Was there a moment when the older language of Author & Punisher suddenly felt insufficient for what you had seen?
Tristan: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always written political lyrics, and your voice as a public figure, if you have followers on Instagram, that is important. That means a lot, and I think people will listen. But actions, you know, just getting up on stage and preaching something is one thing, but getting out there and volunteering and interacting with people that aren’t sitting in a music venue or at an interview. When I’m out there hiking with some people whose parents crossed the border when they were younger and hearing those stories, it’s very humbling. I’m a musician who people listen to, and I’m on a stage, but when I’m out there, you are one of 30 people hiking in a line, and you’re not a leader. You’re just a hiker that’s carrying water. And it was really humbling for me.
Karo: You said KRÜLLER was more of a studio construction, while Nocturnal Birding was built much more with live performance in mind. When you compose for the stage rather than the studio, what changes first: the riff, the arrangement, the machine, or your whole sense of what the music has to do physically?
Tristan: Between KRÜLLER and Nocturnal Birding? Yeah. I mean, the major difference for me was I had so much time. I was on tour with TOOL in 2020. It was the biggest tour I’d ever done in my life. And then the pandemic hit, and I had to drive home 20 hours by myself with gas masks, trying to find food, worried I was gonna die. I just got home, and that was a very traumatizing six months for everyone. I started writing music on my laptop, and then I translated it into machines and studio, and it was a very long process with no end in sight, so you could just write whatever you wanted. Then when we went out and performed it, it was nice, it was more mellow, but it wasn’t that fun to play. It was easy, but it wasn’t something that was written on machines with a guitar player in the room and like, hey, we’re gonna riff off each other like a live band. So once we toured a bunch on KRÜLLER, we really knew we had to make stuff that was like a live industrial hardcore grindcore band. And that’s exactly what Doug and I did. We made stuff that was meant to be just live punishing. And you hear the mistakes that I play, because we’re not triggering the drums in a sequence. It’s all played live. And that feels really good.
Karo: Does this live-first writing also force you to simplify, or does it actually push you toward more demanding performance?
Tristan: Well, it’s demanding, but it’s simplified. And I really feel strongly about this. I can go on and on about it, but the whole reason I made drone machines and do it this way is so that you can play stuff live. The thing about it is, when you sit in a room and you start writing an album, you put the guitars, the bass, the drums, okay, you have those players, but then you start layering additional things. Keyboards, more guitar tracks, more vocals. Then you get to a position where you can’t play that song live anymore. And with these two-person industrial bands, you see people trying to find ways to play that live after they’ve already written it in a non-live way in the studio. So you have the thing where the guy sits with his drumstick and plays the snare pad in the industrial band, and it’s not an intriguing performance, nor is it really live. So I find that you have to simplify. You have to play the song in with the actual sounds and devices you’re going to use when you play live. When you write it, you don’t want to add more than you can actually play, because then you don’t have an intriguing live performance. And I feel very strongly about that. But everybody’s got a laptop with Ableton or whatever, so they just layer stuff and layer stuff, and that’s the problem. That’s right there. How do you make industrial music to play live? Play it in the recording studio how you’re going to play it live.
Karo: Doug becoming the first real creative bandmate in Author & Punisher feels like a deeper shift than just adding guitar. What did bringing in another authorial force unlock that the machines alone could not?
Tristan: Well, I mean, there’s only so much organic stuff I can do on my machines. I’ve always sort of missed the organic intricacies of the guitar or a real cymbal or stuff like that. So just being able to chug in an industrial way, like the old Godflesh albums that I love so much from the ’90s, and add that sort of imperfection makes it even more organic, and we weave in and out of each other. Sometimes Doug is, you know, like, for example, on the last album, I didn’t put Doug in my ears when I play. I didn’t want to hear him because I had to really focus on what I was playing. This album, I have to have him in my ears. So we play off each other like we’re just two band members. And he’s messy too. He’s not one of these, I don’t know, like Fear Factory or Meshuggah. Doug is a noise guitarist, so he likes to change it up every night. And I love that. Every night we have a different thing going on. The tour has been sort of like every show we grow in a different way.
Karo: So do you feel that this collaboration made the Author & Punisher music less controlled, or just more alive in a different way?
Tristan: Yeah, I would say it’s less controlled. I’m getting better at playing my stuff. I can play faster beats now, and every time I play a show, I get better at controlling the machines and it becomes more of an extension of my body, like a real drummer would be. So yeah, I’m getting better, but we’re able to improvise more. And improvisation in industrial music is not something that you hear a lot. If you see a band, that guy or girl with the electronic setup with buttons and knobs, then there’s someone singing dressed up and whatever the fuck, that performance is the same every night because those tracks that they’re playing do not change. When Charli XCX goes out and performs in stadiums, that is the exact same performance every night, literally the same exact audio. There’s no growth. Maybe her voice and her performance, but. And I don’t mean to shit on Charli XCX. I actually like her quite a bit. But mostly I’m shitting on industrial music because it’s really disappointing. And part of that is financial, because bands can’t have six members flying to wherever. But I challenge people to try to make their music more live so that the audience gets to see something special every night.
Karo: One of the things that makes Author & Punisher so singular is that you do not just play instruments, you design and build the machines that make the music possible. When you construct a new controller or device, what usually comes first: the sound you want, the gesture you want to perform, or the limitations you want to force on yourself?
Tristan: Well, I just know from my interactions with mechanical devices, like machining devices, like mills, lathes. I work in a microscopy lab which has these big electron microscopes. That’s my day job. There’s a lot of machinery and knobs and buttons and controllers that I’m interacting with. So I know the textures that I want to feel, and I just want them to control music rather than, you know, an aperture or astigmatism on a microscope. So I just know what I want to make. I make doom metal and I make things that sound like broken lawnmowers, so I know what it’s going to sound like already because I control synthesizers. I don’t have things inside of my machines that make sound already. I’m not an analog music synthesizer designer. I control whatever hardware synth and software synth. So yeah, I sit on my CAD machine, I design the thing based on components I know, I send that out now because I don’t do any of the machining really myself anymore. We send it out to machine shops, I get it back, I put it together, I take the circuit board, I put it in, I wire it up, I program the circuit board, which is a Teensy-based custom system that I’ve designed, and then I put it into my system and we start. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know how these things work now.
Karo: Is there a point where instrument design becomes composition for you?
Tristan: Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m more like a hardcore band in the studio or in the practice room. I go down to my practice room, I have a couple of beers, my right hand plays the drums, my left hand controls one of my things, and I sing through a big custom sound system that I built, and I write songs just like anybody else. The songs that I write on my laptop, like there was a song on KRÜLLER called “Centurion,” and I wrote that song with Justin from TOOL. That was completely written with me sitting at a laptop on my couch. That was not played on my machines. And sometimes I do that, but I never play that song live. It’ll just be a studio song.
Karo: As you could probably notice, I’m a bit obsessed with the machines. Do you feel the machines themselves have evolved with the music – less pure drone, more motion, more rhythm, more precision? Has the engineering philosophy changed from building something punishing to building something responsive enough to groove?
Tristan: Well, it has to be light enough to travel. That’s one thing. When I first made these, ideally I was just playing in a gallery in my hometown, so it could be 300 pounds, whatever, 150 kilos. But I can’t take that to Europe. So a lot of the big stuff that I built in the early days, I don’t travel with because it’s too expensive. So I had to make them fit into a Pelican case and be able to fly to a festival. That was a challenge. If I was just performing in the art world, then I could make giant things, but I prefer the metal world because I find some of that other stuff to be pretentious. I don’t want to make ambient drone music. I want to make the music I like. But as far as the way that the instruments work, yeah, I’ve certainly honed the design a little bit more, especially connectors so that you can plug stuff in really fast, like really expensive hardcore connectors for USB and for my encoders and for the electronics, and thinking about putting things in and out of a case every night, getting smashed on an airplane, that all contributes to the design so that when you have a stage tech grabbing your thing, they can’t break it. That is huge. That is honestly most of what I spend my time on, just making everything robust.
Karo: I wanted to come back to what you said before about industrial acts being disappointing. A lot of them today are technically “live”, but not really at risk. Your work still insists on consequence. If you are not moving, the music is not happening. In 2026, do you feel even more committed to that principle, especially now that so much electronic performance has become simulation?
Tristan: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to sound like the grumpy uncle who thinks DJ culture sucks, but in some ways DJ culture sucks. You don’t have to even do anything to get those songs to combine anymore. I’ve really moved on to. I really love doom and dub. Like, people like this new performer, KAVARI. I really love the sounds that she’s making. It’s incredible. I don’t know how it happens live, and in some ways I don’t care. But if I’m going to go out and see somebody live and they’re just over-exaggerating the motion of one knob on a CDJ deck to show me how amazing what they’re doing is, I’m not impressed. It’s disappointing. It’s embarrassing to have them twiddle that knob. I’d much rather see a live band get up there than see some jackass spin a tiny knob using their whole body. It’s embarrassing for everyone. And I think in 30 years they’re going to look back and be embarrassed by themselves.
Karo: Do you think audiences can actually tell the difference? Your audience for sure, but in general, do people still recognize the difference between execution and triggering, or has that distinction become blurred?
Tristan: Yeah, I mean, I try to put that stuff in videos and I try to explain it, and I think there are a fair amount of people that enjoy learning about it and maybe someday more people will do it. With the whole revolution that happened with synthesizers, where all that modular synth stuff came back and people have all this different gear and they want to have analog sounds, that’s really cool and it’s exciting. I know that for me it was exciting to see that happen because it was a move away from just push-button DJ culture. But where it goes next, we’ll see. And I’m going to try to start selling some of the instruments and maybe that will help, to try to help people be a little bit more expressive with some of the gestures. But it’s going to have to happen in a broad way, throughout the world, throughout DJ culture.
Karo: Looking ahead, what still feels unresolved in Author & Punisher, not commercially or logistically, but artistically? What have you still not managed to make the machines, the body, or the songs do?
Tristan: Yeah, I mean, I think there are still some updates to gear that I haven’t really had the chance to do. Musically, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to say I’ve done everything I want to do, because that’s just what you chase your whole life. As a performer, or as a musician, you always think your newest album is your best work. It’s just the way it goes because it’s fresh for you. But yeah, from a machines perspective, there are limitations to what I can afford financially to do or what I have time for, because I have an engineering job, family, other responsibilities, volunteering. So yeah, there are a lot of improvements I would like to make to the setup so that I can tour and maybe have machines controlling lights. And I have a lot of new ideas that will be brought to life soon. I’m also trying to launch this company where we sell some of these instruments to people, and that might be interesting to see where that goes.
Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
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