by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
Yalc123 is William Austin Clay; producer, multi-instrumentalist, genre polyglot. Since 2015, the Denton-based musician has put out a steady stream of progressive and distinct takes on self-recorded pop music. A lot of Yalc’s earlier records are raw and stripped back compared to their more recent material, but provide the basic framework for William Austin Clay’s proficiency as a songwriter. The self-tagged “intersectional music” on Bandcamp could not be more true. Yalc’s discography hits the highs and lows of lo-fi and hi-fi, but the songwriting always shines through. Arrangements are playful and puzzling, delivered with a turn-of-the-millennium angle that incorporates the sheen of radio-ready top 40 with jazz-leaning structures and progressions.
Last year’s Yalc Nitsua Mailliw found Yalc taking on a new self-imposed approach to songwriting. By writing melodies first, followed by lyrics, then chord progressions, they worked from top to bottom, essentially working “in reverse.” The method yielded some of Yalc’s most impressive material to date. Yalc Nitsua Mailliw’s arrangements are thoughtful and its melodies are deliriously catchy. The album shows off Yalc’s ability as a jack-of-all-trades musician and producer. They make it look fun, too. We were able to catch up with Yalc over Zoom about their creative process, musical inspiration, Texas and more.
Post Trash: Hey how’s it going? You’re in Denton, right?
Yalc: Basically, North Texas area.
PT: What’s the [COVID] situation like there?
Y: Last time I checked we were number one in new cases. It’s so insane to be here in the middle of it and watch the governor totally drop the ball. It’s been interesting, I’ve been laying low as much as I can. Staying at home.
PT: Same, yea. It must feel pretty good to be on top though, right?
Y: Yea, number one baby. Everything’s bigger in Texas. Even the coronavirus cases.
PT: I’ve never been to Texas. I was looking on Google Maps before this and I never realized it’s a five hour drive from Houston to Dallas.
Y: Yea. It’s really big. Little fun fact, the distance from where I am to El Paso, which is at the tip of west Texas, is the same distance from El Paso to Los Angeles. So two states worth. It’s really big, I haven’t been to most places out here.
PT: Can you talk a bit about the artistic orbit you’ve found in the greater Dallas area? I know your Citrus City label mates China Club are close by.
Y: Yea, I’m friends with Kamaron [Black] and Spencer [Kenney]. They play in China Club. Where I’m at, it’s a pretty big area. I’m in Fort Worth, which is outside of Dallas. Then there’s Denton. There’s a couple different scenes going on, it’s pretty diverse. It’s cool, there were a lot of shows. There’s a pretty strong community out here and a lot of good music.
PT: You’re teaching music, what’s your background? Is your family musical, did you go to school?
Y: My family’s really musical, on my mom’s side. Everyone plays music. I got started fairly young, in middle school, playing guitar and stuff. I went to University of North Texas for music and graduated in 2015. I’ve been writing, teaching and making music for other people since then.
PT: What was your major there?
Y: Bachelor of Arts in Music with a concentration in classical guitar. But I mostly did composition, I focused on that.
PT: You worked with United Workers Party USA and they’re a “nonprofit union for the arts,” which is what it says on their Bandcamp page. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Y: Yea that was something I tried to do right after college when I was trying to put out my friends’ music.
PT: Oh, that was you doing that?
Y: Yea, it was my thing. I was trying that out to support my friends and the scene around here. I stopped doing that recently because I had other stuff come up that was more pressing, but it was cool while I was doing it. I worked a lot with them. They’re a great team. Love the owner and the founder. It was cool, pretty low key overall.
PT: You have a few tapes and records out on a bunch of different labels between Feeding Tube, Citrus City and Nino Tomorrow. What was that process like, did you reach out to them or did they reach out to you?
Y: It’s pretty mixed. All those people I worked with were already friends or we played shows together. Or we knew each other from the internet, or from the digital indie scene. It was all pretty organic. Early on, I reached out to Joey Agresta and his label Beautiful Music, and also Zach Philips at OSR. I think both of those labels are kind of defunct now, but those were the first two labels that put me on in the beginning. Since then I’ve developed relationships with people through music and they’ve helped me out.
PT: Yea I find a little similarity between some of your earlier music and Body Meat, who are Nino Tomorrow adjacent. It’s specifically Austi—ah, I forget the name of it.
Y: Austipaustiography.
PT: Yea!
Y: That record reminded you of Body Meat?
PT: A little bit, yea, I think it came out around the same time as World’s Largest Drum.
Y: Yea, I think Chris’ music is really awesome. We’ve been talking and going back and forth for a while now. I first met Chris in Denver when I was on tour and it’s cool how we made that connection. Especially at that time, I think our music was pretty similar. It was really cool getting to meet them and develop a relationship.
PT: A lot of your material since “Beat is Trash” took on a much different approach than your music that came out beforehand that sort of hinted to your future material. That track serves as an introduction to “Yalc,” if you will. What changed on that one? Was it an equipment thing? Or mentality?
Y: I was starting to be not just broke all the time, so I was like, “let me get a real synth.” Before I was using this old Casio CZ 80s synth. I wanted something more contemporary so I invested in my first real synth. That opened doors, I guess. The synthesizers I had had that older sound, which made it harder to make more contemporary electronic music. I got more into that and more into using Ableton. I dove headfirst into production and sound design after that. That was definitely a turning point, getting that piece of equipment. I had done a couple tracks like that on Austipostiography, but it felt pretty primitive, putting it together without knowing what I was doing. That was a pretty transitional period for me.
PT: I know a few of your earlier projects were recorded on a Portastudio, did your DAW switch up later on? Did you switch to Ableton?
Y: I had always dabbled in Ableton but before then I was using a digital multitrack to record everything. That was all the way through college, through Austipostiography. I would do everything on my multitrack, then edit and mix in Ableton. After that I was in Ableton full time. I feel the medium through which I record has always played a part in how I put the song together, which I guess is obvious. But going back to the artist Joey Agresta, I first got introduced to him through his tape work. He would record everything through a certain recording setup and that would influence how he produced the song. I was inspired by that mentality and I’ve always kept that in mind. For instance, for the record I recorded on the Tascam, that was a completely different experience because I had to perform the song all the way through. I had to have a complete arrangement in my head, which inspired how I wrote each song. Now, because I’m in Ableton all the time, I’m mixing and sound designing while I’m writing material, which influences the process. I’ll hear a sound and feel it’s appropriate being played in a certain way, or I’ll have a riff or melody and really think about how that will come out with the synth I’m using. I always try to keep that in mind, the medium I’m using, and let that inspire me.
PT: So when you were recording straight to tape you were playing all the way through?
Y: Yea, that record was such a pain. I had never used a tape machine before and I had borrowed it from a friend. I was trying to figure out how it worked and I was having so many issues with the sound quality and having to clean the heads. It was really arduous and that made me go about the songwriting in a different way. I had to simplify things or make different parts flow together easier so I wouldn’t get caught up in the middle because I have only so many takes on a cassette before I run out or before it starts to lose quality. I felt like I was missing something along the way.
PT: The lyrics on “Beat is Trash” sort of straightforwardly address your shift in style. Are the lyrics a nod to Never Looking Back Again, Ever? Maybe a little tongue-in-cheek?
Y: I think all my lyrics are a little tongue-in-cheek. It’s kind of the prerequisite for my music, especially lyrics, because I feel self conscious about them. For the most part, I was trying to address what I was going for with that song and the rest of the music while being aware of my first real outing doing a full record like that. Of course some of the beats might be trash. It's more of an experiment or exploration of that medium than a definitive thing. Usually, I feel like I try to address things that might be going on while also trying to be self aware with my lyrics.
PT: For the latest record, the songs on Yalc Nitsua Mailliw were written “backwards,” with the melodies and chord progress written on lead sheets first, instead of the beats. Can you tap about where that idea came from?
Y: I think I just wanted to try something different. Before I started writing those songs I was studying other songs. I learned a bunch of covers before. Stevie Wonder, N’Sync, “Icebox” by Omarion. I was trying to understand what’s going on in the chords and melodies that those producers used. It opened up a few different doors. Around that time I was reading an interview with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and they were talking about working on the Janet Jackson album, The Velvet Rope. Are you familiar with that album?
PT: Yea, that’s my favorite one.
Y: It’s so good. At that time I was getting really into it and all the lore. They were talking about how they were writing a lot of material with the vocals first. You can kind of hear that versus Rhythm Nation 1814, where I feel like the vocals are even with the instruments. With Velvet Rope you can hear how the melodies and lyrics are in the forefront. Melodically, compared to the earlier stuff, I think it’s the strongest album they’ve put out. As I’ve moved to making something more in the pop realm, I’ve tried to invest more in the melodies and lyrics. I feel that’s the essence of pop music. Production is one thing but the ear candy comes down to the melody and lyrics and how catchy it is. I want to explore that world and apply that to the things I’ve done in the past, whether it’s asymmetrical rhythms, metric modulation or non diatonicism- mixing that stuff with more melodic material is really interesting to and getting to explore that with the last record opened up a lot of doors for me. It made me think about my music and writing in a different way.
PT: I know a lot of the songs on the record, which you talked about in the liner notes, like “Saturdays w/ U,” have that are nonspecific or not adhering to a narrative but are straightforward pop lyrics. Something I wrote down here is you refrain from cursing on a track like “Saturdays w/ U.” It reminds me of edited songs on the radio, where that censorship becomes part of the song. Was that intentional?
Y: Censoring it was intentional. When I’m writing lyrics I’m trying to do the least common denominator, like Occam’s razor, the easiest lyric to come up with. Like, “Seems like you don’t give a shit.” It just rhymes and fits with the lyrics. I prefer not to cuss since my mom listens to my music. Just my family in general and my students too. If they pull up my music I don’t want them to hear me cussing. That was conscious, for sure. That’s what I was exposed to growing up. I’m used to that edited sound. This is a tangent but I was really into Kanye West in middle school and early high school. I asked for basically every album from College Dropout to 808s & Heartbreaks one year for Christmas. My mom would always get me the edited versions and that’s all I heard, but I’d play those records all the time in the car. Now, as an adult, when I listen to those songs and I hear the cussing, it throws me off. It sounds almost wrong. I have an appreciation for the edited versions. It doesn’t sound censored, it’s just part of the song. If you listen to the radio version of “WAP,” are you familiar with that song?
PT: I am, I didn’t know there was a radio version.
Y: There is. If you listen to it, some lines are completely censored out. It’s just the beat, no rapping. In a way you’re putting the song thru a filter to make it officially radio ready. It’s like putting a producer tag or putting credits on a movie or a watermark on a Youtube video. It makes it the real thing. Maybe I’m just riffing, I don’t know.
PT: No, that’s totally valid. Any time I listen to “Get Low,” I don’t know the dirty version of that song.
Y: Yea, because we were in elementary school when that came out.
PT: Yea, it was like, “the sweat drip down your what?”
Y: I wasn’t even asking those questions at eight years old, I was just getting down.
PT: So for this record, what did this process open up for you as a composer? Was there any one moment where you were like, “I want to do this more often” or “This is something I want to do for a future project?”
Y: For “Saturdays w/ U,” that was the second song I wrote for this album, and when I came up with the melody and lyrics it felt very pop. It was pretty easy to put together. In the past I’d put together the beat and stuff, but when I’d get around to doing the lyrics on top, I’d have all this other material that maybe would have worked as an instrumental, but it obscures what you could do with the melody. It feels like I’m putting myself in a box when I put together the beat and instrumental riffs first. It feels like that now since I’ve explored doing the melody first. I feel like now that I’m doing that, the songs feel like songs, not just an instrumental with a melody on top. It feels like something that could stand alone as an acapella or unplugged. Like a Yalc Nitsua Mailliw unplugged session, where it’s just singing and guitar. I’ve been working on new stuff, writing the same way. It feels way more consistently “good.” If I’m going to focus on making a catchy melody or memorable lyrics, it makes sense to approach it this way for me.
PT: You said you think this is some of your best music yet. Do you have a favorite song from the record?
Y: If I’m talking melody and lyrics from the record, it’s probably “Saturdays w/ U.” I’ve been going through the songs and remixing them and re-editing them to make them completely different songs so my perspective of them has changed. It’s hard to say which is my favorite, they’re all pretty cool to me.
PT: I really like the album art. Where is that picture from?
Y: That is a teacher photo I had to take for one of my jobs. It was picture day.
PT: Nice, did you make the album cover yourself?
Y: Yea. I was working on the album and I feel like every time I get to the very end, I’m always going back and forth tying up all these loose ends. It’s this really long process. But for this one I put together the album art two or three days before I sent it out to streaming services and stuff. Once I put together the artwork it felt like the album was done. It worked with the songs and gave me an idea of how it all worked together.
PT: I dig it a lot. It’s cool.
Y: Thanks, it was fun. Normally, I don’t like putting together album covers but I think this one works.
PT: Return to Pop Island came out on Nino Tomorrow a little over a year ago. You cited The Creative Independent interview with Danny L. Harle about studying and learning from your influences as means of expanding your musical vocabulary. Can you talk about what those influences were and what it took for you to get there?
Y: That record was inspired a lot by PC Music people and Sophie but also K-pop. I was really into K-pop at the time, which is funny to look back on because I don’t really listen to it much anymore. I hadn’t heard it before and I was really into that at the time. I was into radio pop too but those were the two main influences that I hadn’t touched on in my own music so much. I think the biggest difference between that music and the music I’d done before is that it’s faster and a lot of it’s double time. I guess in K-pop they go between pop and a rap sound in the middle of a song, sometimes but, in general, there’s less of a rap tone. But SOPHIE has half-time songs sometimes, so I guess it’s hard to say. It’s just faster tempos and the crispiest sound design, having a sheen to it. At the time I was making Return to Pop Island, that was as close to that level of production as I could get. Since then, I feel I’ve moved more in that direction, as far is getting the sound design down. I feel that compositionally the structures are simpler. They’ll use the same chord progressions throughout. I’m thinking of the PC Music songs that are more dance-inspired, and how dance music is more repetitive. Pop music is like that too. There are some songs there that are just one chord progression all the way through, which normally I wouldn’t do. Normally different sections would have different chord progressions. Little things like that. That’s when I started to move toward more melodic stuff. That was something else that inspired me and put me on the path towards writing a record like Yalc Nitusa Mailliw.
PT: Outside of your musical influences, what else influences your music? Movies? Books?
Y: I watch a lot of movies. I’ll watch anything. I’ll watch a really bad movie or really good movie and I’ll enjoy it. Either way watching movies gives me a different way of thinking of stuff as opposed to listening to music all the time. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’ll either watch a movie or listen to music. Sometimes I’ll go out on a walk or run and then come back with a lyric, melodic idea or rhythm. That’s been a really big source of inspiration. Even stuff like the lighting where I’m working can be inspiring. I have a standing desk set up and that’s been really inspiring to me, being able to stand up. Little stuff like that. Plants. That stuff inspires me. I guess I should read more.
PT: What movies have you watched lately?
Y: The last movie I watched was Freaky. I love me a scary movie. I also love me a coming of age movie. So when you put them together it’s perfect. It was pretty good but it’s probably not that interesting for people who watch a lot of movies.
PT: Your music is all over the place as far as your Bandcamp discography. You have R. Stevie Moore listed as a tag for some of your earlier material. Do you have a specific medium you enjoy listening to music the most?
Y: Yea, I get my ten dollars worth out of Apple Music every month. Basically if I’m not working on my own music or watching something, I have it on. I listen to music all day on that. It’s been really cool getting to pull up an artist’s full discography. Like, listening to Prince’s whole discography. I know there’s a conversation about buying records and streaming and that stuff. But for me and my socioeconomic level, Apple Music works. Cassettes and vinyl are cool, too. Out of the three I prefer CDs the most, but I guess I’m really old school.
PT: Those are the most hi-fi.
Y: CDs are the most hi-fi. And you can leave that thing in the hot car, it’s OK. You can play it as many times as you want. All you gotta do is not scratch it, right? But yea, streaming.
PT: I was checking out a bunch of your Spotify playlists. That Rugrats song “Take Me There” has been dwelling in my subconscious for about twenty years now.
Y: Mmhmm, right?
PT: I also discovered Teezo Touchdown through your playlist. I feel he’s going to have a hit.
Y: Yea, for sure. I was putting together that playlist and the day before I heard that song and I was like, “Yea this is the last one I need to put on.” I put on “Social Cues.” That’s a really cool song. They’re a really exciting artist so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do.
PT: It’s also nice to see some vindication for “Meet Me Halfway.” That Black Eyed Peas track.
Y: I personally feel pretty conflicted about Black Eyed Peas. At the time when Black Eyed Peas were popular, I was a skater. I was like, “Oh, Black Eyed Peas are so normie.” I wasn’t equipped with that word yet, but looking back I think that’s something I would have agreed with. I still kind of have that social perspective when I listen to it. Some of it is tough to listen to but that song and some of Fergie’s stuff is really good.
PT: Yes, “London Bridge” is a really weird song for how popular it was. The backing track is really strange.
Y: I need to go back and listen to that one. I know the hook. Listening to it in my head, is it not a “Hollaback Girl” rip off?
PT: It’s very similar to “Hollaback Girl.” It doesn’t have as “burly,” for lack of a better word, of a backing percussion track. Fergie’s is a lot weirder. In the verses it sounds like someone’s on the fun keyboard setting with the bells and horns.
Y: I wish I could come up with a name for that genre of music except that it’s perfect for kids. Pop music that’s perfect for kids. I think about that song, Baha Men and Smash Mouth. Something about those songs, since I guess those were some of my earliest musical memories, but those songs all share these crazy sound effects. Those songs are very exciting and colorful. But also, if I’m 27, I don’t know if I can rock with it so hard. I’m a pretty big hater, so it’s hard to say.
PT: That’s okay! “Who Let the Dogs Out” has that huge buzzword for kids like, “dog? I know what that is.” Do you have a favorite Janet Jackson record?
Y: Definitely “Empty” from Velvet Rope.
PT: That’s my favorite too.
Y: Right? It’s so good. I’ve never heard a song like it, ever. It’s a little bit drum and bass, a little bit trip hop, a little bit R&B.
PT: I watched your videos. Is that your bike in the “Air it Out” video?
Y: Yea! I sold that thing but that was what I was riding around to my music lessons at the time.
PT: Nice, do you have a favorite flavor of La Croix?
Y: Probably coconut. Tastes like a Pina Colada. Can I tell you my lest favorite?
PT: Is it Key Lime?
Y: No, I don’t think you can even find it. I happened to stumble upon it at an Aldi. It’s like coffee and soda. It has this fancy design on the box so I thought it was this premium flavor. I like coffee flavor so I tried it. When I heard about it I was like, “I have to try this, it doesn’t sound that bad.” It doesn’t taste like coffee, it tastes like medicine. You should try it some time.
PT: I will. I’ve never seen it, I know some companies do area specific runs of certain flavors to try things out. Last one, most of the profits from your music are being directed toward mutual aid funds including the GLORP Records compilation and Nino Tomorrow compilation you were featured on. Are there any mutual aid funds you’d want to direct listeners to through this interview?
Y: I’ve mostly been doing community support. Like, someone shares their Venmo or PayPal. But recently, I’ve been donating to Feed the People Dallas. I saw my friend had donated and it’s a local charity. I think I’m going to try donating to them for my next project. I heard food scarcity is a big issue right now. People are having a hard time making those bills.