Sohn’s new start in life and music
Toph Taylor is a critically acclaimed producer and singer by way of Vienna who performs under the stage name Sohn, and in March he released his second full-length album, “Rennen.” But what is more notable, and likely more relevant to his life at the moment, is that Taylor is also a new father.
“Oh, one second, I’m pulling over real quick,” he said over the phone in Los Angeles. “I’m driving and I’ve got the baby with me.”
Moments after commenting on his newfound domesticity, he referenced his upcoming performance at this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival with an offhanded noncha-
lance. For Taylor, the two aren’t that distant from each other — fatherhood and performing highprofile gigs are both important realities for him. He balances the seemingly disparate worlds artfully as they inform one another, and he credits his home life for his growing creative confidence.
That confidence is all over his latest record, which playfully integrates genres like jazz and R&B with his trademark buzzy electronica to create a bolder, textured musical environment for him to explore. His shows will be just as spacious and cathartic — one is coming up at San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom on Wednesday, April 12 — but Taylor said that a key change is how significantly more active, how much more physical and engaged his live performances will be now.
Taylor compared the liveliness of “Rennen” to the release of his debut solo album “Tremors” in 2014. “Tremors” was dark, slick and critically acclaimed. He was glad he’d been able to kick off a successful career from those efforts, but he also remembered how his schedule was taken over by around-the-clock touring and promotion for a few years because of it. He didn’t want to go back to that lifestyle, not now, he said. When asked about his thoughts on his upcoming Coachella shows, he shrugged it off.
“I don’t want to get too caught up in the details,” he said. “After touring so much I went from not being able to be in charge of my life, then I returned to Vienna and suddenly everything changed. … I had so much time.”
After the waves of “Tremors”-related shows and promo subsided, Taylor slowed down considerably. He spent more contemplative time in the studio, honing his production skills. He moved to Los Angeles, got married and had a baby — it was a fresh start in his life, which in turn made him re-evaluate his approach to music.
Following his debut as Sohn, Taylor positioned himself as a producer in the same melancholic vein as artists like James Blake, How to Dress Well or Bon Iver. But for “Rennen,” Taylor embraced a new kind of dynamism in his music, one that subverted whatever expectations “Tremors” established.
“My music is nu R&B, electronic alternative stuff, but I think this record (‘Rennen’) is more about physically interacting with space,” he said. “That was born out of a boredom on my part from where this genre has gone. I feel like that it’s become so production heavy, that it was just music with random vocals over it. … I wanted to stray from that genre.”
So Taylor decided to bring the recording space into the music to evoke a more grounded sense of intimacy. He recalled holing up in a friend’s pool house for a winefueled month of recording. And it turns out that he was being extremely literal when talking about how one could “hear the room in the album.” He’d bang on physical objects, capture room noise, stand 3 feet away from the microphone when singing, and layer seemingly disparate ambient noise until he came up with the 10 tracks on “Rennen.”
“Since my last record, my production has improved, but as a result my sound was super smooth and slick and I wanted to mess it up more,” Taylor said. “There was definitely a real moment that I understood that was the direction of the new record. … It was very much sort of a record about trusting instinct and trying to stand behind what I’m doing.”