The extended All Tiny Creatures modular morphology enters a new chapter

Hear a forthcoming single, “Four Oh Five,” ahead of the long-running electronic project’s April 19 show at Communication.

I recently pulled out my vinyl copy of All Tiny Creatures‘ 2009 debut EP, Segni. The download code, which sat folded up in the sleeve for 15 years, still worked. The impression Segni gave me of the project’s intentions upon its initial release has long stood corrected, or at the very least amended beyond recognition. If Segni represented a starting point, it would have been pointless to try and guess at where things would progress from there. 

This is worth keeping in mind as All Tiny Creatures (ATC) gets ready to start putting out their first batch of new music in years. Some of that will be in the set at the Madison-based outfit’s show on Friday, April 19 at Communication. ATC currently functions as a two-piece consisting of multi-instrumentalists Thomas Wincek and Andrew Fitzpatrick, as it has since about 2014. Headlining the show is another veteran electroacoustic explorer, Minneapolis’ Dosh, who remixed All Tiny Creatures’ “Holography,” from the band’s first full-length, 2011’s Harbors, for a 2013 mixtape. 

Segni, largely born of Wincek’s solo efforts to conceptualize the project, drove together minimalist music and amiable, almost disarming hooks. Concise piano and Rhodes phrases honeycombed out into more complex structures, solo-electronic experimentation met with the breathing room of rock- and pop-informed rhythms, abstract sound sources sheared and blurred into inviting textures. By the time Segni came out in August of 2009, ATC had already been playing shows for months as a four-piece band—Wincek and Andrew Fitzpatrick on keyboards and guitar, Matt Skemp on bass, and Ben Derickson (who also played on the EP) on drums—and writing a bit more collaboratively. 

When I listened to Segni at the time of its release, I thought of All Tiny Creatures as a project with neatly defined edges, almost prim in its formalism and restraint. In the context of the members’ work around that time, one could hear this EP as a further drilling-down into the stacking, shifting rhythmic and harmonic layers at work in Collections Of Colonies Of Bees (whose lineup has included Wincek, Skemp, and Derickson at different points… you’d need a whole chart to map out these interconnected elements in Wisconsin music). Or even as a stark contrast to the cathartic grandiosity of Bees’ collaboration with Justin Vernon under the name Volcano Choir. Not rigid or cold, but certainly methodical and in no hurry to put emotion front and center. 

Looking back now, after literally every other thing ATC has done since, it’s clear that something more elastic and maximalist and vulnerable was always growing in these lattices of composition. Emotional and technical progressions alike brimmed over on the band’s 2013 album Dark Clock. From the shimmering ache of opener “Comets” to the warp-whoop hook of “All Die Out” to the computerized voice intoning “love is a sacrifice” on “The Book,” so many elements yearn to get out. The album splices together lush pop, Steve Reich-informed minimalism, prog-rock eccentricity, the sonic manipulations of people who know their way around an ungodly amount of electronic music tools (hardware and software, of course!), and just plain heart-on-sleeve big feelings. It’s one thing to grasp at this volume of eclecticism, another to assimilate it into a vocabulary. 

Since then, All Tiny Creatures has not put out a proper album or EP. A couple one-offs on the ATC Bandcamp page have offered a wide-open view on both All Tiny Creatures’ playful side and its keen, earnest ear for those of us in a doomed world. Namely, a cover of Tim Heidecker’s “Trump Talkin’ Nukes” (really a heavier and more moving song than one might expect from Heidecker) and a Christmas single. Wincek and Fitzpatrick have both been working on solo outings that explore the compositional and improvisational possibilities of electronic music—Wincek’s densely layered 2021 album The Desert Of The Real Itself, Fitzpatrick’s experiments under his own name and previously as Noxroy.

All Tiny Creatures’ forthcoming single “Four Oh Five” features vocals from Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock Of Dimes, also Fitzpatrick’s bandmate in the Bon Iver-verse). Its combination of tense, propulsive instrumentation with the stately longing of Wasner’s voice offers a hint of what we can expect from the project’s next chapter. But as we’ve learned, we shouldn’t get too ahead of ourselves when it comes to such an unpredictable body of work. You can give the single an advance listen here:

Ahead of the show, Wincek talked with Tone Madison via email about All Tiny Creatures’ in-the-works new material, the “modular” nature of the band, and the evolution of its live sets.

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Tone Madison: Can you tell me a bit more about the direction your new material is going? I hear a lot of familiar ATC elements in this new track, “Four Oh Five,” alongside some curveballs, so I’m wondering how that sounds to you.

Thomas Wincek: So we’ve been getting together and jamming and writing pretty regularly for years now, but started to be more serious about it in 2019 or so. Basically we’ve been doing what we always do in ATC, which is taking elements we improvise—whether it’s us together or Andy sending me a layered guitar loop or idea—and then I make songs out of those elements. The main difference these days is that we have methods and tools now that allow us to do live in an improvisational context what we used to only be able to do in the studio. 

For instance, where I used to take Andy’s guitar parts and cut them up and rearrange them into new forms, he can play his guitar into a machine and it will cut it up and rearrange it live, based on parameters he gives it. We can then respond to that and improvise further in a much faster and more intuitive way. Instead of layering guitar parts over and over to achieve layers, we can play guitar into a machine and have it create the layers in real time. Similarly I have machines that allow me to generate sequences of notes based on algorithms, in real time, and achieve layers and melodies that are entirely generative, yet guided and steered by my input and decisions. This can yield unexpected results, but surprisingly always seems to sound like something I would come up with on my own. We of course have and use all the old familiar tools as well, but building these more generative environments and then responding to them has sort of been a main pursuit of both of us recently.

Thematically and conceptually, we’ve been working within a post-modern science fiction and post-apocalyptic-futurist framework inspired by stuff like William Gibson’s recent novels, Bruce Sterling’s post-humanist books, Adam Curtis documentaries, the various Star Treks and all kinds of visual art by people like Jean Giraud Moebius and other sci-fi illustrators from the ’70s and ’80s. In fact we have an image board that we share with collaborators to sort of get them in the right headspace for where the music is coming from.

Tone Madison: How did the collaboration with Jenn Wasner come about?

Thomas Wincek: I met Jenn when I took a synthesizer tech job for Sylvan Esso in late 2019, right before the pandemic. She was playing keys, bass, and background vocals on a short tour they did with a full band. I had been a huge fan of her music for years, and Andy has been in a band with her, so we had all sort of been in the same orbit, but we clicked on that tour. I believe Andy was already in her ear about a possible collaboration, but after that tour she found some time to lay down the vocal tracks for the song.

We’ve been working with a bunch of collaborators for some of the songs, and we’ve just been sending them the song, our post-apocalyptic-sci-fi image board, and having a conversation. And then let them go from there. With a couple of artists there was some back and forth of ideas or lyrics, but Jenn had her whole vocal fully formed when she sent it over. I did a few tricky things with it in the mix, but the lyrics, layers, and melody is all her. It was immensely exciting and invigorating bringing all of the elements together, and it’s been very exciting every time we play it live, even using pre-recorded vocals.

Tone Madison: Now that you’ve been working as a duo for several years, how do you think that has changed your approach to writing and performing in ATC?

Thomas Wincek: Well, we originally did the duo thing entirely as a pragmatic concern. We needed to travel easier, get on and off of stage faster, and sustain ourselves on tour. We could only do that as a duo. Since all of the main songwriting was always me and Andy, that also made it make sense. It certainly didn’t mean we wanted to stop working with Matt and Ben, and really I miss the band we had there. Ben is actually playing with us for these upcoming shows. He’ll be doing live drum machine and rhythmic synth stuff. He also recorded drums on the Wasner track as well as a bunch of the tracks we’re currently working on, so we’ve been working with him a lot. Really I’ve always seen ATC as a modular sort of thing, with me and Andy as the [general] core, then we bring in lots of collaborators to work with and fill in the gaps we have musically. When I think about it, that’s sort of how it’s always worked.

Tone Madison: Similarly, with all the different solo and collab work the two of you have been doing outside of ATC over the years, how do you think that influences the work you do together in ATC?

Thomas Wincek: I think we’ve gotten a lot more responsive as musicians. Just being able to go for it in the moment. You can only learn that on stage in front of people, and we’ve both gotten a lot more experience with that over the years. We’ve also sort of decided neither of us really want to sing in any conventional sense on stage. I’ve always used a ton of effects with my voice, but I want to go even one step further and have vocals be something else live. Whether that’s backing tracks, manipulated samples, an AI-generated vocal or a guest vocalist, again, it’s that modular idea.

Tone Madison: Anything else you’d like to share about upcoming plans?

Thomas Wincek: We’re going to release [“Four Oh Five”] as a single off of a short album that will include solo songs from me and Andy that started as live jams we did together, as well as a song we did with Chris Rosenau and Caley Conway. We have a bunch of songs ready, and I think we’ll keep releasing them like that, as short albums every couple of months or so. And doing more live shows, hopefully, as we explore and figure out more and more what that looks like.