By Keith Walsh
Julian Shah-Tayler has a well-defined message on his outstanding new album, Elysium. Named after the club in Austin, Texas where he met the love of his life, the set is filled with songs about the nature of love – at turns tumultuous, rapturous, and upbuilding.

The message? “The message is that true love exists — and that love is a doing word,” says Shah-Tayler. “I choose love, I believe in love as an entity. I think it’s the only thing that separates humans from the animals, from the universe. If you find that, you must cherish it, and pursue it, and do it with a whole heart, and work at it. Love is a doing word.”

Across a 14-track set (including a couple bonus tracks), Elysium covers a gamut of emotions – from the opener “End Of The Line,” — which ironically lays the groundwork for new beginnings – through the healing work of “Kintsugi,” the passion of “Earthquakes” and the adoration of “Darkling U.”

“Songwriting Is My Strength”
It’s an album on which Shah-Tayler, who is known for his wizardry on synthesizers and in the studio, alters the nature of his craft to present a strict focus on the songs. “I’m trying to strip back the extraneous (stuff)  that I put in, because a lot of the time I find myself listening to the 404 album, which is the best I made prior to this one and it’s cluttered  —  every production on every song is full of stuff.” This new approach finds JST featuring the guitar more than synths, though he’s got a battalion of those at his disposal as well. “I’m a songwriter. Yeah. And I’m realizing songwriting is my strength.”

Shah-Tayler continues: “If it was all about the sounds, that would be different. If it were Kraftwerk or Orbital, then it would be about the sounds. Or if I had the benefit of having come out in the 80s, then the novelty would carry it. Because we’re confronted with a world (in which) a 12 year-old kid with a laptop has every synth that I have. So he can open up his laptop, and say ‘oh that’s a Juno 106’ and dial up the sound that I have through my expensive synth and make exactly the same sound. But my skill is the songwriting.”

Among the synths featured sparsely on the album, Shah-Tayler has a Korg Minilogue, A Virus T2 and a Moog Sub Phatty. But for Elysium, he found the songs best served by playing a Fender bass borrowed from David J. (of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets and Night Crickets) as well as his favorite Fender Strat electric guitar. “The key and the crux to any song to me, is the song,” he explains. “What does the song want to say? And now, when I put fluttery and weird and strange and interesting sounds all over the place, it detracts from the central core and premise of what the song is trying to say. And if the song is being diverted and ignored and decorated, it’s like gilding a lily, right? You know, so now my mentality is okay — if I can do it with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine and fretless bass, I’ll do that.”

“An Album About Becoming”
As an expert performer of his solo work, as well as in tributes to David Bowie and Depeche Mode, Shah-Tayler has perfected his creative and technical crafts. In addition to writing and performing, his expertise comes across in the mixing and production of Elysium. He gets occasional help from David J., Chris Olivas on drums (Berlin), Sam West on drums, MGT and Gene Micofsky on guitars, and Nathan Van Hala on keys (and mixing on “Head Up High” and Darkling U.”) “End Of The Line,” “Secret” and “Fisk” were co-produced by Robert Margouleff (DEVO, Stevie Wonder.)

Elysium is a brilliantly instructive set, which Shah-Tayler calls “an album about becoming.” Songs like “The Devil Knows,” “Melt,” “Lupine”and “Earthquakes” portray the passion of romance, while my personal favorite, “Kintsugi” presents a metaphor for the healing power of love. “It’s an art in Japan,” explains Shah-Tayler. “I think it’s derived from either the Emperor or some Shogun who had a favorite pottery, and it broke. And then somebody was smart enough to fix the pottery with gold and made the faults and the cracks within the pottery more beautiful than the pottery had originally been.”

Shah-Tayler continues: “So, it’s a conceptual thing, derived from that sort of practical art of fixing things. And instead of the new, perfectly made thing being the desirable object, it’s the thing that has been amended in a way so, as to make it more beautiful. So I equate it with, you know, a psychological improvement, like once you’ve been through pain and suffering, you use the process of becoming better, putting yourself back together, to become a better person, or to become more equipped against the foibles of daily life.

Experimentation
Asked about his approach to working in the studio, and how he is inspired by different musical devices, Shah-Tayler told me: “When I get a new instrument, I explore the instrument. I don’t look at the manual. I never look at the manual to try and figure out how the filters work or how, how to do things, I just sort of like launching and just experiment. The trick is to just be inspired by something which isn’t knowledge. It think that’s useful”

It’s this music-as-art approach that sets Elysium apart from other contenders in the pop music field. JST says: “You know it’s like if you find a Chinese oud that’s out of tune, and you find something with out of tune notes, then you just play around with that and that suggests something that you know that you’d never come to, just experiment just doing I musically, if that makes sense… That’s one of the things that I find Depeche Mode used to do, you know, they were like, bang a pot, tune the pot and make that the instrument. I mean that’s the coolest, most rewarding way to experiment.”

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