“Good” and “bad” are transient; “weird” stays weird. A truly weird album’s sonic thrashes and atmospheres stand the test of time. The music-making community can pick at a weird album all they want, breaking off certain aspects for their own craft, and still not damage the unmistakable strangeness of the source material.

How can one truly understand a glitchy, jizz-covered mess?

How can the lyric: “We dog sit on mom dog watch night, mom gone, Mumblecore ad-libs rouse. We pet. I type ‘roadhead cum’” ever be understood or feel familiar? Every reading brings a new obstacle.

How does a person become acclimatised to an album that genuinely sounds different every time it plays? The proudly administered step sequencer has no reason, but carries the rhyme weirdly well.

All of this to ask: How do we explain Shadowdog by tirestires now, a decade on after its release?

We asked jc, the person behind the mysterious and now-defunct alias tirestires, who provided incredible insight into an album that has grown a cult fanbase since its release in 2015.

But even jc seems some distance away from Shadowdog’s hypersexual convulsions and cracked-screen poeticism.

For one, as their long liner notes for the new vinyl release state, it is not a wholly autobiographical work. 

It is also a release made midway through an “anti-social shift”. It houses lyrics that explore a pornographic, digitally-native psyche long before our current understanding of such phenomena. But, even with themes becoming more pertinent over time, its weirdness shines out as bright as it did all that time ago.

Its 10-year anniversary is as good a time as any to try to dissect its contents, especially with the artist here to help. 

Let’s shine some light on Shadowdog.

—-

listencorp: What was the first aspect of Shadowdog that materialised?

jc: Every track began with me singing over a guitar. The vocal melodies were there from the beginning and are the only thing that remained by the end of the process.

listencorp: So they started simply and were corrupted over time?

jc: The experimental electronic elements were not part of the initial conception but I was always obsessed with maximalism and formal innovation in pop music. From 2012 to 2013, I was the primary songwriter in a band called Tires. We were interested in 1990s American indie, especially Guided by Voices and Pavement. Over the course of that year I probably wrote 50 or 60 basic demos on voice and guitar. The plan was always to flesh them out after the fact. I was 17 when I started writing these songs and the album was finished when I was 20.

At 18, I was reading a bunch about Pet Sounds and The Olivia Tremor Control, so my idea of innovation was recording a violinist or a sax player. The next year, I was deep in early Jens Lekman and the burgeoning vaporwave scene, so I started sampling more. By the end of the process, I was thinking a lot about Fennesz and Oval, so you can imagine what that meant. Getting into Tiny Mix Tapes significantly expanded my mindset but was also part of an anti-social shift in my worldview.

I believed glitch was the most exciting direction I could take the production in. However in hindsight I realise that glitch was also appealing because it meant I could make the music alone and no longer had to ask favours from other musicians. Worrying less about what friends would think of the release caused me to focus more on some imagined audience who valued honesty of text over immediate emotional impact. These values perpetuated a feedback loop where I felt alienated and full of self-loathing, so the lyrics reflected that. 

listencorp: The sound could be described as completely corrupted. Many artists employ glitchy broken instrumentation in their work, but preserve certain elements. What drew you to corrupting everything in Shadowdog?

jc: That’s a complicated question. A critical answer could be that I’m insecure as an artist. People often call Shadowdog try-hard or overproduced. I am a try-hard. Rather than accepting that a song isn’t good enough, I will work on it until I believe it’s successful in some way. I wanted the music to be as unique as possible because by some naive and insane logic, I believed originality would get me a Pitchfork review and then I wouldn’t have to get a job I hated like the one my father had. I wanted to be in a band like Neutral Milk Hotel but I don’t think I ever understood how to make music with that level of immediacy. I took the lesson that I should also emulate the production of The Beach Boys’ Smile. I tweaked the songs endlessly and I think that’s where the corruption really emerged from.

On the other hand, I love the sound of glitch. I was chasing newness in texture and over time, I discovered a collection of production techniques I had never heard before. I loved how hypnogogic pop and its vaporwave offspring transform decipherable sounds into something alien through simple tools like varispeed, eq, and reverb. I loved how Jai Paul used compression like an instrument in order to reinvent the attack or sustain of his sound sources. I loved listening to production like an archaeologist interpreting how and why a relic was created.

The pairing of convoluted rhythmic filtering techniques and the rapid fire chopping between entirely different arrangements of the songs are the primary reason the music sounds so alien. One reviewer called the album “GANbreeder Pop”, comparing Shadowdog’s aesthetics to those early AI visuals that replicated the experience of having a stroke. These images at first seemed like blurry photos of familiar spaces, but upon closer inspection, nothing in the images were discernible objects. Giving even experienced listeners a soundscape they could never quite unpack seemed like the ultimate objective to me.

Many people have a favourite movie they’ve watched five times, but in 2025, people will listen to their favourite song 1,000 times. I believe the best music offers sonic or emotional qualities which allow someone to listen forever without getting bored. For me, a production which can be appreciated on multiple levels allows someone to listen to it over and over again. I would listen to the demos of my songs over and over and I would keep altering them until they felt enigmatic to me. I rewrote the lyrics into strange broken prose which rarely corresponded with the flow of the melody because it felt more alien.

So when I was crafting the album, I think I conflated thorough corruption with total innovation.

listencorp: Could it be the nature of the lyrics that led to that kind of sonic cloaking?

jc: I wouldn’t say so. In my head, an audience member could read along with the lyrics on bandcamp, so my focus was on giving the vocals a unique texture. In 2015 there was basically no indie rock with aggressive autotuning. I was fully inspired to tune my vocals heavily because of asdfasdf by Katie Dey. That record was so original to me and her voice sounded so cool. Though it’s interesting you bring up the lyrics being hidden behind production as a cloak because I’ve read that she devised the effect to obscure her text and voice as a way of hiding. So maybe in a roundabout way, my vocal production was developed to serve that goal.

--------

If you're visiting listencorp for the first time, hello! We have a print magazine exploring interesting electronic music and the cultures that grow within, from the incredible archiver Vapor Memory to the surge in 'Frutiger Aero music'. Come and check the magazines out!

--------

listencorp: What was the moment you understood that this album might take on a cult fanbase?

jc: Well there was no audience upon its release, so from the very beginning I was hoping for a cult fanbase lol.

listencorp: The album features sexuality and sensuality often through the lens of digital voyeurism, do you feel this theme and the way you explore it has stood the test of time or become outdated over the 10 years since Shadowdog’s release? Or has it become more poignant (not for you, but more the listening/online music community)?

jc: You’d probably have to ask someone less biased if the lyrics have stood the test of time. I can tell you that I was highly concerned about the internet aesthetics having the capacity to age well. I tried my best to only use post-internet language which could have existed 10 years before the album was released. What I mean is that there are no references to brands or specific applications or websites from 2014. I wanted the description of the web to feel somewhat arcane and timeless. The only occasion when I broke this rule was the lyric about the ‘incog tab’, but fortunately for the text, the incognito browser still exists (unfortunately google may be timeless).

Regarding how the themes of sexuality stand up today, I can confirm that early exposure to pornography had a deep and lasting impact on my psyche. It may be debatable how negative this impact was, but I think many people in my life would feel the same way about porn’s effects on themselves. 

This album was released before words like ‘incel’ or ‘gooner’ existed. Though the lyrics aren’t explicitly about edging yourself infinitely or sexual entitlement, I believe the way horny language relentlessly infiltrates descriptions of everyday banality are indicative of the mindsets which lead to incel culture or goon lifestyles. I was drawing on the older trope of the nerd living in his parents' basement, but I do think my depiction of the nerd as uncomfortably sex obsessed feels more relevant today.

listencorp: What’s a lyric that you stand by? A lyric that is still or more meaningful/funny/sad/poetic as it was when you wrote it?

jc: A couple I love:

“frame lasts forever. we laugh forever.” / “he bounds. he’s bound.” / “i finally delete her nudes.”

And some of the most out of pocket lyrics I can hardly believe I wrote, let alone sang:

“then empty, her rear outputs cream.” / “input slipped out of coat pouch orifice.” / “i come in her eye. she leaves blind.”

listencorp: What music are you making now? And what excites you from a creative standpoint?

jc: Between 2020 to 2022 I wrote an opera in the style of Alex G and Elvis Depressedly. It’s written for the screen. My dream is to blend my musical aesthetics with my filmic interests. As a proof of concept to demonstrate the quality of work we can bring to our bedroom pop opera, friends& developed a four-part album we will release in 2026. The new album is titled “folx”. 

On a less personal note, I’m working on an essay defining what I believe to be the most formally innovative production techniques in rock music in the 20s. Hopefully this will answer the question of what excites me in detail. 

I’ve also been deep into the idea of developing genres. Laptop Twee is currently the most public facing of these but I’m still refining the definitions for three other genre concepts:

Dawk = DAW-based Rock

Discord Emo = 5th Wave Emo with Indietronica Production Elements

Bro Collage = Shitpost-influenced Collage and Electro Acoustic Music (as Brostep is to Dubstep, Bro Collage is to Sound Collage)

There was also a genre I spent a few weeks getting serious about called “Rockband DnB”, but on deeper meditation, I don’t believe it has enough legs for me to call it a genre in good faith. The pairing of breakbeats and guitars is more of a trend I’ve noticed within the larger spectrum of Dawk aesthetics, as opposed to its own unique genre. 

Do you think I should be talking so openly about this ridiculous stuff?

------

Get Shadowdog on vinyl

Follow friends& on Instagram

Follow friends& on Substack