Playing the keys are the hands of the Lord – the white wizard underneath Lord Sonny’s black leather.
Tickling the electric ivories for Lord Sonny the Unifier is veteran producer, recording engineer, and musician Tyler Wood. Not only did Tyler contribute keyboards, percussion, and backing vocals to FINAL NOTICE! He also engineered and mixed our debut album.
“If rock stars are the sex gods of music, audio engineers are its druids, the ones who work methodically and meticulously, and to whom people come for mystical wisdom and blessing.”
– Jordan Kisner, Pitchfork Magazine
Over the years Tyler’s work has encompassed a wide range of music from avant-garde, to pop, to traditional. His openness has led him in many directions, and even though some paths have been very technologically oriented, he has always maintained a passion for capturing a pure human performance – a moment’s music in a moment’s time.
Born and raised in Presque Isle, Maine, Tyler heard the call of New York City in college, and arrived in Brooklyn in 2006. Already well versed in music production, Tyler built a studio and began to carve out a career producing, recording, and mixing records. Tyler soon began to tour and record with acts like Luke Temple, Glass Ghost, Chester French, and Joan As Police Woman.
Glass Ghost: Idol Omen
In a Brooklyn brownstone in the summer of 2008, Tyler produced Idol Omen, the debut album by Glass Ghost. Idol Omen – featuring Luke Temple and Sharon Van Etten – was described by the New Yorker as “elegant compositions of frosted indie pop.” Here’s a feature track:
In 2009 Glass Ghost founding members Eliot Krimsky and Michael Johnson welcomed into the band both Tyler on keyboards and percussion, and Aerial East on vocals. The groups 2014 follow up album, LYFE, was also produced by Tyler.
The Clinic & Michael Pollan
Along with producing dozens of albums, Tyler has worked on many film and TV projects as well. This includes scoring and mixing sound on numerous short films by writer-director Jennie Allen. In the extensive list is 2018’s “The Clinic”, which has screened at film festivals throughout the US and in Mexico. This short film was inspired by Michael Pollan’s article “The Trip Treatment.”
Speaking of Michael Pollan, prior to his 2018 book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness” Michael Pollan wrote “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” and also produced a Netflix series in 2016 of the same name. So where’s this trip going? The hands of the Lord, Tyler Wood, did foley sound on the first episode of Cooked. (So now what’s Foley you ask? A Foley artist is concerned with the addition of recorded sound effects and creating aural details after the shooting of a film.) As Tyler writes on his website, “Included in my list of foley sounds was the lizard scene (on episode 1). The solution was a wheelbarrow full of dirt and about 3 feet of rubber garden hose … fun work!”
History of the Eagles
Psychedelics and food science aside, back to the music! Also on his list of TV credits is the documentary mini-series “History Of The Eagles.” As Tyler writes, “I got to go through and mix hours of Eagles multitracks spanning the decades; including Bill Szymczyk’s amazing original studio master tapes and concert footage from the enormous stadium shows of the band’s heyday.”
Transpersonal Sonic Bliss
For the past 5 years, and in April of 2019 Tyler was the sound engineer for the 24-HOUR DRONE experiment, as well as a performer in past years. During this immersive audio art event inside a solar-powered reclaimed 1880s industrial factory, participants were free to come and go over twenty-four hours of unbroken sound. However, those who made the commitment to escape the tight hands of time during this extended collaborative work were rewarded with the intangible feeling of meditative contentment and pure transpersonal sonic bliss. It was BYO1Z of course. To check out a small slice of 24-HOUR DRONE make sure to attend to the O+ Festival in Kingston NY October 11th-13th. Tyler’s performance from 2016 will be installed Saturday, running from 10 am to 7 pm.
Oh My Goodness
All of these side projects are quite minor compared to Tyler’s main sonic focus: Oh My Goodness. Over the past 10 years Tyler has been working alongside fellow Mainer Therese Workman as the Excite Bike, Worry-Core, Analogue-Electro-hybrid duo, Oh My Goodness. Excite Bike? Worry-Core? “The two reasons why you’ve never heard of these genres before are that, first, the duo made them up, and second, because you’ve never heard anything like them before,” writes Charity Painter, from The Wild Honey Pie. Intelligent and highly experimental, their self-titled debut EP was released in early 2013.
Therese Workman and Tyler Wood, both originally from Maine, met during their cleaning crew work as freshmen at Harvard. Propelled by themes of anxiety and nightmare the hip-hop beats and meticulous texturing inspire inclinations to ecstatically dance it all out, or just dance. Amazingly, they are able to deftly translate their worry-core sound to stage:
In the same interview with Charity Painter, Tyler explained, “(We) avoid being precious at all costs. (We) honor and explore EVERY idea, no matter how much time it takes.’ Allowing for total fun and endless exploration in this case leads to tight beats and textured layers.
Oh My Goodness received the 2013 Album of the Year from Dispatch Magazine. Alex Luke, the Global Head of Programming and Content Strategy at Amazon Music and the Former EVP of A&R for EMI North America, writes, “Oh My Goodness blend organic and synthetic sounds seamlessly and maintain a pop sensibility across this entire EP. There’s subtle musical nods to some of my favorite artists (like LCD Soundsystem, Metronomy, Burial and Disclosure) but co-mingled with arrangement and production techniques that are in some of the biggest pop and R&B singles of the year. There’s a fearlessness in the way Oh My Goodness tackles pop music that made this EP an easy choice for Album of the Year. Can’t wait for more.”
And they delivered. In late 2013, Oh My Goodness released a remix album with featured tracks re-envisioned by Andrew Bergmann, Christopher Tignor, Eliot Krimsky, and Alias, aka Brendon Whitney, the co-founder of the indie hip hop record label Anticon.
In 2019 they released their follow up EP, Tippy. In the words of Therese Workman: “This self-released project took 5 years to put on its tuxedo, and now its poppin’ magnums with a machete. We hope that ‘TIP TOP’ (the 2nd track on our new EP) is either your new favorite balm or bop. It’s dedicated to anyone who’s ever learned their value the hard way — Or just to anyone who has ever been in their 20s before.”
The hands of the Lord
Tyler’s contributions are most notably seen in the video for our 6th single from FINAL NOTICE! “The All New Know Nothings.” His piano rocking and synth soaring can also be heard throughout the album, helping listeners navigate through the vast and varied space-time continuum of rock n’ roll.
Beyond the keys, Tyler’s meticulous audio wizarding can be heard in the final polish as well: the fine balance of all instruments and their multitudinous tracks, layered throughout the duration of the space biker journey that is FINAL NOTICE!
To review even more of Tyler’s past work – in more of a chronological fashion – visit
http://www.tylerwood.com/
For fellow audio wizards, or to get a sense of how Tyler works in the studio, check out the long-form article by Jordan Kisner for PITCHFORK MAGAZINE. It features the likes of Bernie Grundman, Matmos, Max Drummey of Chester French, and describes Tyler working alongside mastering engineer Joe Lambert (who mastered FINAL NOTICE!)
Full Album Available Now!
Purchase FINAL NOTICE! on Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, or listen on Spotify or Soundcloud.
Includes ‘March Forth’, ‘All The Signs’, ‘Till We Change’ and fan-favorite ‘Love Is On The Line’!
