Fred Thomas
There’s a kind of music-making that one might call sonic nesting—a small constellation of synths and a dusty cassette deck in the corner of a room, a drawer full of notebooks. It's the work that happens in the periphery, outside of touring and spectacle, where the artist becomes both listener and critic. In the wake of lockdowns—when stages fell silent and the meeting house of live music disappeared—many turned inward. Creativity responds to disruption; each crisis brings a new body of work.
Fred Thomas’ output (here is a link to the ultimate primer written by Erin Margaret Day) often feels like a shimmering early webpage from a long-lost LiveJournal—unfiltered, diaristic, tender. His work captures scenes of the Midwest: the taste of a low-grade beer at a noise show, the awkward communion of friends not entirely liked, guitars and a reverb tank capturing fading love.
His synth-led compositions unfold episodically—seven volumes to date—scattered across independent labels. Dream Erosion VII is the latest dispatch. Like taking a self-portrait every day, its pieces accumulate: floods, salvation, the granular texture of a memory ringing in the close distance.
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Hi Fred, how’s your summer going? Are you touring with one of thirty bands you play in, or eating ice cream at home? (I know you just purchased your first home.)
I play a lot less and in a lot less projects than it seems. Before May, I'd only played a few solo shows in January of 2025. From January until April I was basically eating ice cream and hanging out with my cat. There's a few things on the books right now, including a little East Coast run with my friends in Winged Wheel and a couple of local shows with my indie pop band Idle Ray because we just released our second album. Other than that, though, there are long stretches of grateful inactivity.
This isn’t our first time chatting -- I know last time we talked a bit about working on music from home, and minimal synth and recording setups– how is this shaping up in the new space?
The last place I lived was a house about half a mile from the one I moved into, and Emily and I rented it for exactly five years. We thought it was built in the 1920s, but when the owners sold it, they disclosed that it was built in 1844! The extremely kind person who bought it texts me whenever mail gets delivered there for me, and one of the last times this happened, he asked me if we knew about the black mold in the basement. In his renovations, he tore out the old flooring of the basement and found unbelievable amounts of toxic black mold, enough to make whatever he paid for the house way too much and enough to make it a small miracle that I didn't get really sick working down there every day and making synthesizer music every night for five years. I have a few things set up in the attic now, and I am continuing to thank my lucky stars we didn't buy that house.
I know for myself new spaces evoke new creative routines– do you find this happening as you settle in?
My tendency is to constantly change and reconfigure my creative space. I go so far as to sometimes put certain instruments in other rooms as to limit my workflow, or just to keep changing up the energy. This perpetual shifting has become a routine, and I'm finding that the music I make lately takes longer but is way better than when I was just always plugged in and rewriting similar songs every day.
You have such a wide, genre-expansive variety of projects. (Idle Ray, Winged Wheel, Saturday Looks Good To Me, ECOATM) How do you keep yourself organized internally or externally? For me I’d probably have a messy work space and find projects influencing other projects.
The key for me is to only ever work on one idea at a time, and to keep in a mode once it finds me. That usually manifests as a week or two where I'm listening to lots of nostalgic high school favorites and writing songs that sound like my version of Pavement or the Velvet Underground. After a little while of that, I'll remember how much energy I get from something that's on the complete other side of the spectrum, and work on something more experimental or challenging. There are weeks where I'm not touching any instruments or listening to records at all, and I'm mostly quietly writing or locked into a book. Instead of having a one-track mind, I try to keep the access open to lots of different tracks but only hop on one at any given time.
So this is the seventh chapter of Dream Erosion. That’s seven synth records. What is driving this?
I'd been learning about synths and trying to find my voice with them for about ten years by the time the first Dream Erosion record came out in September of 2020. That practice grew from really crude, technically unskilled playing in different synth-focused bands to finding the start of being able to translate my songwriting voice onto these fascinating instruments. This was also at the beginning of the pandemic, so my anxiety was at an all time high, and spending many hours of every day lost in synth exploration and composition was therapeutic at that point. Aspects of that time five years ago are still alive in my electronic music practice, and I keep getting closer to being able to express myself with instruments I don't-- and probably won't ever-- fully understand. There's also a progression of unbusy-ing that can be traced through the series, one where I'm growing less and less afraid to leave space in the arrangements. I guess the force driving this particular segment of my music is the same as that which keeps the rest of it forever burning towards the next thing; there's more to say, and there's a new way to say it every day.
Is there going to be a complete Dream Erosion box set? I am reminded of the Magnetic Fields “69 Love Songs”, go big. Go bigger. How do you know when the project ends?
Like all ambient music of value, these songs are meant to be a little bit anonymous, a little bit interchangeable, generic. I've made 90 minute tapes for friends that are just the various mp3 files of these dozens of songs on shuffle, and they almost always come back to me with sentiments like "Oh my god, this is the music I listen to every morning now." There's a way it gets better and more effective the more random it becomes, so even though there have been talks of a box set or a selected ambient works of Fred 2020-20??, I'm wondering if it might make more sense to just randomly mix the songs as they show up, whatever medium that would work with?
You’ve released cassette projects as well for others– care to riff on the rise of cassettes lately since this is a cassette release?
Cassettes are simply cool, in no small part because some people think they're the coolest thing ever and others have such a strong distaste for them. I'm fascinated by cultural objects like this that draw such vitriol from those who aren't into them, and can sort of be equally extra in the hands of people who have entire rooms of tapes. It's been interesting to see cassettes go through various waves in the time I've been alive, from the kind of can't-give-them-away, thrift store tapes taped over with noise music in the '90s and even into the start of the 2010s, to now where it's way more common to see fully pro-manufactured tapes of most indie records. It's still a really accessible way to make something special for a small audience, and that alone makes cassettes valuable.
In honor of summer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask the standard desert island question, but– you’re packing a suitcase for a cabin in the Upper Peninsula, and you’re going to lock yourself in remotely and record– what’s going with you?
On a tour in 2017, I impulse-bought my Roland SH-101 at Switched On, a hardware synth shop in Austin, Texas. I've used it on almost everything I've made since then, but I still learn new things about it every time I really spend some time and break out of my default patterns with it. It'd be a really fun exercise to try to make an entire album with just that one synth, especially if it was happening in an idyllic summer setting.
