Black Moth Super Rainbow on Rejection, Score Work, and Thriving Under the Gun

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OK, let's get down to business: I've followed Tom Fec's work as Black Moth Super Rainbow and TOBACCO since Dandelion Gum oozed out of my iPod back in 2007, it's been fascinating to chart his many twists and turns discography-wise and the new Black Moth record, Soft New Magic Dream (which just saw release last month) is the latest benchmark down his weird, woozy path. Up to this point, I'd never actually interviewed Tom (although I did interview his one-time bandmate Maux Boyle way back in 2010 for the esteemed Tiny Mix Tapes)—so I enjoyed grabbing him on the phone earlier this year and getting into the new record, the scope of his career, and much more. Check it out:

Tell me about the genesis of this new record. It's the first official Black Moth record in seven years, right?
Yeah. I actually started it, unofficially, as soon as I finished the last one. There's stuff that goes back to 2018 on here. Then, pandemic stuff happened, and I didn't really feel like coming back to it—I had other things I was doing, and I needed to live more life to make it make sense.

I didn't really want to come back to Black Moth, anyways. I mean, this is fucking probably the fourth time I've ended that band—but I always keep on coming back. In 2023, I started working on those demos again, and then in 2024 I got this really big blast to make some new ones. It was almost manic, the way I made it. There was so much nothing for so long, and then I was like, "Okay, gotta get it done, gotta get it done."

Do you typically find yourself working like that?
Yeah, that happens. I got hired to do a video game in 2021, but before that, I didn't even turn on a keyboard on that whole year. I just wasn't feeling it. I'm pretty hot and cold—but this one got real hot at the end. I started writing the last song a week before I even turned in the masters.

How was your pandemic experience in general? It sounds like you took a bit of a break from music in general during that time.
I loved it. [Laughs] I loved the pandemic experience. I had a tour booked for 2020, because I had a Tobacco album that year—and getting to cancel that tour felt like the ultimate snow day. Touring is not really my favorite thing. It's not that I get stressed out by touring—I just don't feel my best when I'm touring. I think I might be too much of a creature of habit. I like to eat healthy, I like to exercise, and I like to have something resembling a routine. So I fucking loved the pandemic—I mean, not the pandemic. I loved getting to stay home.

Yeah, I've talked to quite a few musicians over the years who felt similar. Some have also said that they were able to be more productive, creatively, than they were before the pandemic.
When it comes to making stuff, I'm a lot better under the gun. The less time I have, the better I am. But that's also a little bit of a curse, too—because I don't leave any time for anything. I've always said that it feels like how, Michael Myers, every Halloween, he has to go kill his family, right? Every time I don't have time, I have to make something. I can't sleep if I'm not making it. I haven't slept well since I was a teenager, so when I got to stay home for that year and a half, I slept like a fucking baby. I wasn't thinking about making anything. It was like my brain was finally blank, and it was the greatest feeling.

It's funny to hear you talk about your own creative pacing, because from a distance you've seemed relatively prolific across your different aliases. You're basically the opposite of, say, Boards of Canada—and I've talked to people who work with those guys, and from what I've heard they are regularly making music, even if it rarely sees the light of day. But it doesn't sound like you're working constantly as much as it is a real need to put something out there when you feel it.
Yeah, I get that strong push. But also, the older I get, the more of a perfectionist I'm becoming. The first Tobacco album, Fucked Up Friends—I wrote that in a month, because it was so easy. I didn't have to think about anything. Now, I probably put that much time into one song. I love Boards of Canada, and I can see why those guys take so long—because you can hear it in the detail. As I get older, I think my stuff probably is going to start getting further and further apart. But hopefully that makes it better.

Are you the type to revisit your earlier work? If so, how do you see your own progression as a producer and musician over the years?
When I first started and people first started noticing me, I was 100% audacity—just believing that whatever I did was fucking great, whether it was or not, and not really putting a whole lot of thought into it. There's a lot more thought these days, but I can't lose the audacity, because that's what I am. I'm not a great musician—I can't read music, I've met so many people who blow me out of the water. I mean, the people that I work with in Black Moth, when we play live, the way that they're able to learn all the synth parts and everything—I couldn't do that. I can't even re-figure out the stuff that I wrote. So I have to have that audacity. But over time, I've started to add nuance on top of the audacity.

I feel like I'm still evolving. I don't think I've hit that old-person wall yet—how your favorite bands are after 10 or 15 years where it's like, "What are they doing?" I really hope I never get there. That would be really scary.

I listened to this new record and then I went back and revisited the last Tobacco album, and if you'd asked me 10 years ago what each project sounded like, I'd be able to put the differentiation into words. Now, both projects sound like they're going in very different directions. Is that something you perceive?
Black Moth has always been what I imagine a band—like, a full live band playing outside—would sound like. Nothing too off-putting, nothing too abstract, but all still within what I am, what I do. I don't know that anything I do is accessible, but it's more accessible. The Tobacco stuff is more me just playing and not really worrying about writing songs and having things move the way they should move.

I've really played with those parameters a lot since I started. That album I put out in 2020 as Tobacco on Ghostly—there's stuff on there that could've been Black Moth. There was probably stuff on Cobra Juicy that could've been Tobacco. But I usually see these albums as a full project rather than what band name they're gonna go to.

You've worked with a lot of different people over the years as well. I'm curious to hear you talk about any people that you came close to working with—the ones that got away.
The big one that got away when I was doing Hot Wet & Sassy. The first song on that album, "Centaur Skin," I wrote that with someone in mind, and I got him—and then he just sort of disappeared, because he was at the time he was working on his album. That was Robert Smith, and I haven't talked to him since the summer of 2019. We were talking about setting that up and he just sort of disappeared. I don't know if maybe I scared him off. I might have said something weird, I don't know. But I think that would have sounded so good.

I actually hear a lot of Air in your music at times, although that could just be the vocoder. Are they a band that have ever been an influence for you?
It's actually not something I ever drew from at all, but I think we could make a nice little tour pairing at some point in time. I had all these other weird influences that built this thing, parallel maybe to what Air was doing. A lot of the stuff that I get compared to is not really stuff that I listen to, and I haven't quite figured out why that is. Maybe it's because, fundamentally, the heart of what we're doing is so different, but the skin of it might be similar.

You've been self-releasing your own stuff through Rad Cult for a minute as well. Tell me about the highs and lows of that process.
Well there's only one high, and it's that you get all the money. I don't want to do all that work, otherwise. I don't know people—like, this new album won't even be in stores. I had a distribution deal for a long time, and I'd noticed that I was getting charged, like, $200 every month in fees because I either had too much stock in a warehouse or not enough. There was this weird, perfect balance you have to hit with every release, and it just didn't seem worth it anymore. I've toyed with going back with a label, but at this point, no labels will even talk to me, so I'd probably rather not. Someone's always asking me for something, and there's always some kind of deadline, and I just don't care.

When you say labels won't even talk to you anymore, why do you think that is?
I don't know. I tried a couple times. With Cobra Juicy, which I did on Kickstarter, I talked to a lot of people the year before and had some really good meetings. I had a meeting in an office in Seattle with a really good label. I'm sure you can figure out who it is. It all went really well, and he told me how much they usually sell, and I was like, "Oh, man, this should be really easy." He was telling me, "This is the greatest thing ever. I love this album." Then, I get home and I don't hear from him, and I'm emailing, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, we're not gonna be able to work on this," and that was basically the thread through everything. A lot of these bigger guys were like, "This is like the best thing you've ever done ,we love this, we can't work with it."

That one was actually for the best, because that album made a lot of money. I have a lawyer who works with a lot of these labels, and his viewpoint is that if they can't claim you as their own—if they can't take credit for you—then they're not really interested. They just want the cred. I don't know how right he was, but ever since then...I mean, I can't even get a reply to an email from anyone. So I don't know.

Have these experience been discouraging for you in terms of working within the music industry versus just doing what's best for you?
Yes. It makes me feel like a complete outsider—which, I've always had that. But there was that moment where it was like, "Okay, well, maybe I can work with people," especially after Dandelion Gum happened. There were a lot of people who wanted to work with me, and I just wasn't feeling it at the time. I thought it would be more important to do things on my own. Maybe it's because I'm at this stage in my life where I don't owe anyone anything, and I have all my masters.

But...I don't know how to say this, but there are a lot of things that never really added up to me—whether that be, like, sales or whatever. The last Black Moth album, for a band that no one's ever heard of, did pretty well on Billboard—it was, like, #1 on Heatseekers, and no one was interested. For this one, I only tried to talk to a couple of labels, but I couldn't even get a reply.

It is discouraging, but at the same time, I guess it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, I have all this freedom, and I'm doing what I want, when I want. When people are like, "When are you gonna turn this in?"—if I don't turn it in, what are they gonna do? Nothing. At the end of the day, it's my money.

Talk to me about working on the soundtrack for High on Life.
I loved doing that, because I didn't feel pressure. I know that's weird, because I was working for people who are my bosses. It was the first time I had a boss in however many years. But they're easier on me than I am on myself. I beat myself up so much harder when it comes to making a Black Moth record than when it comes to making stuff for these guys. They can throw me an idea—something that I would never do, that I would never choose to do, a creative choice I would never make—and it's really fun to work that out. It gets the juices flowing. It's almost like experimenting really hard again, but someone's paying me to do it.