Tiers la Familia has spent years refining an approach where kindness becomes the most confrontational stance possible. The Love Synthesis is a wide-eyed, blurry romp fueled by shaded synth beds and electric rhythms. This music is vulnerable but still aggressive, underpinned by a real softness. Sefyu “Joe” Sidney and crew (Cheryl Kingan, Jeff Tobias, and Ian Bjornstad in this iteration) meet the darkness with serious grooves, a sense of humor, and an unrelenting, positive determination. This is kindness as resistance set to a killer beat. Sidney’s path to “Lead With Kindness” as a guiding principle came from hard-won understanding, from watching workaholism serve as a survival tactic, and from recognizing that society systematically dismantles the very qualities that make people human. Sidney’s music insists compassion is the radical act, and that shows up in so many ways across The Love Synthesis. This album breathes with the conviction of someone who knows the other side where hate thrives, and refuses to give it any more airtime.
(Bonus points for releasing the album in the format of an awesome sticker pack with a download code)
The Love Synthesis is OUT NOW on Debacle Records.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
When did you first start making music, and what drew you to it? Can you remember the first recordings you made in your bedroom?
Making music was the next step after that kind of active listening and DJ-level fascination with pop music. All of that just inspired me to feel like, “Oh, I want to say something too!”
But my bedroom recordings wouldn’t have been possible without my neighbor involving me in his bedroom recordings. Without having Chris Vita as my next-door neighbor in 1992, I wouldn’t have felt devoted to the recording medium as an art or discipline. So much praise and respect is for him. As much as I loved music, he made participating tangible. He got me into punk rock, which was another one of these tangible alleyways into music, the actual doing of it.
As far as those recordings, they were on home synthesizers, kid-friendly Casios and Yamahas at the time, straight to cassette tape. I’d have mic’d up the damn speaker for all I knew, but that dude got a straight signal using cables. He was a Radio Shack kinda kid.
Those first recordings were like jacking the synthesizer’s demonstration songs, and jacking the chord-fill-in sequences that they used to have on them. Garage sale stuff too, like consumer-drum machines, and teaching yourself guitar and drums.
So, because of my surroundings and lack of any care for any other socialization, I was learning to record as a kid in a cement basement. I eventually brought that into my own bedroom, and it became a more private thing.
The phrase “Lead With Kindness” is described as the album’s central provocation. Can you talk about the realization that led you there? What made demanding more positivity feel vulnerable and punk rock at 40?
I was thinking of what John Lydon would do when the dub got brought into Public Image Limited – but for it to be me, if he were to be an inspiration for that, for originality, I would have to subtract anything he would’ve talked about- so no “Low Life,” no “Death Disco” – I was stuck with kindness and mindfulness. Ha!
But in a GOOD way. And I realized after that, “Oh my entry point was HR from Bad Brains,” but I didn’t realize it until I stripped Lydon of “Death Disco” and “Low Life.”
Cause it was a part of me. I spent a year being fed vegetarian food by Taiwanese Buddhists in their temple around here (Queens). I came to the idea of positivity from a very pure place.
But I think the more adult years passed, the more uncomfortable I got. I was just uncomfortable as an adult at the time, as a man, and I did not want to share anymore. This society is prepping you for it the whole time: that in order to survive, use less.
of your imagination, and then don’t use it all, then stop critical thinking. And to fuck your feelings. Especially! I was an artistic person being dismantled by society.
I forgot to “go into the arts,” and this is what happens.
I had a lot of development to do to regain myself. I put the work in. Passion, softness, and vulnerability, and all of these so-called human things are the very first things this society wants to get rid of in order to be productive for the system, the cog the machine needs you to be. Have you ever noticed how you have to adapt to what Work Culture wants from you?
So I couldn’t DO this until I was 40, I was not ready as a human being to be out on stage for people and tell them to ‘believe in mindfulness.’
Sensitive issues, and it was time sensitive. Like Rabbis are supposedly advised not to offer the study of Kabbalah until the learner is 40. That is when you’re ready.
I am 100% with you in framing kindness as a radical act rather than a passive one. How did you arrive at that understanding? Was there a specific moment or experience that shifted your perspective?
Wow fuck- I’m still arriving at that understanding. But I’ve seen some shit, I don’t want to name any things as specifics, you could say they’ve cumulatively helped the gears turn towards a radical view of love.
Workaholism got me through Trump’s first term. Ignorance. But I learned to be more human through the heightening oppression and the perfectionism in the normalization of it.
I have a “cis-presenting, white-presenting male membership card” – I was unaware that I could AFFORD the ignorance through workaholism! I wasn’t invested in the fact that nothing changed since Amadou Diallo, nothing changed since Matthew Shepard. That we were all more fearful and some of us more terrible than ever. I wasn’t looking up, man. That was my privilege. That was my survival tactic for having been in bad places, but it is still not an excuse.
So we get this shithead clown president, we get this Covid-19 pandemic, more frequent church, mosque, and synagogue shootings, uptick in racial violence against Asians in my city too; You would’ve had to have had your head really far up your ass to continue to not look. And my journey here required a long fucking hold out first, I feel like when I returned to sharing art and the cliche of the platform (which is such a weird thing, I’m doing art for art, now there is a platform? weird!) then I have a responsibility towards positivity- I have seen the other side whether it’s drugs or violence or abuse- I don’t owe those a retelling.
How do you navigate making music with an explicitly positive message without it feeling naive or disconnected from the realities people are living through?
It’s very hard, but it’s still very intentional. By the way, we have a song popular in our set “Time is an Open Hand” – it’s not positive, but it’s not negative – I’d like to think it’s sobering.
So we’re not inundating you with positivity all the time. The naivety is, at first glance, part of positivity or “posi-core” haha, and it’s an incorrect assumption. That would be like correlating twee pop with infintalism.
Now I think there’s a huge problem with infantilism, and much like naivety, it’s not the place you want to be. Because it’s wiser to choose to lack judgment than to have a lack of ability to judge altogether. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone-“ Rather than show the discipline of restraint.
Interesting in this topic, a high form of Buddha-nature is that of a child- the child has not been as damaged by society as it will be by the time it’s an adult. There is a discipline to return to the child as a place before you learned hate. To try and come back in touch with your original softness – I guess it’s similar to American “talking to your inner child” psychology.
So I will one-up naivety with Buddha-nature any day. And I absolutely come to TLF messaging with my Buddha-nature. “Stop right there, you seem to care – Is everything alright?” That’s like it is absurd to care, are you sure you’re ok?? because you seem to have a heart!!
Did you see the statement by Renee Good’s wife after she was murdered in the street by ICE? The amount of compassion necessary to move forward and surrender to the idea that peace is possible after this for her? That’s some high-level Christ-consciousness shit- Good’s wife just took every good thing about Jesus and held up a mirror to Christians in America. This needs to be discussed; this widow is synthesizing love.
What role does humor play in your work?
We’re New Yorkers, so we’re always coming in hot, haha. Oh, I mean, the sassy pricks in rock n’ roll were our favorites. The traders of barbs and such. The firm tongue in cheek. It’s a levity all this doom around us requires.
On our third album (Tier Apparent, 2023), I used a lot of autotune in order to be out of tune with the song’s key – that was artistic but humorous.
We famously have our name spelled wrong by accident in every way possible on official things: flyers, YouTube, shirts- Tier La Familia, Tier la Familiar, Tiers La Famiglia- that becomes a running joke of band lore. And humor saves us. Not just here in the art.
It goes back to the Buddha-nature. I can’t be solemn like The Cure. I like The Cure, I just can’t successfully be that, that’s not me. I’m more Charlie Chaplin than The Cure.
After 25 years of making music, what’s different about how you approach recording or collaboration now? What have you learned that you wish you’d known earlier?
I grew up with it, and as I achieve wisdom, I hope to (and so far so good) make it – wisdom application – make sense in making music too. Like I don’t chase the musically perfect or the studio perfect sound – the same way I don’t chase perfect girls or perfect jobs. I am wise enough not to, and I’m wise enough to not be a slave to perfection or even the concept of that being real.
I’ll make music by feel. Listen to Theo Parrish’s records. They’re not perfect, but the feel is better than on the ‘perfect ones.’
I’ll say that while recording alone teaches you about yourself and emancipates you, but that self-sufficiency in art does not always make it a peak experience. Any idea of music being for ‘me’ should be balanced with music for ‘us’ – because I learned to care more about community and care more about soul. I was chasing chicks. Weed dealers. I didn’t understand soul and community. Again, Kabbalah at 40. I wasn’t ready.
And I want to be collaborating every day. I spent most of 2024 bothering the shit out of people on text on “yo sing over this”, “send me something instrumental you threw out”, “play on this”- straight up bothering band members and people for company on record.
You know who you are if you get an email from me that makes no sense – that’s me unable to formulate that we need to do something together. Cause I do me in meditation these days, I don’t need to do me in recording anymore, I want to be with others. I also want more singing by more people. This is an official call: I need a chorus. I’m building a chorus.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I’ve lived in a very, very busy area for ten years. So my first place renting a room here, that window was the sound of yelling, honking, drunkards, kitchen staff fights, illegal gambling rumbles, funeral processions, stray cat violence, fireworks- just a crazy window!
And I moved up that block eight years ago, and I spent months missing that window. My new window faces a different side, and I started to be upset that my new window was so quiet.
But as time went on, this window took on its own personality, and the sounds of this window for eight years now have been trains, airplanes, and fire trucks- we’re right over the tracks, in a fly zone above us, next door to a fire department. When we have storms, heavy winds push against it. The city breathes through those sounds, and I felt like my window sounds changed from the duress of my old window and into more esoteric lungs of the city, like a respiratory system of engines. And people were out their window banging pots and pans at the end of shifts for first responders and nurses that first month of Covid here in March 2020.
I also love the sound of dogs’ dream barking.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
