Tristan Konkle
Photo by: Luke Best
Tristan Konkle has been “Killing Time” over the last few winter months. Between producing another musician’s album, pausing his band Tapes and Motion and launching a solo career, the Peterborough musician has been busy.
We sat down with Konkle to discuss his history with music and what to expect over the next few months.
What’s your connection to Peterborough?
I was born and raised in Peterborough, lived here my whole life, went to high school here. I played in a lot of bands in high school, so that’s where my relationship with the music scene began, just playing with friends and whatnot, forcing them to learn the songs that I’d written, forcing them to learn instruments.
Would you say you’ve always been musical then?
It’s weird. I don’t come from a musical family per se. Neither of my parents played music, but I do come from a family that loves music. I remember when I was a kid, I’d come home from school and my grandpa would be playing the Beatles and The Rolling Stones on our sound system at home.
So that was the first thing that got me invested in music. I just loved it for so long that when I was a teenager, I decided I wanted to pick up a guitar and play for the first time and started writing my own songs. Really since then, it’s just been a whirlwind of different bands, different projects. If it wasn’t for the rich music community in Peterborough, I don’t think I would have been able to get myself out there as much, you know?
Growing up, what were some of your biggest musical influences?
The Beatles first and foremost. I taught myself how to play guitar just studying a Beatles chord book because I loved their music so much and I made a point to want to learn every bit of music they ever recorded. So I did that, and then from there I started writing my own songs.
In more recent years I’ve taken a loving to artists like Mac DeMarco, Tame Impala, mainly just because they’re artists that I look up to because they’re able to make music from the comfort of their own home. I think my music reflects that because everything that I make and release personally is just stuff that I’ve done in my bedroom, from writing it like an acoustic demo to putting it out in the world.
Album art for Art and Irreligion
Your last live show was in November playing with Tapes and Motion, celebrating the three year anniversary of your debut EP Art and Irreligion,what have you been up to since then?
So since November, I’ve been trying my best to get material together to start to embark on my own solo career and putting my own music out.
But I’ve also produced a project for the local champion, VANCAMP, which was a lot of fun. It was so great working with his band and getting my hands dirty on the production side of things because it was the first thing I’d produced. It meant a lot that he let me really see his songs through to the end and mix them. I think we worked on some great music.
You mentioned doing some music by yourself, but recently for Peterborough Folk Fest and a little bit before that, you built Tapes and Motion into a full band, not just you and Colby McAllister. So what’s your sort of thoughts on why you’re releasing music under your own name now instead of Tapes and Motion?
Tapes and Motion is still very much a thing. I think we’re just going to take a little bit of a break for the next little bit and work on the next bit of music that we want to put out together. Then the goal is when we do come back to do our next thing, it will be as a full band. Hopefully the people that we’ve incorporated, such as Collin Chepeka and our friend Braeden Gibb, they’ll take on a more permanent role in the band.
But until that happens, I’ve just been itching to get new music out, so that’s why I decided to start releasing my own. And I think it will be fun to have my eggs in a couple of different baskets.
Tapes In Motion performing at Peterborough Folk Fest 2025
Photo by: Luke Best
Do you see that this solo project is going to be wildly different from Tapes and Motion, or what are your sort of inspirations?
Tapes and Motion is such a collaborative project between me and Colby, so the songs exist for a long time before they ever see the light of day, whereas I’ve been writing so much just over the last year and I’ve accumulated so much material that I just didn’t want to wait to get together with Tapes and Motion to do it. I feel like they live in a completely different place.
A lot of these new songs are more mellow, a lot more melancholic than the Tapes and Motion stuff, which I feel like is a lot of energy-based and a lot of that music we’ve made to exist in a live format. But this stuff is different, it’s all just music I’ve written myself over the course of the last year and I’m excited to see it come out.
Do you plan on performing your solo stuff live or is it just going to only live on recorded format?
I hope to get a band together to be able to play this material because a lot of it is just recorded by myself in my bedroom, but there’s a lot of different instruments I played. And so in order to reproduce it accurately live, I think I’m going to have to fill out a band for it, kind of like what we did with Tapes and Motion. So it’ll be a similar ordeal.
Have you ever actually released music just under your own name in the past or performed by yourself?
See, it’s funny because the first couple of Tapes and Motion songs that ever came out were originally released under my own name. But then Colby was such an integral part to the creation of those songs that it only made sense to pursue it as a band. So those songs that I put out, in The End Of It All and A Whisper, I took down under my own name and then re-released them under Tapes and Motion. But besides that, I mean, this is the first time I’m releasing music, I think, with the confidence and with knowing that it’s going to permanently live as something that’s just me, which I think will be fun. And it’ll be a distinction between the Tapes and Motion stuff.
You have a new single coming out! Can you tell me anything about that?
Yeah, so “Killing Time” is the new song. I spent the last year and a half working on it. It’s a love song. It’s somber compared to the material I put out with Tapes and Motion. I had originally planned to put as my first song out a kind of more upbeat pop thing, but I opted to go for a ballad just because I really wanted to make a distinction between the music I’ve released before and the music that I’m going to release solo in the future.
Anything else that you want the world to know?
So you can follow me on Instagram, I have a YouTube page where I’ll be posting all my music. And one of my goals for this year actually is to release a song every month. So if you follow me on my socials, you can keep up to date with all that, just as a way to get my catalog of music out there and off my hard drive. It would be nice to free up the space at home.
Tristan Konkle’s new single Killing Time is now available.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
