Tim Hecker

Todd Burns

I want to welcome one of the best experimental music artists that I know of right now. Please help me welcome Tim Hecker.

(applause)

I wanted to just play a song to kick things off, to get everyone in the same frame of mind. Those of you who may know Tim’s music, those of you who may not, this track is called “In the Fog II.”

(music: Tim Hecker – “In the Fog II” / applause)

Tim Hecker

I think you get the point.

Todd Burns

That song’s called “In the Fog” and in interviews in the past you’ve mentioned fog. You perform and there’s fog in the room. What’s the deal with fog?

Tim Hecker

I’m in a fog phase I think right now. That was a reference, the title’s a reference to a book in the 19th century that I came across about English pea soup fog and these kind of mysteries that happened in the night. I haven’t heard that song for like four years so it’s kind of like a shock to listen to it. I probably would’ve mastered it a bit differently now.

Todd Burns

Why would you have done that differently?

Tim Hecker

There’s shrill aspects around two and a half K (2-2500 kHz) that I probably would’ve cut out. It’s definitely fog based in some way. Definitely just like a continuation of my obsession with ether and things that aren’t fully formed or figurative or clear or transparent or easy to understand. Kind of almost shape-shifter kind of references and things like that.

Todd Burns

Tonight you’ll be performing in Montréal and there’ll be a bunch of fog I assume in the room.

Tim Hecker

I hope that tonight will be the most fog ever. There’s different kinds of smoke machines and tonight should be this kind that’s like breathing like a waterfall. It’s like beautiful liquid air and you won’t even notice that it’s so dense you can’t see. That’s the hope. It depends on the air conditioning systems and the type of machines. Sometimes I do them quite intense.

Todd Burns

I was hearing you talking earlier today and yesterday about you need to get the right fog. The right type of fog is so important, like there’s a fine line between good fog and bad fog.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, there’s some that literally smells like chalk and you’re basically inhaling asbestos. It’s the worst thing on Earth. Others you could stay there all day. For me it’s just a way of cutting off the eyes in some ways. Even though I work with light, it’s about channeling things back towards the primacy of the ear in these types of concert experiences, that there’s so much audio visual kind of encouragement in our society and in our institutions and festivals that I think that there needs to be another path sometimes, which brings things back to the ear because how often do we just listen? Denying sight, denying... I haven’t worked with screens for a while, as a way to bring things back towards the ear.

Todd Burns

I guess a lot of performances you are already doing that sort of, even when it wasn’t fog related, like you played at Madison Square Garden behind a sheet, right?

Tim Hecker

Yeah. That was a requirement by Sigur Rós to kind of make the opener obfuscated, but for me it was perfect. Who wouldn’t want to play behind a gauze, mesh thing at MSG and play for 15,000 people your little pipe organ dirge on your crappy keyboard? It sounded insane, and was the greatest way to be an exhibitionist but also not have that weirdness of the silhouette of the lonely person playing onstage doing electronic music.

Todd Burns

Is that the biggest show you’ve ever done, Madison Square Garden?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, of course. That’s literally the end game of all music expression. MSG, you’re finished.

Todd Burns

Billy Joel and you basically.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know where you go from there. It was a real fun experience to do this crap on a massive, massive soundsystem.

Todd Burns

When were you doing that? Was that 2011-ish?

Tim Hecker

Maybe 12 or 13. I can’t remember exactly.

Todd Burns

What have you done since then? Where did you take it?

Tim Hecker

In terms of my show or with Sigur Rós, opening for them?

Todd Burns

Both.

Tim Hecker

I’ve kind of shifted in some ways. I used to play in the dark as a way to make it about the heat coming out of a PA system in the night, just kind of that feeling you get about just being pummeled and having that bass bin rocking, and that’s a really intense experience, and I’m kind of still pursuing different ways to get at that feeling. For me, I started smoking out rooms and having it dark. For a while, I started making these static zones of lavender. I have some jokes about what that color was. I can’t really say now. It is this static, creepy lavender, very violator type of hues. I went to, I started working with a light artist, MFO, and we worked on these, I wouldn’t call them Terrelian or wouldn’t call them a bunch of different references in the visual arts world, but ways of making color experiences that do a similar thing to a full blackout in performance.

Todd Burns

How do you discuss that sort of thing with someone like MFO or a collaborator who may not, you may not speak the same language? What types of things are you saying?

Tim Hecker

I mean, I triangulate a bunch of artistic references that, for me, are clear, like fog architecture, light installations that use fog, and a way that actually... It’s difficult for light artists because it’s... I’m trying to create an anti-light effect. Often you’ll have a light artist who has this arsenal of lasers and strobes, and they want to jack everything because it’s this performance that they can enhance. For me, I’ve been trying to say this almost needs to be understated. You almost have to make this so boring it’s painful for you. It’s like a different way of dealing with lighting, I think, that yields a different effect, and that’s partly the premise of audio in the experience.

Todd Burns

Yeah, I assume for the lighting guy, it’s like, “Here’s my shot. Here’s my performance.” I assume it isn’t that way with MFO...

Tim Hecker

Yeah, it’s a collaboration. It’s like a discussion about what kind of feeling we want to make in this room tonight with this combination of sight and sound. For me, it’s pretty specific, a way in which you’re not thinking about your phones. You probably, hopefully aren’t talking about, “What bar are you going to?” You’re being inundated with sound pressure that incapacitates your ability to think about the tedium of your day, and you just... In an idealist state, your ego evaporates, and that doesn’t happen, but that would be nice. You can get to a point where the pressure’s both intense enough that is doesn’t kill you, doesn’t hurt your ears or just rides that line between violent confrontation and almost comfort and like womb-like type of surround environment.

Todd Burns

I have the track that we played earlier, asked them to play it a little bit louder than maybe normally, just to get that point across, of physicality.

Tim Hecker

It sounded bloated from here. There’s two bass bins. I was like, it sounded crazy.

Todd Burns

I think, though I’m always intrigued by you and people like Ben Frost, where there is this physicality to the sound when oftentimes other people, with ambient music specifically, it’s like you can push it to the background. With you, it’s actually quite in your face oftentimes.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I’m kind of a bit [on the] middle path. I’m not a noise artist, and I don’t claim to be doing an extreme of anything or really radical, experimental work. I think I pull back a little bit from that point of ear damage hopefully, but I think that there’s one step back. It’s to this really fruitful garden about feeling threat, but not being, hopefully not being killed by it. That changes in every room, every space. A seated theater is different than a standing room, where people can move back if they’re in this spot where they’re just getting murdered. You can’t do that when you’re sitting in an opera house or whatever. You’re stuck. I tend to ease back a little bit out of sympathy for that.

Todd Burns

You’ve done a lot of study in the academic field on loudness and pressure. Does that interest in terms of your live performance come with that, or had you always had that interest?

Tim Hecker

I mean, I kind of came out of a period [when] I was really playing with metal bands and more involved in a noise scene than I am now, and I was into taking a computer, which is really sterile, and running it through distortion pedals and mono and just taking this pristine format and degrading it and using sound pressure.

Yeah, I’ve always been interested in, I would say, the transcendental aspects of sound intensity. I went through a period where I quit my job and studied and did a PhD, and I researched the historical origins of people that were obsessed with loud sound, because there’s a lot of books written about noise abatement, which is about people who are interested in making cities quieter, taking New York City in the industrial revolution and trying to reduce the sound of jackhammers and the time at which you could make noise. There’s a lot of literature about people that were trying to tidy up the city. For me, that was half the picture. Who are the people who were really obsessed with powerful sound that could obliterate your ego, could make you dream about something else, could induce godlike effects through music? That’s a different thing, so I kind of went through a study period and read a lot and thought about it.

Todd Burns

In your dissertation, at least one chapter is strictly devoted to organs.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I wrote a chapter on this, kind of like a sonic arms race, where a small section of pipe organ builders in the early 20th century were kind of fighting to build the world’s loudest musical instrument, and that at that point was through pipe organs, which are using jet turbine wind systems to create really intense force, and that lasted for a short while because it was kind of shrill and bombastic.

Todd Burns

You write quite a bit about this one guy, Robert Hope Jones, is his name I think? He seems like quite a character in all of this.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, he was like a dilettante, total outsider traveling around to different organ company builders before he got fired trying to introduce this type of organ stop he built, which was like a 64 deep bass that could... It was almost like sub-frequencies in 1914. He would install these in the organs and they weren’t church organs at that point. They were secular. Cities and civic centers were building pipe organs. They were everywhere. It was almost the form of musical entertainment at a period, at least in the States. The Rockefellers funded 8,000 pipe organs being built across the States.

Todd Burns

This guy was basically like, “Let’s just build it bigger and bigger and bigger?”

Tim Hecker

Yeah, he thought that you could induce godlike effects through sonic intensity, more or less. He tried to make them more powerful.

Todd Burns

We have an image, actually, of this, I guess it wasn’t one of his organs, but it’s from Atlantic City. If you could put it up...

Tim Hecker

Yeah, it’s one of his competitors that ended up trumping him and trying to build the world’s loudest pipe organ in Atlantic City. It’s called the Atlantic City Convention Hall, and it’s an organ with 33,000... [image on screen] There’s 30,000 pipes in this building. It’s actually set into the walls, and that was the world’s largest convention hall at that point. It’s kind of insane because the place is falling apart. No one gives a shit about it. It’s the equivalent in terms of technology, like the Eiffel Tower in terms of mastery of technics at that point. No one cares and it’s literally falling into disrepair.

Todd Burns

You visited some of the places as you were writing your dissertation. The disrepair was one thing that stuck out to you, that nobody cares about this stuff.

Tim Hecker

It was shocking. It was shocking. It was really sad because it was mostly elderly pensioners who are spending their time working for this building, trying to help rebuild it, but they don’t have the resources. Maybe that’s changed in the past few years, but as of 2013 it was totally derelict.

Todd Burns

What else, when you saw these things in person, struck you about this?

Tim Hecker

That track, “Rave Death,” kind of came out after traveling around and visiting some pipe organs, and I got to do a tour of this one and I played the organ because some of the parts of the organ still work. Namely, the deepest sub bass notes that were... Literally, these sound like, when you hit the lowest key, it sound like a helicopter, just air moving. It’s really intense and it’s like a gigantic room. It’s totally psychotic, and it was really hypnotic and almost like a narcotic effect. It was quite amazing.

Todd Burns

You went to Iceland after that to record the album that you did?

Tim Hecker

Surely after, maybe a year or two, I went and took some pieces that I was working on: at that point they were half finished. My friend Ben Frost who kind of encouraged doing this and you know, set up a church to just jam in. We just kind of went over these pieces and played pipe organ with that. I took microphones and fed that into my computer and did a lot of processing on the fly, and we just recorded a bunch of stuff.

Todd Burns

What was surprising to you about working with the pipe organ in terms of the sonics of it and dealing with the sound material?

Tim Hecker

I think what’s interesting about it is kind of like what’s zeitgeist now: it's that just the answer of acoustic instrumentation and real representation with electronic processing. It’s like some fruitful path that just has no end of the ways you can explore it. You know, [you can] confuse reality and representation and recording. It's this really elementary thing of just four people just jamming in a room. It used to be kind of a dream state where you can do tableaus of deep imagination.

Todd Burns

You mentioned jamming in a room and collaborating. For a long time in your career, you were like, “No, this is me. I needed to get away from the band thing...”

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Todd Burns

What brought you back to collaboration?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I mean, I kind of came out of music, just like failed bands, and friends who were too wasted and wouldn’t show up the next day. You know, I was just like, “OK, fuck this. I’m buying a sampler and I’m going to loop you.” You know, these were early computer period [activities], and I just realized I could you know, trigger symphonic types of gestures through computers at that point. It seemed clear to work alone. At that certain point, I was against collaboration. I was like, “Why would you share a canvas with four people?” You know? That’s absurd.

I mean some people do it, but most still like de facto do painting alone. I was like: this is my form of painting so I’m just going to do this. After a while, it became clear, once you bring other people and forms of collaboration can be really fruitful. It’s a different thing. I’m not like doing band types of writing at this point, but it’s still – having other people involved is great because you need a challenge function. If you’re just sitting there alone, it’s like you can easily lose yourself in plug-ins or like clicking your mouse all day, it can be deadening you know?

Todd Burns

The collaborators that you work with, I assume that you have to brief them almost? Like, “Hey, what you’re coming up with may not exactly sound like what you’ve done in this room right now.”

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I kind of tell them, “Hey, you’re feeding into something that will be not about what you’re expressing right now.” That can be a whole bunch of different roles and ways to describe that. I’ve pulled out an iPad with paintings and like, “I want you to create this drip effect through your clarinet.” Or, “We’ve talked of this, I want you to pretend you’re Chewbacca on sizzurp and you’re screaming through your saxophone.” What does that sound like? Let’s try to do that. You know?

Todd Burns

It almost feels like you wouldn’t have to effect that if they actually got Chewbacca on sizzurp.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I think... I listen to a lot of my dry recordings and some of them are really interesting and fruitful just to leave on their own. I’ve done a record of that kind of stuff with piano, but I’m just so used to processing and hammering and sculpting things into some disfigured state where the origin is confused. You know, I just used to blanket everything with reverb and delay and creating these kinds of hypnotic post minimalist states of repetition and vagueness. I’ve lately come a lot closer to semblance and figuration or something? I don’t know.

Todd Burns

Seems interesting the way you talk about your music. You’re constantly referencing art. Like words, “sculpture,” “painting,” "figuration.” Is that the way, I mean, that your brain has always worked in terms of thinking about the music that you make?

Tim Hecker

I mean, yes and no. Obviously, I come out of deep music practices. I played trumpet as a kid, and I learned to do it from a traditional way. A lot of epiphany moments were when I was thinking about painting, and what is like this abstract squeegee painting sonified? Does it sound like crackling fire? Does it sound like some weird cut-up collage, like a sheared Picasso kind of face? Is it a Xerox type of like form of granulation? That pushes for me this light bulb in my brain, and it gets excited. Then studio practice is really fun, and it’s a way of kind of breaking through a wall, you know, in terms of writing, in terms of being inspired, you know?

Todd Burns

What don’t we take a listen. I asked you to send me something that was just a bare recording yesterday.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, this one I realized it’s like stacked. It’s two takes of Icelandic singers that I used from my last album. I used a lot of choir and wanted to just deal with the voice because I was like really anti... Not like rhythmic and vocal are traditional aspects, but I wanted to deal with the voice in a way that was just interesting. It was a challenge for me to do that.

Todd Burns

Listen to a minute of that and then we’ll listen directly into the song that would eventually emerge. This is “Music of the Air,” from Love Streams.

(music: Tim Hecker – “Music of the Air” / applause)

Todd Burns

We kind of talked in very abstract terms about what happens between the dry thing and the finished product. Can you talk about it in concrete terms? What goes on between those two things?

Tim Hecker

There is an underlying bass note that starts with this kind of thing floating over it. That’s something I wrote and jammed in advance. Just kind of improvisation, and then I got this short piece together. Then I sent this to Jóhann Jóhannsson who’s a composer and does a lot of film and record work. He wrote a short accompaniment for that. That was the starting point for this studio session. He sent a conductor, his assistant, to come to Iceland, and then we worked with an eight person chorale ensemble, and I was quite hungover that morning. I was introduced to whale sashimi and ice cream, and I don’t recommend those in sequence. I stayed up all night, literally the worst I ever felt in my life. That recording session was only one day and it had to happen, and I was barely alive. I was recording with Ben again in that session and we just took turns going into the room and giving them instructions, like “This sounds really beautiful and you’re a trained singer, but what if you now have some terminal disease and you are actually a robot?” or “What if your voice can only sound like the most monotoned thing?” “Here’s auto-tune, what if you sing like auto-tune?” Or a bunch of different ways we asked them to improvise, following the score that Jóhann gave me, but also alternate takes where they started just singing off the things they were hearing.

We would play back the first take, which was probably the composed, arranged, official bit, and then we started asking them to do bubbling sounds or robotic burps or whatever. It started stacking up and they started improvising off their own work. By the third or fourth take, you get these very strange things that sound like people breathing or gasping or asphyxiating. I started to auto-tune that and treat it and mold it again with the original material, coming back to that bass jam at the beginning and I just mixed a track down. It takes about four or five iterations, but becomes that in the end.

Todd Burns

Auto-tune obviously is known for certain uses. You were obviously using it for a completely different use. Why did you go to auto-tune as the thing for this?

Tim Hecker

Auto-tune is just one of probably six things in a chain of treatment that that original material gets. Obviously, just the way of taking some variation and making it colder, making it less expressive and exuberant drama student... Someone talked about Lady Gaga as being this drama student who just couldn’t stop doing vocal gymnastics, and I wanted the opposite. I wanted absolute muted, weird, synthetic-restraint or something. Out of that, maybe some human aspect comes. I don’t know, but it’s a different form of a deep restraint or something. I’m not sure.

Todd Burns

Obviously this record had a very specific recording process. The organ one had a thing. Is concept important to you before you go in?

Todd Burns

It’s a tough one, because it’s not like all these records have these strategic conceptual underpinnings. I don’t map it out in advance. It’s not helpful to be just pinned in by some map you set out for yourself, that’s like, “I have this concept, I’m going to execute it fully.” For me, I came it at like I wanted to interrogate the voice. I thought about taking medieval choral music that had ripped MP3s and turned them into MIDI files, and then started applying them towards synthesizers and transforming them. They came back into the voice, so it was almost an ouroboros, where the full cycle returned. That concept kind of emerged as I worked. Other times I’ve come at it in advance. They’re not all water-tight executions of some singular idea. I have a vague idea, but that clarity [comes] as you work through it, for me personally. Other people have the song in their head, absolutely, like Michael Jackson, if anyone’s ever heard his four track recordings he did at home of “Beat It,” he just sang out every component in advance. It’s uncanny and shocking that he visualized every aspect of that song. For me, it’s a bit of a more vague Impressionistic sense of where I want to go, and then it just emerges through working and hammering it into something else. There’s a point you just leave it and it’s done.

Todd Burns

Do you come back... How do you know when it’s done? I think this is an interesting question, especially with this type of music. I could keep going.

Tim Hecker

We live in an era of endless tinkering. You can have 400,000 revisions and save every one and question every choice you make, technically. That can be great for some people. For me, it’s the worst thing on earth. I know people who have been paralyzed by having too many options, too many software synthesizers, too many presets that you can literally spin your head out. Constructed limitation is good. For me, I like two prints, when I jam or improvise, to stereo files. Just a single thing. I can’t go back and question any mixing choice I made in that session. Then I build things on top of that. It’s not a normal way to work, but for me, it allows me to just move forward and not be stuck with this infinitude of possible revisions and questioning.

Todd Burns

Do you have a sounding board that you trust that you’re sending things to, for like, “Hey, what do you think of this compared to this?”

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I have friends that are the most valuable thing on earth, their opinions. People who can be frank with you. That’s helpful, beyond. That’s really important. In the end, though, if you solicit too much input, you can get the opposite, where you get this paralysis by democratic vagaries, because you’ll find two of your friends will like things in a totally almost opposite way. You realize it’s like you’re left on your own to go with your heart. Your heart is just, in the end, what you’re left with. You can’t really teach when to stop tinkering with things and when to realize a piece is done. From my experience, I’ve just known when I start fidgeting with pieces, the oxygen in the room of that piece just starts to dry up. It becomes lifeless. Maybe I’ve heard it too many times and I’m sick of it, but I feel it just starts to get worse.

Todd Burns

In researching this, I was reading an AMA that you did on Reddit and someone was asking for advice, just general advice, and you said something to the effect of, “If you work at it hard enough, you will find a sound, or your sound.” When did you find your sound yourself?

Tim Hecker

I had numerous epiphany moments, but one was just taking... I think I talked about distortion pedals, but just taking a clinical sound out of an early software synthesizer on my computer and running it through a Turbo RAT distortion pedal, and then re-sampling it back on my computer and building something around that. It just felt like, wow, you can literally just overdrive a crappy computer pristine full-spectrum sound and degrade it. It’s almost a new form of four track or lo-fi, but for me opened up all these spaces where I realized that I could work in and play in. Not like it’s my own sound, but there’s something fruitful that starts to emerge after working repeatedly and daily.

Todd Burns

Where were you at? What year was this when this happened?

Tim Hecker

This was probably 2001. I was making minimal techno for a while under a label called Force Inc. I switched to just doing music under my own name, and I started to just overdrive pieces, and I realized an album here on a label called Alien8 and also one on a German label called Mille Plateaux, which was a pretty cutting edge digital music label around the late ’90s, early 2000s. They were doing glitch and clicks and cuts, that was almost ground zero for a lot of these types of computer artists. I came at it from a bit of a reverent, distorted, Montréal, really Bohemian way. For me, I was around a bunch of rockers and a lot of DIY punk music approaches that I just felt that a lot of this clinical music I was associated with lacked teeth and just needed a bit of dirt. That, for me, was a kind of path to doing that.

Todd Burns

For those who may not have been in Montréal at that time, can you set the scene as far as what the scene was like for the music that you were doing and the people that you were hanging out with?

Tim Hecker

It was an emerging hub of pretty interesting electronic music. There’s a lot of connections with Cologne record labels, Berlin record labels, Force Inc., Kompakt, and things like that. The festival here called Mutek, which was really essential for pushing a lot of artists at that point. Then there was, I lived in the Mile End, which was where Constellation Records was operating. I was touring with bands like Godspeed. I just had this kind of synergy of all these different, really opposing aesthetic and musical kind of interests that kind of confused me and led me towards a certain way, I guess.

Todd Burns

We’ll come back to the electronic stuff, but I find it interesting, you talking about Godspeed and those types of musicians, and you’re out here hanging out with them, opening for them, playing with them, with this computer when they seem, at least in my mind’s eye, to be very acoustic and very...

Tim Hecker

Yeah. They were kind of amused by me because I would play with a friend of a house engineer. I was interested in confusing the technician from the artist. Who’s doing the PA’s equalization, which for me is like an art form, and someone just running their music or playing their keyboard. I would open for them and just play beside the front house engineer, and it was really liberating and fun, and people were confused because they thought it was some extended walk-on music or something. They kept cheering like the band’s going to come on. It’s like, “How about 45 minutes of this?” I’d start having stage lights going, there’s no one there. It was just a fun space of being able to confuse all these performance gestures.

Todd Burns

What did the other bands make of you at that time?

Tim Hecker

I guess it was kind of respect or appreciation because I was asked to play with them. I don’t know. I felt like it was some weird synergy. It was weird that I was opening for bands like Godspeed or Isis. These rock or metal [bands], effectively. You don’t want to pigeon-hole them but definitely from a different zone to what I was doing.

Todd Burns

In the zone that you were doing stuff in, you mention Mutek, and I think that festival’s impact on this city’s electronic music scene is pretty undeniable.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, for sure. It was this amazing kick in the ass, because if you’re around your friends you have a limited standard which you have to rise to. For me, I don’t know if I opened for someone like Thomas Brinkmann but it’s like someone you respect, it forces you to raise your level. That was, for me, was crucial, just being able to be kicked in the ass to think my music wasn’t good enough, or whatever. Those festivals were almost this incubator of raising your standards. Personally, artistically, they were immensely helpful, I would say.

Todd Burns

You think, especially for a city festival like that, where the artists are kind of in the town for the day and in the town for the weekend, it’s also you’re having conversations with them, and like, “What do you do with this stuff?”

Tim Hecker

Yeah. It’s also like, not to be nostalgic, because it’s like 12 years ago, but someone playing on their laptop felt like insane. I was like, “What? You can do this now?” People were doing it just with mouse-pad, and I was like, “OK. This is legitimate.” I started to realize this is a legitimate tool, and I fell really stubbornly into it at that point, when a lot of people were making band recreations of their electronic compositions to, for me, create almost a performative acceptance with an audience. I was really interested in resolutely sticking with the computer as my instrument. Why not play a keyboard and a mixer in this weird hybrid, to create a sound field that has live components and is improvisational, has risk, and is different each time. That was really great for me.

Todd Burns

You’ve been a proponent of Max MSP almost throughout much of your career, right?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I’m like an amateur user of it. I rely on people that can program the patches, but for me that’s still an undisputably flexible, weird way to treat music like a sculptural form. Talking again about visual arts, whatever, but it is for me like a painter’s work station that I can kind of spread things around and treat digital audio like the cables, which is just data flow as a stream you can capture and mold on the fly. You know?

Todd Burns

It’s a particular... It’s called Pool, I think.

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Todd Burns

What is that? Can you explain a little bit about...?

Tim Hecker

P-P-O-O-L-L. It used to be L-L-O-O-P-P. It’s a collection of all these patches that was developed primarily by, I believe an Austrian gentleman, and it’s chaotic. They all, all these objects are just Max objects, but they all connect in a network so you can wire all these things together, and have them all modulate each other, and talk to each other. It’s kind of like modular synthesis but it’s computer [based], so you can just work with digital audio in a really fluid way. Treating it like a river that flows between all these different things. It’s just a lot more flexible and open sourced, and there’s a lot more possibility with making things that are kind of odd, I would say.

Todd Burns

One of the things I found interesting, we were walking around yesterday and you were just saying you were trying to get rid of synthesizers throughout your career, and try to get less options in terms of hardware and things you can do.

Tim Hecker

Yeah. I have a lot of friends that collect synths and I respect that fully, but for me I would say it gives me anxiety just looking at a room with like 15 synthesizers. I was like, “OK. I would like to sell them and have just a couple, and then be able to choose on that, and know them really well. It seems like torture to have like 20 synths to choose from and you have to plug them in and it’s like, no. I have a very low-key studio process now.

Todd Burns

What are the ones that you keep in there no matter what? What are the ones that you have found your way around and keep coming back to?

Tim Hecker

I would say my bread and butter is like Clavias, it’s the Nord Modulars. This like small, weird, modular hardware synthesizer that I’ve used for years and years. I just bought another one in case that one dies. I have the backup, but it’s a really flexible, weird, early DSP type of synth that malfunctions in ways that, for me are really creative and I can’t predict how it’s going to sound. Yeah, I have that. I just bought a Nord rack again, because it’s something I used to use and I’m getting back into. That’s about it. I have an ARP Omni for sale if anyone wants to buy it.

Todd Burns

What else do you have in your studio?

Tim Hecker

Liberate it from me. Also, modular synths I use a little bit, but not that much. I find it’s just difficult to patch and I get lazy with that.

What else do I have in my studio? I mostly have a really good mixing desk, and I have a bunch of guitar pedals, and use things like ’80s harmonizers, like Eventide Effects, Lexicon Effects. I just route things to each other and do feedback loops. It’s almost going back to the dub concept of just using the console as a musical device, and just feeding my computer into these kinds of weird ways that start to just kind of become something else.

Todd Burns

Have you used the same monitors for your entire career? Do you care about that?

Tim Hecker

I’ve switched monitors, and that is a disorientating feeling, because you get used to a kind of sound, but you’re also... Every room resonates differently so you just have to deal with that and it’s okay. Yeah, I do have a set of monitors I’ve mostly used.

Todd Burns

What else, inspiration, like on the walls... Obviously you’re into painting and all these things. I assume stuff on the walls would be...

Tim Hecker

Yeah. I have a couple things I keep hanging. I’m moving studios right now. My studio’s in a box and so I’m like working on computer mobilely, but every time I set up a new studio I hang this painting of this snow leopard that was traced by my step-grandfather, who was just an asshole. I don’t know. Something about it...

Todd Burns

We won’t go too deeply into that.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, this animal that just is very strange because his paw is really huge. It’s like as big as a leg. It’s beautifully disfigured. Then I have a picture of Tupac on one side. Out of the side of his eyes he kind of stares at the monitors. That helps mixing because he’s like watching all the time and you’re like, “Am I going hard enough with this? Being too soft?” That helps a lot. (laughter)

Todd Burns

What would Tupac do?

Tim Hecker

Yeah. I don’t know if Tupac would make the kind of music I do, but it’s just like he’s a kind of spirit companion, and he’s just always sitting there. I have a couple dolls of like Sandinistas that I got in... No, not Sandinistas, but from Chiapas in Mexico. These revolutionary dolls I bought when I was traveling through in there in the ’90s just after the insurrection there. I have a picture of vintage era Federer just doing –

Todd Burns

Roger Federer?

Tim Hecker

Yeah. Just a little tennis, that’s it.

Todd Burns

What’s the Federer significance?

Tim Hecker

I just think it’s gracefully poetic in his apex because now it’s over and he’s pretty much retired. At his peak he was very compelling. I don’t know, he’s graceful and murderous like a ninja coming into the night but the tennis version. You know?

Todd Burns

Tennis ninja?

Tim Hecker

I’m like not into tennis as much as I used to [be], the golden era is over now and it’s just, that’s finished.

Todd Burns

RIP golden era of tennis.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, finished.

Todd Burns

In terms of process, what about naming files? Are you very precise? Is it take one, take two and it has the date in it or are you more like this is what it feels like?

Tim Hecker

It’s like stream of consciousness, poetry I just name at that moment and sometimes it’s just dates and a weird feeling.

Todd Burns

Give me some examples of stream of consciousness.

Tim Hecker

Yeah just like I jot, I write something like, “jaw bells version five max shred,” or something. Two, January 3rd so it’s like a bit of context. From there I start working on the pieces and then at the end when I have an album I start naming them and I do a oujia board séance where I just, for me it’s a chance to do poetry. Literally, I love writing and album naming was this opportunity to just add a bit of oblique poetics to the object called the music release, whatever you want to call it.

I was kind of opposed also to or interested by artists like Autechre who were like you know it’s all pointless, let’s just randomize these crap titles and just make it computer generated. Which I really was compelled by and I was always thinking about but ultimately I fell against that. I felt like something else, a chance to write something.

Todd Burns

Definitely puts you in a frame of mind, you know when you open up the album.

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Todd Burns

And hit play and you have this picture...

Tim Hecker

Yeah one of the tracks called “XX CBFold7,” you know it’s like what’s that make you feel? Right off the bat when you hit click, play, it’s kind of odd. You know it gives you a disorientating feeling which I think is part of their artistic intention fully and that leads to the music almost being formed right off the bat.

Todd Burns

I think one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed is the sense of humor in the track titles, like certainly early on there was a lot of word play.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I mean this stuff seems so serious but it’s like I’m not, it’s not fully really this austere, bothered type of expression. For me, there’s a lot of jokes that underlie a lot of this music. Like when I did a collaborative record with Daniel Lopatin, we were laughing the whole time and that album, even though it was made in two days was just steeped with humor. It was like, it doesn’t translate in a clear way but it’s underneath the surface and yeah.

Todd Burns

Why don’t we take a listen to one of the tracks actually from that one. What do we have here? This is “Grey Geisha.”

(music: Tim Hecker & Daniel Lopatin – “Grey Geisha” / applause)

Todd Burns

You made that album in two days and you said you didn’t even remember making that track.

Tim Hecker

Right.

Todd Burns

When it started, at least.

Tim Hecker

I didn’t listen to that song since it was mixed down, like not at all. For me it’s quite funny. I remember making a joke about that song or that motif being some idea of the intrepid North American traveler who gets inspired by world music of Indian pipe flutes or something. Just not sarcastic but some weird hybrid fiction. I don’t know, it came out of a joke basically, then became musical expression very quick.

Todd Burns

With that one a lot of people, you know when they hear it, I think they would be like I can hear Tim Hecker in here and I can hear OPN and I know exactly who did what. Was that the case actually in the studio?

Tim Hecker

No not at all, sometimes we reverse. I would play the Lead, sometimes he would bring his Juno out, it was like a mix. Definitely there was certain times our roles were clear and we pulled out the instruments we know and just tried to make music. The whole point was to have a break from this almost suffocating document called the solo album. You know, it was so much pressure and scrutiny that we just wanted to make something really quick and in the spirit of jazz. Not that we have the chops of jazz artists, you know artists in terms of our instruments, but we do with computers or with working quickly with digital audio as like a performative form of expression for sure.

Todd Burns

You recently signed with 4AD for this last album. Talking about the solo album and the dreariness of it, were you –

Tim Hecker

It’s not dreary, it’s just intense and takes a lot of work and that’s not to say it’s shitty or really depressing. It’s not, I love making music and it’s a great blessing to be able to do it but it takes a lot of work.

Todd Burns

Did you feel more pressure? More expectations, anything different with this new album being on a different label?

Tim Hecker

No, not at all because I wrote it before where it would be put out was clear, and I just did it for myself. It’s like the same thing I’ve been doing for a long time. I’ve always not taken music as this career path where I need to do it a certain way so I can sell records or get shows, I tried to just do it to satisfy my soul or my spirit or my need to fill a hole in the world of music that’s not being made or just making peace with yourself ultimately. Hopefully everything else will come from that.

Todd Burns

I know you haven’t been doing it consciously, but do you think your music has been getting more and more accessible with each passing album?

Tim Hecker

I think it’s difficult to say. It’s hard for me because I don’t want to listen to my old catalog. I don’t want to know what I made in 2008, I want to forget about that and obviously we’d return to some of our same gestures and tropes and harmonic movements that you feel spiritually connected with but I don’t know. That’s a tough question. I think that there’s something peaceful that comes with time after you’ve made... Like how much distortion can you make? How overloaded can you make something until it’s like pointless?

You’ve made something really heavy, so what do you do from that? Make your next record even heavier. For me, that’s a point where I was like kind of joking that there’s an arms race where it goes nowhere and you need to go sideways and I don’t know if that means more accessible, I don’t think so. Maybe, but I feel like it doesn’t really matter, like that debate or question is not that fruitful.

Todd Burns

Another debate I think that’s kind of over in a way, that you were kind of touching on earlier is people using laptops to make music. Back a while ago, sort of like, “Whoa, this is crazy.” Is this a thing, now that this is a thing, what does that mean for your own music practice where originally you were thinking, “Wow, this is like super punk,” in a way.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, there was a point where it was like there was this punk thing almost, not punk but it was like a little bit confrontational and then it became really passé in the mid-2000s and I stuck with it. I started wearing this costume. I wore this dungeon master outfit and I had lighting people trigger these effects, drag one leg onto stage with a cooler of beer and play my music. I would just keep doing it. I didn’t form a band, which is fine but it just wasn’t my thing. And I feel like I do use musicians occasionally for sure and it’s something I’ll probably come back to, I think because it’s fun to have someone to improvise against.

I’ve had a few concerts in this past year where I’ve used singers walking around in fogged out spaces with wireless headsets singing motifs that are similar to some of these pieces and they would kind of just like wander amongst the crowd and it would confuse what’s happening, you know because you could hear someone sing and then but it’s also being affected through this huge PA and the performative apparatus wasn’t clear and I really like that personally.

Todd Burns

I think also when you worked with Unsound you did something with someone who makes perfumes?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, it kind of like... The way I’ve been working has been really encouraged through working with them by doing something that was light and sound. I had been working with light and fog for a while, but we made something a bit more jacked up where it was also perfume like almost an aromatized, a scent being diffused in the room so it was like sight, sound and scent.

Todd Burns

What does Tim Hecker’s scent smell like?

Tim Hecker

Like unwashed hippy, two weeks on the road with the Grateful Dead, patchouli and incense. No, I don’t know. Something maybe, I’m not sure.

Todd Burns

One of the things that you’ve kind of always talked about and I wanted to touch on, everyone kind of listens to your music and says, “Wow, this guy must be just horribly sad and depressed.” They meet you and you’re just...

Tim Hecker

Just crying.

Todd Burns

Yeah.

Tim Hecker

You met me and I was in just a puddle of tears before I had to come on and do this. I was literally...

Todd Burns

It was difficult for us to get in here. It’s actually the opposite.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I think it just really doesn’t matter, personality. It’s like I’m making work. I don’t thing that same standard of personality is held to painters. Like who cares? You know? It’s kind of obscene, the amount of focus and biography that musicians are forced upon. The narrative of your relationship breaking up and forming the sad songs you make, I mean who cares? In the end, you know, it’s like it should weigh less. For me personally, that’s why I don’t make it such a big thing or I’m reticent sometimes to be more involved in the visibility of the product or the object that I’m making.

Todd Burns

I wanted to maybe open it up to questions from the audience. I’m sure some of the participants have a question or two.

Audience Member

Hey. Thanks for coming. I wanted to ask you, so you kind of covered the ambient scene back then, 2001, can you tell us a few good names in Canadian ambient, nice music from nowadays?

Tim Hecker

I think there wasn’t really an ambient scene. I also feel like I don’t do ambient or I don’t try to defend that as something. I was kind of like confrontational ambient. I wanted these kinds of quiet room environments jacked up on steroids that would blow down your wall. So it was like, how am I defending ambient? I think it’s fine. I'm definitely drawn to a lot of whatever you want to call... Classical works in ambient music but I have a problematic relationship with it because I also want to antagonize it quite a bit. There’s lots of great musicians in this city and in Canada. It’s kind of insane. There’s a website or used to be called WeirdCanada that has an endless assortment from tape artists all the way up to more established.

There’s a history that goes back to Lanois and beyond doing this type of work like New Age musicians, endless.

Todd Burns

One of the artists that you’ve worked with quite a bit who I believe is Canadian is Kara-Lis Coverdale?

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Todd Burns

She’ll be playing tonight. Can you talk a little bit about your work with her and her work in general?

Tim Hecker

I met her four years ago maybe. She was working with a friend of mine and I just brought her in and started jamming with her and she was making music herself and we just kind of had like Lopatin, just a funny back and forth where I’d have her just respond to things I was making and I would process them on the spot and kind of just like keep stacking things and shifting them and having her respond almost in terms of counterpoint to some of the work that was coming out of the speakers. Yeah, it’s like...

Todd Burns

What was it about her work that was so intriguing to you in the first place?

Tim Hecker

She was like a highly trained keyboardist to start with. She knows music theory deeply where I’m more of a dilettante that has a loose understanding and she’s very expressive in terms of keyboard. Literally, like very simple one note in major chords that are fairly rudimentary.

Todd Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

Hi, thanks for coming. Getting deep here for a second, you spoke a bit about certain music and volume as having a godlike effect. Can you explain some more about that?

Tim Hecker

No, its promise is a godlike effect, so it doesn’t deliver that. It’s like accepting that it’s a failure, but there have been people for 100-plus years who have felt that, as pipe organs were in the church traditionally, [they] could invoke God, OK? Once organs shifted to a secular type of context, increasingly in civic spaces where people go out to concerts that were playing more nationalistic anthems or whatever, that they could still invoke some transcendental effect. I don’t try to invoke God at all. I sometimes play in churches and I definitely toy with religious form, but it’s not to reaffirm any form of transcendence or promise in it but it’s almost like to gut it and to create some type of empty husk of the promise of God or something. Does that make sense?

Audience Member

Yeah, it does.

Todd Burns

I think just churches too are just acoustically fascinating, right? They’re like a very specific type of place.

Tim Hecker

I love the reverb in them. It’s just that relationship with “God” is problematic so I prefer secular, I prefer black box rooms, like this room’s great. Quad system, just creating a very danger zone of white heat in the middle is perfect.

Audience Member

Just a second. My heart is pounding. I have a bunch of questions. Can I find you afterwards, maybe?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, sure. No problem. Absolutely.

Audience Member

We through the last couple of days have had a lot of talks about... There’s been some talk about tuning and frequencies and healing in music, the affect on the human body. I know Carsten Nikolai of Alva Noto, he has researched a bit about frequencies and the human body.

Tim Hecker

Like the 430 hertz versus 440?

Audience Member

Something like that, yeah. Have you any thoughts, or can you talk about music, is it relative to subject, is there something about frequencies, can it be destructive, can it be healing? How do you feel about all these kinds of...

Tim Hecker

I’m like deep in that kind of question right now, just researching my next record, just in terms of tuning. I’m using a lot of instruments that were traditionally made at 430 hertz, which is just work with stock plug-ins and synths, because they’re all tuned up. There’s a lot of internet corners of the world that believe that 430 hertz is more biological and more healing and resonates with bio-rhythms of the human heart and spirit. I’m really interested in that. I’m not sure I believe it yet, but I’m kind of in that wormhole myself.

I think that it’s a really interesting question, like why are things standardized with this western equal temperament intonation at 440 hertz? What happens when you de-tune everything and the relationship, going back to Pythagorean tuning. I’ve used quite a bit... It gives you a different feeling when you hit a chord, where things are just like aligned in a ratio that’s better than a purely mathematical division of 12. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m deeply confused and interested myself.

Audience Member

Thank you very much.

Audience Member

Sorry. I just quickly want to ask something about what he just said, because I was talking to another participant...

Tim Hecker

We can talk about 430 truthers now. (laughter)

Audience Member

I think it might be 432. I’m not trying to...

Tim Hecker

No, teach me, please.

Audience Member

Well, just in the context of you talking about playing holy spaces, using instruments like pipe organs, to invoke God or whatever. Sorry, now I’m getting a little heart beaty. More about the concept of controlling people through using certain frequencies and how people in the church did that... It’s like part of that was invoking the spirit, but it was also a form of controlling people.

Tim Hecker

For me, control is not a word I want to use myself in my own practice. I’m talking about that historically. It’s almost like baiting people into situations with certain tonal relationships in accord with church music. I’m interested in creating a special experience for people, possibly hopefully some form of transcendental moment for a second, but not controlling, because that’s so loaded with power relations and things that I’m not really interested in. I feel like if someone doesn’t like it they can leave. I encourage like 20% of the audience to leave, because there should be a portion that doesn’t like it. It should be confrontational and it shouldn’t be for everybody. Yeah, control is a weird one. It makes me feel kind of strange.

Audience Member

Yeah, I guess I was just thinking about kind of the relationship there between something like, 432 seems like it’s the natural harmonic tone and that things got moved to 440 and kind of standardized. Those tones, to me, are a little too bright, a little oppressive, and used in a lot of western culture. Just hearing how just that small shift coming out of something, too, religious and something that’s supposed to be so holy and spiritual. It’s just like an interesting... It’s hard for me to explain.

Tim Hecker

Once you go down to 432 and you de-tune things, it feels a bit looser and slower and it resonates a bit better. When you turn up to 440, it feels cracked out, it feels really juiced and bright and almost neurotic. I agree. I’m not sure, though. I’ve made so much music in 440... But I also de-pitch everything I work with. I have everything not in perfect tune with each other. I mean, we haven’t really talked about making music with modern tools of perfect metronomic locked, asphyxiating repetition, that everything is in perfect time. The same thing with tune. I really enjoy having things drop out of tune with each other so that there’s some kind of phase relationship and time relationship that’s not predictable four bar loops or patterns that are just like “OK, yeah,” you’re just looping two things in Ableton or whatever. Yeah.

Todd Burns

How do you get out of those locking mechanisms, the grid, so to speak?

Tim Hecker

Just have to use different ways of turning those things off, like using longer form. I tend to... I’ll start a piece with two patterns that are slightly longer than each other and then just play off them. As the trainwreck happens, how do you respond with your next set of notes to those? That’s where it gets interesting for me. It starts to make my brain kind of excited.

Audience Member

Hi. I’d like to say that, first, it’s really an honor to meet you here. I’ve been following your music and your study for years. Anyway, you have researched noise in specific historical events before. I can guess that some noises could be used in a propaganda way or political way. If so, if you found something like that, what was the most making you freaked out? Would you introduce something?

Tim Hecker

Some of my reading and writing lead towards the use of loudspeakers and emergent fascism in the ’30s. and what lead towards amplification and sonic power to charm and decapacitate mass crowds through political ends. My kind of work stopped there. Its end point was obvious, the way the loudspeaker was picked up to decapacitate mass amounts of people and mass gatherings. So there’s obviously... Going back to your question of control. It’s obvious... That’s why I’m so kind of weird. Because I don’t want to... I have a really ambivalent relationship with that. Through sonic power, you can stop people from talking. But what do you do with that? It’s a very confusing space to be in. Because it’s so loaded with power relations.

Audience Member

I have another question. Can I?

Tim Hecker

Sure.

Audience Member

Most of the day, in my dark room, I just listen to your music or just sad music or classical music and just enjoying destroying my ego or crying.

Time Hecker

Thank you. I’ve succeeded once.

Audience Member

At the same time I just go to the club and just go crazy with grime or Rihanna. Daniel Lopatin started making pop music, too, right?

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Audience Member

Are you listening to other kinds of music we can now expect?

Tim Hecker

My music started coming back from raves and things like that, where I was like “OK. But there’s deeper music that could be played in spaces.” I was always interested in the chill out room I would go into. They were playing psy trance or whatever. I was just like “OK.” I just imagined making better music for that space. Or being up at 6 AM, I was kind of writing music for that, I would say. It doesn’t really answer your question, but it’s true.

Todd Burns

You grew up listening to a lot of shoegaze stuff...

Tim Hecker

Teenage years, for sure. I was faking driver’s license IDs so I could get into clubs to see bands like Ride or My Bloody Valentine play. In Vancouver, that was like a huge thing if one of those bands came through town. It was like once every six months.

Todd Burns

Today I was reading some interviews. You listen a lot to Bones, this rapper.

Tim Hecker

I went through a phase.

Todd Burns

You had a short phase with Bones.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, definitely. He’s the one that’s like not really, like, he’s never been written about by Pitchfork, I believe, for example, but his stuff is listened to widely and he sells out big venues. There’s a whole alternate world of musical dissemination that I still don’t even understand, that’s just network driven and it’s really interesting, that a lot of the apparatuses aren’t really dealing with or don’t know how to deal with.

Todd Burns

Are you consciously not listening to stuff that’s in the area that you work in?

Tim Hecker

I think, no. I think I go through phases where I think over listening to contemporary music can hurt, force too many questions or knowing too much will stop you from just having fun and expressing yourself, because in the end that’s what it’s about. There’s almost a malaise of the archivist who knows every form of experimental music in the last 40 years. They’re constantly thwarted by themselves because they know some Italian from Bologna did a better version in 1976 and you’re just like, “Ah.” Where do you go? You’re so lost. For me, I’ve sometimes done the opposite where I don’t want to know certain aspects, like music history, just to help to create a space of play or yeah.

Todd Burns

There’s a question behind you, right there, yeah.

Audience Member

Thank you. Initially I didn’t have a question, but following MIIIN’s question I now have two. The first one is: are you aware of Matthew Herbert’s music?

Tim Hecker

Yes.

Audience Member

Like the albums One Pig and –

Tim Hecker

Some of them. I came out being really interested in his dogma with respect to music production that I was kind of not fully on board with, but anyways.

Audience Member

The question that came to mind was sound and control, because I actually forgot about it but then I had a flashback to an image I have saved on my computer of an LRAD, or long range acoustic device that they used in Ferguson, and I was like, “Whoa.” They’re already going down that fascist point. Then I bought this book from the 1960s or ’70s called The Effects of Noise on Man by Karl D. Kryter, like on noise pollution. Yeah, so I just wanted to know about contemporary control or control through sound in mass populations. Matthew Herbert also did the album of a drone strike. It was a seven minute sound sample or something but it was a whole 40 minute thing.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I mean he’s been politically engaged in a really interesting way for a long time and has tackled a whole bunch of approaches, mostly by sampling things on the fly and kind of building up constructions. They’re really interesting. He has an overt politics that I’ve always been a bit more ambivalent about making so explicit in terms of my work, but I feel that obviously all these issues are totally legitimate and that a lot of the tools of audio control are used in such insidious ways in terms of urban policing, the way Metallica was used in Guantanamo Bay, for example. Endless situations in which sound force, sound pressure is being used in really nefarious ends for control of populations and things like that.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Tim Hecker

Pleasure.

Todd Burns

One of the things you mentioned in your dissertation was –

Tim Hecker

When I wrote my dissertation I was like I’m never going to talk about this. Just something I did on the side. It’s like if you’re a gardener and then you also are like a logger or something.

Todd Burns

One of the chapters was all about foghorns, basically. There’s actually totally beneficial uses to enormously loud, impressive sounds, right?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, that chapter on foghorn was about the mistake that if you can’t see anything because of storms where lighthouses don’t work, you could use acoustic devices to save shipwrecks from happening. That didn’t really work because of these zones of silence that are often created where sound doesn’t propagate linearly to inform mariners that there’s reefs all around. Shipwrecks would keep happening despite increasing the power of these foghorns. I kind of just traced that belief in making it more juiced up it would be able to transmit farther distances, but it was kind of charting ultimately a failure in...

Todd Burns

Interesting. There’s another questions.

Audience Member

I brought my own mic. I’m just kidding. (laughs)

Tim Hecker

How did you wire it up?

Audience Member

No I didn’t. Hi, thank you for your work first of all.

Tim Hecker

Pleasure.

Audience Member

It’s very medicinal for me and a lot of people I think, you know? You talked a little bit about knowing too much and teetering on that line and having this, I don’t know. I fear for myself knowing too much between academia and being primitive in approach to things, and still maintaining that visceral kind of, I don’t know how to word it, but how do you find balance I guess? Because of your study with actual sound and to be able to still accomplish something that you can connect to without going overboard.

Tim Hecker

I think it’s a tough question. That’s a question of balance, for everyone has their own way of creating sanity through information onslaughts, through constant forms of... I don’t know, it’s a tough one. I think for me it’s been like horse blinders at different points that just allow me to focus. My studio is connected wirelessly and writing is a problem sometimes when you’re... Like iMessages pop up. You have to create these ways of just blocking it out. It’s a challenge. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s always been there and it feels like it’s accelerating. For some people it’s okay. They have their chat window open and they’re writing music. For me, it doesn’t really work. I’m not a good multitasker. I’m kind of like a neanderthal, like focus on one thing at a time.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

In your reading have you gotten to marine biology yet and looked at dolphins and whales and echolocation? Because all that shit is really cool.

Tim Hecker

You can tell me about it though. No, I haven’t.

Audience Member

OK, just curious.

Tim Hecker

Yeah.

Audience Member

The way they communicate is insane in terms of sound.

Tim Hecker

A little bit. It’s like long distance sonar forms of propagation.

Audience Member

Yeah, and it’s not uniform. Different depending on the circles and stuff.

Tim Hecker

Cool, that’s great. I would love to learn more for sure.

Todd Burns

Are there any more questions?

Tim Hecker

This is amazing. I expected to be asked about like plugins and there was like not one. Blessed. Yeah, thank you.

Audience Member

Could you talk about why [inaudible] maybe? The things you do in your studio, how do you [inaudible]?

Todd Burns

Talk about your plugins.

(laughter)

Tim Hecker

Yeah, Live is a way of guided improvisation. I break a lot of my pieces down into stems and I just kind of throw them into this blender that I have. We talked about Max MSP and I still use that as my main way of performing and I run that all through a mixing desk and I have things like distortion pedals and I have a MIDI controller in every keyboard and I play a lot of synths into that blender. Then I have the mixer going back into my computer and I’m constantly re-sampling. I grab buffers and things like that and it allows me to just hit pause and just create almost elasticity with time and stretch things out. Layer white noise into feedback loops and things like that. You can be guided by stems, but it also allows you to veer off into a lot of insanity if you want. Sometimes it’s confusing what’s going on, but I have it so it’s kind of like I can wrestle it. It’s kind of like all these stray cats running around. I’ve got it so I can kind of just guide them toward something hopefully musically interesting. Does that make sense?

Todd Burns

Is it important to you to have that lack of complete control in a way?

Tim Hecker

Yeah, I mean, you have to amuse yourself as a sentient being. I don’t want complete control. I want to be challenged by my computer feeding back or seeming like it’s going to crash or not knowing how that happened is kind of like juice you need to drink to be nourished, you know? Yeah, I would say so.

Audience Member

Hi, how are you?

Tim Hecker

Good.

Audience Member

I wanted to ask you, you were talking about configuration and not really knowing what something is, like not being completely sure, and also I think it has to do with what you were just saying now about not having complete control of yourself as the artist. I’m not quite sure how to formulate this, but do you feel as a listener... What do you like about that state of not knowing or not being quite sure, having an idea, what do you want to provoke in your audiences in that respect? What do you get from that?

Tim Hecker

I think that it’s effective. For me and maybe for some listeners to not know possibly what’s happening. It’s like if something sounds like a dolphin singing, for example, or it could actually be a cello, to me that’s an interesting compositional proposition. That indiscernability from what this actually is leads to a kind of creative space of play. For me as a composer and hopefully as a listener that isn’t so literal, isn’t so pinned down, isn’t so data minded and transparent and deadening, you know what I mean? That’s my own heart singing to you right now. Yeah.

Audience Member

I’m reminded of a quote by Nietzsche about the thing that makes you really happy and the things that you really love you have to mumble about. You can’t really be articulate about it.

Tim Hecker

Yeah, like I’m literally onstage here muttering about things I like because it doesn’t always make sense, you know? It’s not a clear thesis. It’s just a vague feeling that you’re trying to put words to.

Todd Burns

You could almost say there’s a fog.

(laughter)

Tim Hecker

Yeah, absolutely. I’m so sorry.

Todd Burns

Sorry.

Tim Hecker

It’s deeply fog inducing.

Todd Burns

On that note, please, thank you very much.

(applause)

Tim Hecker

Thank you.