Tim Hecker Isn’t Afraid To Slow Down

In a rare interview, the experimental electronic musician discusses film, gear, fashion, and his new album Shards

After half a decade spent voraciously writing about left-field music, it takes a lot to get me antsy before an interview. Nonetheless, there are butterflies walloping in my stomach as I admit Tim Hecker to my Zoom meeting. The Montréal-based composer is calling in from his studio, and inaugurates our chat with a quick virtual tour of the purple lit room. A humble rack of modular synthesizers is perched alongside a mixing console, which sits parallel to an understated computer monitor. A few keyboards are stacked in a corner, and Hecker tells me there are some guitars hiding offscreen. His setup isn’t slipshod by any means. Even still, it’s difficult not to be surprised that one of the most confounding experimentalists ever keeps his arsenal of sonic tools relatively slim.

If you’ve even so much as casually dabbled in ambient, avant-garde, or electronic music, Hecker’s name probably requires little introduction. The Vancouver-born artist moved to Montréal in the late '90s and began slinging eerie techno beneath the alias Jetone while working a day job and pursuing a PhD from McGill. Growing disillusioned with traditional rhythm, Hecker started developing frosty, amorphous textures, which were unveiled on his eponymous full-length debut, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again, in 2001.

The carefully spaced out albums that define Hecker’s catalog are each essential and singular, drawing a bleak, cynical landscape when consumed as a unit. Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006) evokes a hopeless tundra, dotted with clusters of thrashed structures. Though hardly danceable, Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) has become a clubber’s lament, for dissociative moments when foggy strobes override the ego. Hecker’s explorations of Japanese gagaku, Konoyo (2018) and Anoyo (2019), boil down ancient folk instrumentation to a primordial stew. Parsing Hecker’s mesmerizing abrasion, it’s easy to grasp how someone with a trinity of pieces edgily titled "Hatred Of Music" could still go on to win a Juno Award.

Twenty-five years into his career, Hecker prefers to lay low. The last time he granted an interview to a journalist was a couple of years ago, when he opened up to the New York Times about his qualms with helping to popularize ambient music. Hecker’s records are plaintive and abstract, but, upon seeing him perform live his aversion to the serene genre descriptor makes sense. In darkened venues, Hecker pushes speakers to the brink, conjuring a barrier of distortion that is enveloping and fanged. Occupying a universe light years away from Brian Eno’s convivial background noise, Hecker’s stage presence is more likely to get TSA concerned than it is to massage the hubbub of a bustling airport terminal.

Hecker’s new release, Shards, is intended to tide fans over as he scrutinizes material that will eventually shape his next proper record. Issued by legendary Chicago label kranky, the seven track mini album compiles outtakes from the musician’s recent forays into film and television scoring. Grayscale cuts from Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, Andrew Haigh’s The North Water, Peter Brunner’s Luzifer, and Guillaume Nicloux’s La Tour come together to showcase earthly elements of his silvery formula. Hecker is upbeat, albeit unflinching as he ponders Shards. In a rare published conversation, I talked to Hecker about topics ranging from his approach to scoring with Cycling '74’s Max/MSP software to his recreational interest in streetwear.

You helped lay the framework for a formless style of experimental music. I would assume that a lot of people who do scoring work have jacked your foundation a little bit and tried to make music that sounds like "Tim Hecker." Now you’re doing scoring work, so I’m curious what it’s been like to dabble in the soundtrack world, which was probably indebted to you before you were in it.

TIM HECKER: I wouldn’t claim that there’s debts to me in any world. I’m part of a milieu of a lot of other people who were working on ambient music, or hybrid electronic music, using real instrumentation and confusing what is what — I was kind of part of a movement. I feel like there’s definitely times where, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I heard scores that were big studio ones where I was, like, "Oh, this feels like the brief was something similar to what I’m doing." But they weren’t calling on people of my ilk to actually do that work because studios need safe hands, they need these blue chip almost, like — I don’t want to use the word like something derogatory — but someone they can count on. I think at that point, working with a weirdo, outsider artist would have been a huge risk.

How did you come into scoring work? Is it something you actively sought to do?

HECKER: I was never a professional artist, or never planned to do that. I had a day job and then I did a PHD. I was going to teach at a university. And then, at some point, I was just, like, "This is a better path for me to continue making art on my own terms." And so I kept doing that. I think scoring was something that I was interested in. But I was never interested in being a service composer, like a jackknife that studies at USC and can do, like, 40 genres and whatever’s needed. I was more interested in work in which I could put a stronger musical vision, which inherently limits you because, you a lot of times are looking for Netflix underscore, like, donkey — a certain just tepidness with music.

I think the right projects just kind of came along, and there were a few in the 2010s. But it was really the pandemic. During Covid, I started a project called The North Water, which was a four-part BBC miniseries. I really sharpened my chops in that period, which was also a gift from the heavens that allowed me to do that because there was absolutely nothing else going on. It was kind of a natural evolution, and since then I’ve done a few projects that have been interesting and fun. I just kind of balance it. But I’m not interested in fully going into scoring 24/7 because I think that does kill or challenge your artistic output. The language becomes kind of cinema enframed. I think you stop thinking about music in its own terms.

Your roots are in the Canadian scene, but you were based in Los Angeles for a while. Do you think living in a city known for its film industry pushed you in the direction of scoring?

HECKER: When I lived in LA, I lived there for pretty much seven years. I wasn’t really scoring at all. Those opportunities didn’t really happen. I did one when I was living there, but it mostly happened when I moved back to Montréal. I think LA is a challenge to keep a certain… for my music it’s a difficult place because there’s this sun-bleached optimism and self-care. I found that the chords didn’t really roll out as challenging or as deep as when I have lived in arctic wastelands or places where you have to trip over frozen dog pee on the way to your studio. There’s something that leads to a certain different music.

I didn’t realize you were based in Montréal again. I lived in LA for a while and I felt the same way. I felt like it was a profoundly difficult place to be creative if you’re into challenging or grating music in any way.

HECKER: I think, for some people, they manage to do that, and that’s amazing. Just for me, it was harder to make records there. I did some, but it was, like, I traveled to Japan or would get out of town and sequester myself somewhere and get focused.

I notice a lot of immediacy in your scoring work that contrasts with your album material, which is more enveloping and sprawling. Are there ways in which you feel like your approach when soundtracking differs from your approach when making a record?

HECKER: It’s completely a different practice. You’re trying to be invisible in some ways, trying to support an experience as an audiovisual — and primarily visual. There’s definitely directors that are brave and want to have music that is antagonistic or goes against the frame. But often the tendency is to write things that dissolve and are almost unnoticeable, which is difficult sometimes.

Building on that, I studied film composition in college, which is not what I do for my job now. It was always hard for me to figure out how to turn my own art into a reflection of someone else’s writing, directing, and pacing. I’m curious how you relate what you do as a composer to what’s happening in somebody else’s film.

HECKER: Since I’ve been working on film music, I pay way more attention to it. I barely, 10 years ago, knew Bernard Herrmann’s work or hadn’t even, like, listened to Hans Zimmer that much. As I got older, I paid more attention to see the choices that were made and the kind of artistry behind it. I’m more interested in fully, like you said, enveloping music that kind of speaks on its own terms and is its own language. And it’s a really different practice, as you know.

I’ve read a fair amount of interviews with you mentioning different pieces of gear or software you use. It seems like you’re an artist that has a pretty shifting setup, in terms of how you make music. What tech do you find yourself gravitating towards when you’re soundtracking?

HECKER: I would say the constant thing has been Max/MSP for, like, 20 plus years. It’s kind of the basis in which my whole studio circulates. It’s like a computer that goes through analog equipment. But Max/MSP is kind of the painter’s canvas. It’s the space in which you can really take music, like an elastic material, and do almost anything to it. It’s like a sculpture bench. That’s the constant.

I’ve got a modular, I use that a little bit but not really, mostly, for scoring. I’ve got a computer. Like, a few synths and a couple guitars, but not a lot of stuff. I try to keep it super sparse, and that’s pretty much it. I do cycle in equipment, but my setup doesn’t really change that much. This is a more high end version of what I did 20 years ago, which was, like, a Mackie mixer and a shittier sound card and more prosumer kind of equipment.

But you can do the same thing now with anything. It is of zero importance what kind of gear you have. It’s kind of, like, do you know it well enough to get beyond its inherent preset brain? Like, the way Ableton forces you to warp things in a four bar loop and stack loops in this kind of Jenga way. Can you get beyond that and break it apart and start to express something that’s different and gets beyond the internal logic of whatever you’re using?

I have not spent a lot of time using Max/MSP, but I have dabbled in it. It feels like it’s a software where a lot of stuff is out of your control. How are you able to tame that when you’re trying to sync up with a scene?

HECKER: I like it because it’s inherently out of control. It’s not precise. You can have things that are rhythmical or have some kind of meter, but it also allows you just to go off rails. That’s what’s good about it. Otherwise, just use Ableton and loop things and build loops. My brain can hear loops in a way I get bored. I get bored by the second or third repetition of things. In certain ways, that can be really hypnotic, if it’s done well. But if it’s not, it’s tedious to me. Things that veer a bit out of sync and go out of phase massage a part of my brain.

Since the new record collects pieces from scoring projects you’ve done, I’d love to get into the backstory of some of the collaborations. How did you end up working with Brandon Cronenberg on Infinity Pool?

HECKER: I had just watched the film before of his, called Possessor, like, a month or two before. And I was, like, "Damn, this is good." I was, like, "Damn, this would be a great project." And then he reached out, out of the blue, a couple months later and I just started working on it, pretty much shortly after. That was a really fun one because it was just kind of a deranged, fun, dystopian, kind of sci-fi film that was great to write music for. I loved it.

How did The North Water happen?

HECKER: Andrew Haigh was a director, I’d seen some of his work before, with really painterly, artistically astute works that had no composer, or had very little score. Often, a really confident film has no score and one of my first suggestions, often, with directors is to use that. Sometimes that is a scaffolding — music comes last and it’s the thing that patches up when there’s problems with the script or the structural aspect of the story. A lot is levered onto the music to fix that, and then it becomes, sometimes, a music video. And I tend to encourage pulling back from that type of thing.

I just spoke with him and connected and we started working on that project. At that point, it was supposed to be a four-hour miniseries. We had some ideas about using whale song as a metaphor throughout the series. That went on for a long time because it was, like, a year and a half, I was working on it actively off and on.

And Luzifer — what was it like composing for that project?

HECKER: Peter (Brunner) is another director that I’d been speaking to over the years. And he had a great film and told me Franz Rogowski was in it and I was, like, immediately interested. I had seen him in a Michael Haneke film, and since, he’s done some amazing ones. Passages was great. I thought he was a fantastic actor. He was also casting this ex-junkie, non-actor as the other main lead. And I think that’s great sometimes. I was drawn towards it, and it was this alpine, twisted family living in seclusion. The music had some religious, alpine cult kind of tilt to it, generally. Some of these films, I don’t get to do the scores for or it doesn’t make it to becoming a full soundtrack. So in that situation, I was just happy to put out a few pieces. That’s what this release is.

Shards sounds pretty cohesive, but it’s a collection of disparate pieces. What was your process like for assembling the album, and how did you narrow it down and sequence it? Do you feel like it all sits together?

HECKER: The digital platforms tell us we need to work faster and put out content all the time. I'm like, "I’m gonna work slower and put out less stuff." In the middle of waiting on albums and sitting on these half baked pieces I’m working on, I thought putting out something that has some good music is a good idea. It’s kind of just an EP along the way.

I went through a lot of the scores I hadn’t released and just pulled some of my favorite pieces that do something for me and sequenced it. I started with, probably, two hours of things and chopped it down to 30 or 35 (minutes). You know, you play them in the car, driving around late at night. Some of them speak to you, some of them don’t. Some of them feel like you’re just playing the same chords over and over your whole life. Some of them feel like they get to something special, or have some kind of presence. I’m really hesitant to put out music. I could put out a lot more, but I feel like, over 25 years, putting out 10 records is a pretty meagre output rate. I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I just think about it for a while and listen to it — took my time. And then got it mastered and it was done.

On a broader note you’re an ambient artist who’s been around forever and I’ve heard all of your records. That does not go for so many other artists in the experimental world. There’s so many people putting out stuff at an infinite clip and it’s difficult for a casual listener to know how to engage with it.

HECKER: Would you say, if an artist is slower, you’re more prone to, like, tune in when someone puts something out from them?

Totally. I listen to pretty much everything that everybody puts out, but that’s because I’m a pretty uniquely…

HECKER: Omnivorous music consumer?

Yeah, more obsessive than most other music listeners I know. Why did you choose the album title Shards? What does that mean to you?

HECKER: I think it’s just literalism. These are some shards of pieces of a fragmented past that are kind of mosaiced, put together into some kind of weird, stained glass composition of broken color panes of music.

The last time I saw you play was at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. It was truly one of the darkest shows I’ve ever been to. Why do you choose to perform in such darkness, and how do you manage to play in such a dark environment?

HECKER: There’s a long history of people playing in darkness. I’m definitely not the first, and there’s many people who’ve done it. But there’s something about it that accentuates your ears. We’re visually inundated with all day screens. I’ve done shows with, like, light-based performances. But my favorites are in the dark. Like, dark room, a bit of haze, and a PA that’s overpowered for the room. It’s my favorite place to lose myself as a music fan. I think that’s the reason to leave the house, is to kind of get smoked by a PA that’s hypnotic and otherworldly. That’s my aim and hope. I don’t know if I achieve that, but I try.

For a lot of people making the best experimental music, they want that noisiness and that darkness. You don’t want the good vibes, wellness thing that everybody speaks out against.

HECKER: People speak out against what?

The wellness/ambient playlist thing that everyone seems a little burned out on.

HECKER: It’s kind of, like, the promises of new age culture that led to Silicon Valley techno feudalism, right? There’s a link there and it’s almost like history repeating itself. So, for sure, I’m healthy and I encourage mindfulness and health and body, y’know? But a music experience doesn’t need to be a juice bar or, like, an Urth Caffé kind of quinoa bowl. It can be something different, I guess.

It was a really wacky festival, but I remember seeing you at Adult Swim Fest in LA, playing with Konoyo Ensemble. And it was a crowd of people who did seem to be there mostly for Adult Swim. Do you remember that performance?

HECKER: There were messages after, like, "You fucking suck, you fucking piece of shit. Go die." I was just, like, "Wow, amazing."

It was in a pretty concrete-heavy, ugly zone of LA.

HECKER: It was, like, USC campus. It was fun to play in a stadium that the LA Galaxy play at. But yeah, it was weird.

You have some shows coming up. I’m curious what your setup is going to look like. Are you going to play them alone?

HECKER: I think I’m probably going to bring one collaborator that I’ve worked with in the past. I think it’s gonna be a concert with electronics. I’ve thought about inviting other people. I don’t have a plan yet. The plan is just to play a few shows and make some noise and get on the road a little bit.

I tend to not tour as much as I used to and keep it every two or three years, do a tour in different regions, and then be quiet. It’s kind of like interviews — talking to everybody all the time — I feel like it’s not great to play every six months, after years and years of being an artist. I think that it’s good, personally, for me, to withdraw and think about why I’m making music and what the point of doing another show is and how it will be different. How does it round out the other things I’ve done in the past? So it’s not just milk run, y’know — you don’t know what town you’re in and you’re just doing it because it’s obviously one of the few ways to make a living. I’m a bit lucky because I have a lot of records in circulation and I don’t have as much pressure to tour as other people do, which is a luxury, for sure. But I just choose to make it a bit less frequent.

Do you plan to interpret pieces from Shards live?

HECKER: I think one or two of those pieces, probably a few new pieces that I’m working on, and a few from the deeper catalog that I tend to just reconfigure and smash.

In your last interview, you expressed some regret for helping to popularize ambient music, which caused some people to get upset online. I’m pretty aligned with ambient, but I’m always here for some criticism and I think that the genre needs to get razzed a bit more than it does.

HECKER: People got upset online? I don’t follow any of it. What was the gist of it?

Some people on X weren’t upset at you, but were kind of upset with the idea of someone shitting on ambient. What’s your relationship with the genre descriptor these days?

HECKER: My ambient thing is just — I wanna say this with grace — it’s just the same thing I was saying before. Like, productivity culture encourages just lifehacking every aspect of your life. There’s a point where music’s serving the efficiency of either working a certain way, or mindful state spaces. Music became utilitarian, like, more and more. Almost in a way it’s like elevator music, it becomes all these functions in your life. And then the platforms encourage that slipstream into these kinds of utilitarian categories. I think ambient just fit into that kind of stratification and all these efficiency corridors.

What the fuck is ambient? You play pads. It’s, like, what is new about that? It’s literally just holding the sustain on a synthesizer with some reverb. It’s eternal and there’s, like, thousands of artists that have done it. I think ambient is a shortcut for thinking about what music is, in some ways. I get it, broad brush. But I was always against even someone like Brian Eno. In his new work, the question is, like, "What art does?" It’s such a British empiricist, pragmatic question. I would never ask that question. I’m not interested in the function that art's serving in our society. I’m more interested in how it overflows and can’t be explained by pragmatism, empiricism, and scientism. I don’t know if I’m a mystic, but I go against a lot of that stuff. So even at the origins of ambient, I’m, like, not in congruence with its initial structuring. I’ve had that going back forever, and yet I love a lot of the work. I just try to not use the word because it doesn’t feel that helpful to me.

I have also gotten a lot of flack over the years for my writing. I write a column for Bandcamp rounding up ambient albums, and people will get pissed that their album is there or whatever.

HECKER: [Laughs] Who would be pissed about it? It’s something great, and it’s okay. Maybe there needs to be an explosion of new subgenres. Maybe we’re at a post-genre world. I don’t know, and it’s eternally codified.

Even as a writer, I feel a lot of pressure from external forces to, like, at some point, assign a genre to something. I don’t always want to, and I don’t always feel particularly excited about the idea of ambient as the endless pad. It’s boring. I don’t really want to listen to a thousand hours of that for my job. I’d rather listen to something that’s, like, ambient and six other things.

HECKER: I love pads. It’s been the thing I’ve loved more than anything with a keyboard for over 25 years. I love holding sustain. It’s just, at some points…

I did a record, called Virgins, that was antagonistic to the idea of ambient. I was trying to make rhythmical, staccato, aggressive blasts that tried to not have it pigeonholed in that way, or kind of went beyond the confines of that category. I haven’t thought about this since the last time I put a record out and did an interview. I don’t know if I’m saying anything that evolved from that.

As a younger music listener, checking out, like, greatest ambient albums of all time lists online, when I found your stuff, I appreciated that it was subversive. I liked the concept of "ravedeath" being what experimental music could embody, as opposed to the more staunch, academic conceptions I had before.

HECKER: Listen, if it’s a gateway for someone to discover amazing works, it’s a portal to something, that’s awesome. It does not matter at all. If it allows people to get out of TikTok, like, hamster brain pop music and open deeper spaces, that’s awesome. For me, I’m not a writer. At least, I don’t write about my own work. It doesn’t really matter. I try to quell the voices in my head or the need to make music. It doesn’t really have boundaries on that.

I heard from a mutual friend that you’re into fashion. Is that true? Does it impact your music at all? What brands or designers are you excited about?

HECKER: I mean, I’ve always liked fashion. I think as you get older, maybe you meet other artists as you go through the world. Clothes are, like, a part of how you express yourself and being a human. It’s also, like, not important at all. I would say one of the first ones I did was a Yohji Yamamoto season, a Y-3 season, maybe 2012. I did some music for them. That’s someone I find myself coming back to a lot more recently. Maybe I’m just getting older. Yohji I love, and I love throwing a piece in here and there… Lots of my friends work in fashion, and it’s, like, these worlds are not discreet. They overlap and you get inspiration from people who do other things. It’s definitely real and important.

Beyond all the films you’ve worked on and the soundtracks we’ve discussed, what movies have inspired you recently? Are there any film composers you’re looking up to right now?

HECKER: I love cinema. I’ve always watched films. I’ll go through periods where I don’t watch anything and then I’ll watch a lot. Lately, I’ve been watching a lot. Things that I’ve loved recently? Wim Wenders’ last film, Perfect Days, was an amazing late work of a master. The last film I watched on the airplane was Conclave, which I loved. I mean, I thought it was great. I thought the score by Volker (Bertelmann) was really good and effective. I thought it was excellent. As an ex-Catholic, I’m drawn to papal mystery. That’s the last one I watched.

I just watched Perfect Days on a plane, like, two weeks ago. I was also blown away by it. I think it’s a movie that I knew I wasn’t going to click with after a long day of work, but needed to watch in a time and place where I had the bandwidth to let my brain meander.

HECKER: Yeah, fantastic. Just great. So much under the surface about our societies and class structure and materialism and happiness and all the bullshit around that.

A lot of stuff about bullshit, but also in many ways an uplifting movie.

HECKER: But it reveals the bullshit, and it gives a levity to the idea that, the way we wrap our heads around success or material or status, they’re all ephemeral and they can all be washed away. And we can all be the toilet cleaner, proverbially, in that situation, which is many peoples’ worst nightmare, or something. The idea of a toiling life, there’s beauty in that. It’s kind of, like, how you wrap your mind around things.

Shards is out 2/21 via kranky.

TOUR DATES:
4/29-5/1 Brooklyn, NY @ Long Play Festival
5/2 Woodstock, NY @ Bearsville Theater
5/3 Washington, DC @ Black Cat
5/4 Somerville, MA @ Crystal Ballroom