Complexity and ambiguity are the hallmarks of one of experimental electronic music's leading lights in both music and conversation. RA's Holly Dicker peels back the layers.

such a hero

Thanks for the interview. I loved both, "Ravedeath" and "Dropped Pianos".

Really stunning thing...





www.clubbingunlimited.com

Good interview, thanks.

nice interview!

This man is one of the best artists around. I got a chance to see him live back in October so I hung around the doors of the sold out venue for about an hour and someone left after the first act and I got a free ticket. The performance was priceless, though.

nice read... thanks!

hecker and frost have so much to answer for regarding my listening tastes of recent years.

I think you're wrong, Tim Hecker. Your music may not achieve ecstacy in your own ears, but such a subjective judgment call is in the ears of the listener. Example: in the summer of 06, I got some nasty food poisoning a doctor later told me reminded him of cholera. Throughout the agony of living through that two-week experience, all I could do was lie very still in bed, drink water and pedialyte, read China Mieville's The Scar, and listen to Mirages on repeat. (Shuttle358's Chessa might have made it in there a couple times when I passed the CD player between trips to the restroom, but still it was mostly mirages that I had playing.) Mirages' oscillation between walls of noise and moments of deep echoing serenity eased the suffering of an otherwise brutally uncomfortable illness. Call it the agony and ecstacy of cholera or my experience through pain to heaven if you will. ;-)

Anyway, my point is, you may be let down by your expectations of your musical output, that what you have in mind at the outset is not what you produce in the end, but I for one have experienced ecstacy through your compositions. (There's always at least one track that takes me to a special place outside of everything else going on in my life, that makes me go outside late at night when all else are asleep stare up at the stars in the cold and listen a few times on repeat in my headphones and let the music wash over me as I wonder aimlessly how being transformed into a constellation felt to Orion. ) Long story short, don't discount your audience's reaction to your music in your self-assessment.