Tim Hecker interview at Resident Advisor
This is really good - he says some very intelligent stuff without sounding too esoteric or bandwagon-jumping; e.g., on Ravedeath
“The record is not about the technology. In some ways it isn’t about anything at all, like an expression of bare composition. […] Record titles or track titles are a chance to cloak the work with a kind of poetic garb. That isn’t glib in any way, I take it very seriously—and that’s not saying that the titles are about nothing—but often people run with that stuff so far that you need a meaning structure around it to interpret a work.”
and how it developed:
“I actually began to write them with piano in mind and I used a lot of piano pieces to kind of play with motifs. I actually recorded all that early stuff and released it as Dropped Pianos, but the more I worked on it in the studio the more it became these sort of suffocating, internal, mixing desk only-type of pieces with digital reverbs.
I felt it lacked a kind of three-dimensionality that I’ve never been really good at getting with my music—almost a fake kind of liveness. So I took it at that point to an actual physical space and, with really good microphones and recording techniques, we got a pretty fantastic way to contrast that sterile nature of the pieces I was working with.”
He even says, giving an excellent quote to finish off an interview, that
“interviews are one of the rare occasions that a musician like me gets to really think about their work and discuss and bring words to things that aren’t often spoken.”
which might well have something to do with his music being instrumental in nature, that it successfully avoids a lot of the linguistic meaning that gets piled on to most halfway interesting bands in the current era, while enabling such discussion to be both rare enough and accessible to the listener.
