Our new interview series Icebreaker features artists talking about things—some strange, some amusing, some meaningful—that just might reveal their true selves. This edition stars Los Angeles-based ambient explorer Tim Hecker, whose latest album Love Streams is out now via 4AD.
Pitchfork: What do you think is the worst aspect of modern music culture?
Tim Hecker: The way albums are released and the way the media is involved. Labels and artists are forced to have these 50-point roll-out strategies of endless bait, teasers, and teasers of teasers. It’s just so tiring for everybody. Most of my previous albums have leaked before they came out, and it’s by the same institutions that you’re trusting to write criticism and start debate, and that just ends up imploding the whole passive arrangement. All these things are breaking down, and I feel like we’re on the verge of some more interesting paradigm of dropping music. The live re-editing of Kanye’s Life of Pablo is genius—why does the album have to be this static thing? But the flip side of that—the constant IV drip of him changing his mind-as-news stories—is so tedious.
And what’s the best aspect of modern music culture?
How cheap computers and free software have caused an implosion of the elite—the idea of the recording studio being this gateway for people to make high-quality work is totally eviscerated.
What is a band you love that nobody would suspect given your own music?
The California rapper Bones. He releases an album every month it seems. They’re not all good, but I come back to some of his work, like Cracker and TeenWitch. He pulls in all these different musical worlds: There’ll be a weird sample of Slowdive, and he’s just talking about being high as fuck. It’s a funny juxtaposition. I don’t want my musical tastes to really align with my work.
Do you have a favorite joke?
Nothing comes to mind. My humor is more on-the-spot: intuitive, stream of consciousness. I don’t think it comes through—I get asked these serious questions because of my music and end up trapped in this “serious” matrix. But humor is a major part of my day.
It's easy for people to think of you sitting in some tower playing an organ while it's snowing heavily.
I live in L.A., so it's the opposite of that. I ride a green motorcycle; it's not Nosferatu in the Alps. That's the risk of music like this. I'm interested in brightness and how you can make affecting music without having that dark, somber color palette. It’s a challenge.
What is the greatest concert you’ve ever seen?
Sonic Youth’s Goo Tour in 1990 with Nirvana opening. I was 15. It marked a fiercely violent transformation of my suburban brain. Kurt Cobain just crowdsurfing over me and dripping sweat on me with his guitar still plugged in—we were all hitting it and it was feeding back. It was just a physical, intense, pure-energy show where Sonic Youth and, arguably, Nirvana were at their peak. A seminal moment in my life.
What’s the last TV show you binged?
“The People vs. O.J. Simpson.” It is kind of like “Law & Order,”a court procedural, but it's jacked-up considerably. And the main score has these really nice pulses—it’s really understated. John Travolta's life, plastic surgery, and woe became perfectly meshed with the lawyer he’s portraying, Robert Shapiro. And the amount of times David Schwimmer says the word "juice" in the first couple of episodes is hilarious.
What's a moment in your life when you felt like a complete moron?
Just existing as a buck-toothed 12-year-old in grade eight. On that first day of school, you’re stripped down and bare. You know nothing. You're at the lowest echelon of any cultural reality. You’re gangly. Your body is changing. It’s moronic, you know? In the most pure way.
What is a moment when you felt like the smartest person on Earth?
Never. I demand some affirmation of insignificance in front of the universe—it’s the inner Buddhist in me.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Yes. I understand scientific triumphalism and why people are so obsessed with denying the phantasmagorical, but I also think there is a limit to that hubris. There is a world of true magic, in some sense. I know I sound crazy, but I'm not. There is ephemera and weirdness and things that don't match into the simplistic, meat-and-potatoes view of the universe. I’ve had moments where I've been surrounded by forces that I can't explain.
My friend and I went to a winemaker in Burgundy once and we went into this cellar—four layers deep, hundreds of feet down—and there are these bottles sitting there that have mold growing over them, you can barely tell there's a bottle there. And the winemaker told us that every few years he drank a bottle that was made by his grandfather and his father—a 1912 vintage or whatever—and he considered that the spirit of his family were there in that glass of crazy Pinot Noir. That's a form of ghost, and I totally support it.