Tim Hecker: I've always said my records are these failures of not gett...

I'm not an anti-online person. I get what the modern world's about and I understand that that's the nature of music dissemination.

Tim Hecker

online modern world

Because I refuse to perform my music in a traditional sense of instrumentation, I don't have an amazing live stage spectacle to provide, and I don't want to go there. I don't see how the music would stay true to the spirit of the work.

Tim Hecker

stay-true spirit want

Sometimes it's a fraught, kind of laden world of performance that I think can be really dubious, but it's also super fun to almost desecrate an instrument that for 500 years has been associated with God.

Tim Hecker

fun years thinking

It depends on what kind of minimalism you're talking about, of course. I love both those artists - Brian Eno and William Basinski. I would say my minimalism references are early American minimalists from the 70s.

Tim Hecker

minimalism kind artist

I love vinyl, but I'm not a 'vinyl person'. I still collect, but most of my stuff is digital.

Tim Hecker

digital vinyl stuff

You have to make rough decisions with sequencing and work within the limitations of having good audio for 15 minutes on a vinyl side.

Tim Hecker

audio decision sides

Working with devices and guitar pedals and mixers and synthesizers is what I do, and I prefer people not focus on that because it's kind of distracting from what the point should be. At least for me, it's to have the primacy of aurality in the experience of that evening.

Tim Hecker

guitar focus people

I work with digital audio, which is like sculpting, a form of chiseling down metal or wood. And I take audio and move it back and forth between the analog and digital realms and work with it almost like a plastic art until it takes forms in different shapes. And I use those figurines that come out of that type of work.

Tim Hecker

different art moving

I'm not a nostalgic person for the glory days of 8-track sales at the local K-Mart. But there's a little bit of flattery and a little bit of horror. It's a mixture. It's like sublime shock and awe, but also terror. That's always the way I feel about how music flows through those types of networks. I'm mostly cool with it, but I definitely appreciate when people support the work.

Tim Hecker

track appreciate people

My peer network is international. It's people all over the place who I know, and respect their work. It's not really delineated by traditional nationalist ideas.

Tim Hecker

peers people ideas

Vinyl's just a fun endgame step. I work with analogue signal chains too, but the mp3 is the way I listen to music.

Tim Hecker

mp3 fun way

You can't be sure there's not a God, so why live your life in hatred or the denial of that. It's better to be open to the possibility of it. Just because the whole conceit of scientism... is that our world is explained by two atoms smashing, right? Our green planet came out of that. But I just don't buy where the original line comes back to, those two atoms. The explanations aren't fully in yet.

Tim Hecker

denial live-your-life hatred

There have always been people making music. On their porches, playing folk songs. Playing piano in quiet salons. You don't have to listen to every MySpace page, so what's the difference? It's just noise that you filter out.

Tim Hecker

piano differences song

I download music just like anybody else, but it's a weird relationship when you're a musician.

Tim Hecker

downloads musician

I'm not a peak oil person. I'm not a biohazard apocalyptic kind of freak. I don't have a supply of weapons or gold bars under my house.

Tim Hecker

oil gold house

I've been playing music all my life. I wasn't really fostered in a musical family, it was something I did despite the kind of limitations put on me. It was a series of misshapes and failures and things that didn't work out and other opportunities that kind of presented themselves. I just followed a journey.

Tim Hecker

work-out journey opportunity

I did dance music for a short period of time but I felt like the fruit for me was in the outer dance world so I stopped doing overt techno and I think, in terms of rhythm, I enjoy things that feel like they're falling off, like they're just barely holding on.

Tim Hecker

world fall thinking

I definitely enjoy liturgical work and choral work from the 15th century and 16th century, but I play in churches with a bit of trepidation, and it's not something I enjoy because there are all these problems. It's an implication that you're part of the theological apparatus, like for atheists or something, and I don't like that. I like playing with the form, inhabiting the tropes of religious music without that promise of angels at the end. It can be awkward, you know?

Tim Hecker

angel atheist religious

You start to think, when you're finishing a record, in twelve- to fourteen-minute chunks. At a certain point, you do write to the format. It's not a coincidence that most albums are between thirty-five and fifty minutes. It's kind of like the 98-minute film. It becomes some paradigm for human attention in the media.

Tim Hecker

writing attention thinking

I've always thought that each album would be my last one, and then I would be out of ideas and I would move to photography or something. I thought it was transient and it's not because of this entrenched career stubbornness that I've done it for so long, it's just something I enjoy doing, and it's the most direct way I can express something.

Tim Hecker

photography long moving

I've always said my records are these failures of not getting where I want them to go, they end up detouring somewhere else, so on one level it's partly a disappointment, and on another level it's being comfortable with surrendering to that kind of state of becoming or whatever.