For just over 15 years now, Vancouver-born musician Tim Hecker’s been redefining our relationship with, and to, ambient music. Focusing on the darker end of the spectrum his oeuvre is a consistently brilliant exploration of how music originally intended as a secondary form of experience can become a life-changing totality. Albums like Ravedeath, 1972 and Harmony in Ultraviolet are totemic, gargantuan structures that reside in a rotting midpoint between ambient, minimalism, noise, and drone. His most recent release, this year’s Love Streams, might just be his bleakest and best yet.
Earlier in 2016, Hecker found himself plonked on a comfy looking sofa in a studio somewhere in Montreal, with Todd L Burns and the rest of the Red Bull Music Academy crew for around 80 minutes of hi-octane chat about groupies, coke, and the wildest parties you could ever imagine. Just kidding everyone—it was actually an incredibly interesting conversation that took in everything from the importance of the organ in his work, how he finds himself thinking of digital audio as a kind of sculptural form, and why he takes eternal inspiration from a photo of Tupac.
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You can watch the whole thing right here, and given that it’s an expansive conversation with one of the most talented and intriguing musicians working today, we cannot recommend it enough.
