There was also latent grief. His mother died when Hecker was 12 years old. He held back his turmoil until he became a father himself, and most recently underwent years of intensive therapy until he was in his 40s. ” he admitted.
This multivalency seemed to follow Hecker. He spent his college summers in the wilderness of British Columbia, planting 4,000 trees every day in clearcut forests. (Each sapling tethered to a hipbelt took five seconds to fall to the ground.) While he worked, he dined on psychedelics and early British electronica. A grizzly bear prowled near Planter’s camp at night. A mix of danger, beauty and intrigue, it’s a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.
Later, frustrated by the urgency of starting the band, including remembering what they had played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. he didn’t need anyone else. “The first impulse was this awe-inspiring excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his giant computer, his tower, giant monitors, and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data that could be molded like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”
Hecker initially made techno under the alias Jetone, but later became less reliant on being young and sticking to the scene, so he slipped into the kind of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity. I was. His tones and emotions deepened rapidly, suggesting a constant and often very large tug-of-war between anxiety and enlightenment. This, he said, reflected “people’s rainbow of possibilities, their extreme joy and their incredible suffering.”
To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he finds a motif he likes, whether it’s a mad rhythm or an enchanting melody, he improvises over and over again, and he stacks up to 200 pieces like leaflets on a lamppost. He cuts out bits that don’t fit and edits that chunk of sound until all the layers interact.
“Different moments have different emotions, and each has its own ecosystem,” he said. “I have 24 channels of feedback pieces that bleed, pollute, overload and link to everything else. I don’t want simple emotions — the best for me is confusion about how is what you are doing I felt. “
