There was a latent sadness, too: When Hecker was 12, his mother died. He suppressed the turmoil until after he became a father himself, going to years of intensive therapy recently, well into his 40s. Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”
This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. (Each sapling, strung to a hip belt, took five seconds to get into the ground.) As he worked, he dieted on psychedelics and early British electronica. Grizzly bears prowled near the planters’ camp at night. Danger, beauty and intrigue commingled, a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.
Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. He needed no one else. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”
Hecker first made techno under the alias Jetone, then slid into the sort of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity because it felt less dependent on being young or sticking to a scene. His sonics and sentiments quickly deepened, suggesting a constant and often very loud tug of war between anxiety and enlightenment. This reflected, he said, “the rainbow of possibility for people — extreme joys, incredible suffering.”
To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he’s found a motif he likes, maybe a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody, he repeatedly improvises over it, letting as many as 200 pieces pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole. He excises bits that don’t fit, editing that mass of sound until all the layers interact.
“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said. “I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”
