Welcome to the latest edition of Pitchfork s Guest List. Each week, been up to lately: which tracks they can t stop spinning, what books they can t put down, and what new bands they ve caught on tour. This week it s Tim Hecker, who talks about his job in the Canadian government, pursuing a doctorate degree, and the network TV drama that has spawned a super-secret rite of musician followers.
I m really crazy about this record on Nonesuch by Toumani Diabat e , a Malian instrumentalist. He has an album called Boulevard de l Independance, and it s kind of pan-African fusion, taking the traditional gourd type of music, but [with] a really big band-- like 11 or 12 people, electric guitar, horns. I think it s super amazing stuff, great for driving down the highway.
by Geoff Mullen, who s from Rhode Island. I find we have a similar builds up these really amazing, decontextualized melodic fog pieces from them. They re quite powerful and I think it s really great-- it From Tender Buttons.
It s just a soft number. It s just a really beautiful song I keep coming back to, super nice.
Do reissues count?
I used to have a copy of Slowdive s Pygmalion for years on tape, and at the end of last year I bought it on eBay for something like 35 bucks on CD because my tape got scammed. They again. I really love this album; it s been constant for me over the years, and a good example of that is Rutti , which has this really amazing negative space that they build up.
I think it s super beautiful and super wonderful. It s amazing that they re rumored to have gotten kicked off their label for that, but I think it s just the highlight of but I disagree, I think their last record was really something different. You can t really say much music sounds like that.
reinterpretations of his Brazilian Portugese songs into Italian. I don t know if it s for a particular film score, but Rotativa , the first track, is a reworking of Buarque s earlier song called Roda Viva , which is a great doppelg a nger, the two pieces, how they transform. It s a really beautifully put-together song with a traditional Morricone arrangement, but with this menacing, melancholic side that Buarque brings it, which is really amazing.
That s another doppleg a nger piece. You have to listen to both of them, for me personally. The Iggy Pop version of China Girl is totally schizophrenic and super neurotic and powerful.
And David Bowie gives a more steamy, yearning, lustful approach to it, as opposed to Iggy Pop s. I think [Iggy Pop s] is the better of the two, for sure. But that s not saying that David Bowie s version is not good.
That s just an instrumental piece, with this guitar arpeggio that s tight, almost math rock, but it s super effective instrumental music. I don t know if it s the singer of the band, but he has amazing French on it-- there s just this little French phrase, and that s it, and this I ve heard it for a while, but I remember hearing it again in a terrorism, and the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the neoconservative ideology of a philosopher named Leo Strauss. The producer/director used Eno, and it was so nice.
This piece in particular, I just love it. It s another instrumental piece that s just I kind of waver on this one, but the one I always come back to is Sometimes on Loveless. That s my reflex answer.
I grew up in the suburbs, and as for every teenage shoegazer product of the suburbs, this is very much embedded in my DNA. It s an amazing blend of lush and heavy, violent, and soft.
Not the last great film I saw, just the last one I saw: Michael Mann s Miami Vice.
But having said that, I think that Mann has this great touch on films-- he turns what could be a really macho, idiotic, cocaine-overloaded film into this really nice noir thing. I m a big fan of Heat, for example, and a few of his other films. So I was a soft touch on that film; I had no problems with it.
It s no Godard or Fassbinder, but forget about it.
I m reading about 10 books at the same time, because I m working on a PhD. But Big Sur is a really great meditation on a place and the people who live there, and the psychic geography of that area.
Big Sur in the 1950s is a really romanticized, idealized place that really wasn t-- it seemed like a really chaotic and fucked up place. But he does this great sketch, this portrait of Conrad Moricand, sort of the moocher, who moved in with him. It s great, it s a classic.
I d say either my piece of junk Mackie 1402 mixer, which has been dropped off tables and had beer and smoke all over it, or my cheap Profile ES-335 Gibson copy, which I ve had since high school. I bought it off a friend for 150 bucks. It s probably not worth $50 now, but I use it for all my music.
last year, at least a few of the key ones. There are still a few others. But I d have to say my favorite is either Kim s in New York, or maybe Aquarius in San Francisco.
I was in Aquarius in the summer, and I picked up that Geoff Mullen CD, and I think a Tibetan ritual chants CD.
Quitting my day job. I had a serious career job.
I was a civil servant, a policy analyst for the government. And after a few years, I said bye to that. We worked for different ministers-- kind of the equivalent of U.
S. secretaries-- your legislative branch is different from how the Canadian parliament works, but we essentially prepared legislation and worked with our ministers in different departments. No offense to anyone who does that; I just needed to get out of that for sure.
It was put on, which is the luxury of a pension, or do what I needed, to throw caution to the wind.
I played in this weird festival, called Bleeding Edge, out in San Jose, in their open-air Lilian Fontaine Garden Theatre, it was this 300- or 400-seat open-air amphitheater, and the seats curled up into this hillside. There were palm trees and semi-tropical forests encroaching everywhere.
It was a really amazing situation, and as the sun set, the crickets piped up, and the music had to challenge the crickets for authority, but it was quite a nice, special place.
Right now, I watch Lost , but I watch them only as DVDs, and I would say that s about it. I m still in Season 2, so I m completely ignorant, and I don t want to talk about it, because I m at a certain place in time.
I actually learned about [the show] from Aaron Turner of Isis, so I think it s a musician s kind of Freemason secret or something. The We have this great, embattled program called Brave New Waves in Canada, which has been going on for years, and I believe it s still ongoing. I don t know how the CBC bureaucracy is deciding the future-- whether they want more seniors or youth-friendly stuff, but I hope it continues.
It s basically four hours every night, starting at midnight till about four in the morning, of really weird music. Everything from conventional indie all the way to neo-Xenakis composers. Really free-form stuff, and it s quite amazing.
I don t listen to it enough, but I d have to say for sure it s my favorite show.
Ding-dong. I don t know; I have a generic ringtone.
I don t have mp3s or anything like that.
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