Name: Andrew Pekler
Occupation: Sound artist, field recorder, composer
Recent release: Andrew Pekler's new album New Environments & Rhythm Studies is out via Faitiche.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: Some books: Haunted Weather by David Toop, The Order Of Sounds by Francois J. Bonnet, Noise by Jaques Attali.

If you enjoyed this Andrew Pekler interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, bandcamp, and Soundcloud.   
 


When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I listen with my eyes open usually. I don't have any synaesthetic abilities and so don't really see colors, shapes, etc.

I suppose since I make music myself, I can't help but listen to music in a kind of analytical way – working out in my mind the structure, the compositional choices, the particularities of the sounds, instruments, and production, etc. Sometimes I try to recall what it was like to hear music without this overlay.

However, I also don't want to romanticize some kind of “pure” listening experience one might have had as a child. I suppose all listening is mediated (in the sense that the meaning we find in music and sound is culturally coded) it's just that one can become more attuned to (and derive pleasure from) the mediation over time.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

They are basically the same although I do prefer to listen to music over speakers. The serendipitous combinations with other sounds around can be quite thrilling!

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

Sound and music are inextricable for me. The idea that the music is what is written down and sound is what happens in our ears is not the way I (or most) people experience music. That said, if we are talking about how a recording is engineered to sound then there would be too many and for too many different reasons to mention.

One album I really like because it beautifully captures the space and mood of where it was recorded is Curtis Mayfield's Curtis Live! album – listening to it I feel like I'm at the 200-seat Bitter End Club in 1971 about 3 meters from the stage in front of the conga player.



On a different note, Oval's Systemisch album from 1994 is sounds exactly like the glassy, digital surface of the scratched-up CDs it was made with – also endlessly beautiful.



Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

Sure, I do to all kinds of sounds, as I think everyone does.

The reasons however are as banal as they are individualized; hearing a certain sound in a tune at a certain point in one's life, in a certain situation, with a certain person, etc ...  

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

Yes, that's how it seems to me.

I begin compositions with sound materials, samples, field recordings, and try to tease out the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral elements that are already embedded in them. This is a subtractive process – excising all that is unnecessary, combing elements into a structure that reveals itself over time (although sometimes the structure is static or structureless).

Then, in a second step, I usually add more “conventional” elements (a chord sequence, a melody fragment) that interact with or contrast the underlying structure. And finally, (usually after putting the piece aside for some time), I will again strip away anything that feels superfluous or merely ornamental.

This, I suppose is similar to how a sculptor works.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

I am certainly attentive to the non-human soundscape, but to me, non-human made sounds are as much a mediated artefact (in the sense that their “meaning” is culturally coded and not inherent in the sound itself) as „regular“ music. We attribute qualities such as “moving” or “boring” (or whatever) to these sounds by the same mental mechanisms as we apply to anthropogenic sound and so I don't ascribe any kind of privileged status to geophony or biophony.

In fact, I'm quite wary of environmentalist causes that use aesthetics (whether sound or visual) of a particular species or biotope or whatever as an argument in favor of their protection. As if this frog, that marshland, or this seagrass has to adhere to some (human-made) aesthetic standard to be worthy of our conservation efforts. I find this a self-defeating and blindly anthropocentric line of thinking that ultimately only weakens the cause of environmentalism.  

Anyway, I'm making music that tries to occupy a particular middle ground of perception between “synthetic” and “organic” and therefore a lot of sound material not made by humans (i.e., field recordings) is among the material I work with.

As with any audio material, I edit, manipulate, loop, transpose, layer, etc. field recordings in order to find in them some rhythmic, harmonic and melodic elements that already suggest other musical forms. For instance,  I have a number of pieces where the rhythms come from pitch-shifted recordings of insects (“Cumbia Para Los Grillos” or “Fabulation For K”) interacting with other elements.
 
Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

Given how difficult sound-based communication within our own species already is, my intuition tells me that interspecies communication is pretty impossible.

Or perhaps only possible to a certain small extent in a situational, behavioral sense whereby sound is just one inseparable component of the communication.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I imagine Gould was describing a situation of being surrounded by one's own choice of music and not being subjected to someone else's! Total silence is quite rare in my life but I suppose the more music and sound is available with little to no effort to find it, the more important silence becomes.

Without going into the various possible regimes of sound hygiene, I would point out that there is quite a lot of music that incorporates silence and acts as a kind of middle ground between absolute silence and full-on music.

One good example of this is the music of Morton Feldman, much of which is very soft, with many pauses between sound events, and is often of indeterminate emotional valence – all in all, the effect of Feldman's music is like a palette cleanser which makes hearing other things (or nothing) all the more intensive.



Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

Difficult to speculate on such a scenario. How much less / more? In what areas of life?

Hearing is interesting because it always incudes some degree of mental work (whether conscious or unconscious) to decipher the source of the sound and the space from which it emanates. This is why composing with non-mimetic, abstracted or synthetic sounds is so interesting – it's possible to circumvent or interact with this mechanism in a playful way and suggest novel or strange sound-producing entities and acoustic spaces.

This is for instance why I almost never use “pure” or un-manipulated field recordings but rather process them into new forms that still somehow retain some aspect of their origin – the uncanny effect of the results is endlessly fascinating to me.