Name: Ded Hyatt
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Current event: Ded Hyatt's debut album Glossy is out now.

If you enjoyed this Ded Hyatt interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.
 


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?

When I listen to music I often see landscapes or structures. Songs are like places to me, with terrains and densities and neighborhoods, native flora and fauna, local architecture.

In my song ‘Chlorine,’ I see sparkling water, a garden. The images I heard influenced the lyrics and the music video. ‘GT80,’ by contrast, sounds to me like a journey between two desolate planets in outer space, craters and blackness and stars flashing at hyperspeed.

I prefer to listen with my eyes open. Eyes closed, like headphones in, often overwhelms me.

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

When I listen with headphones, I feel like I’m listening to the song from inside of it. I generally hear more detail, but I have a hard time hearing the whole. I prefer listening through a stereo system because I feel like I can hear the song from outside of it and hear how it exists in the world.

That being said, I do love public transit journeys with headphones on, jockeying through crowded terminals immersed in a song that no one else can hear. When the world is soundtracked in that way, with all of its ambient sound drowned out, it invites you to see things differently–everyday gestures can look like dance, facial expressions operatic.

As a kid, listening to music through headphones was almost like a drug in the way it transported me from regular life.

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

Devotion by Tirzah is an album whose sound has stuck with me.

I love the way Mica Levi’s production makes synthetic sound organic and vice versa. I love the minimalism of the sound, the simplicity of the phrasing, and the intimacy of every noise. Everything sounds closely miked, raw.



And then Tirzah’s voice is in your ear, you can hear her breath. Every layer sounds naked and still it coheres into a whole. Devotion was one of the sonic touchstones for my new album Glossy, and my song “Devotion” is even named after it.

More than any of the other songs on the album, its first movement emulates that organic synthetic sound with a stark but effected acoustic guitar and intimately miked and heavily autotuned voice.

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

Absolutely. I think this relates to the way I hear music as structure. I often feel like an architect or sculptor when building a song, laying foundations, gathering tones into towers and spires.

I also hear textures like painting, and can feel like I’m mixing sand onto the canvas, varying the thickness of the brushstrokes, adding water. Sometimes the sound can be diffuse and dilute like watercolor, other times sharp and geometric like pointillism or cubism.

“Causeway” has this geometric sound to me, like a chemical lattice or scaffolding, and then it opens out into this estuary when the strings come in, geese flying overhead, but then the strings are digested back into a latticework as they go pizzicato, further so when the electronic drums come in.



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?

Walking through LA’s Miracle Mile neighborhood at night, I had an ecstatic experience with a mockingbird.

It was during Covid, so the streets were empty and unusually quiet. It was perched at the top of a small jacaranda tree in someone’s front yard, and it was performing its magnum opus, cycling through every song in its repertoire to no response, doubtless for an audience of birds I could not see. I stood under the tree in this stranger’s front yard and listened to the bird sing for what felt like a long time.

It was probably only ten minutes, but still, a long time to stand in front of a stranger’s house in the middle of the night.

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?  

My cats can read the tone of my voice. We communicate all the time, whether I’m summoning them, adoring them, or scolding them (gently). They cry to play or go out, and our kitten chitters and chirps during play like she’s talking trash.

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’m easily overwhelmed by sound and when I listen to music, it’s usually an event. When I drove, my commute used to be one of my favorite times to listen to music, but now I take the subway and it’s too loud for me to enjoy music.

I like the ambient sounds of the world, and I can’t multitask with music. I really want to pay attention.