Alexander Tucker

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Alexander Tucker employs music as a mode of psychic transportation. His collaged lyrics spin tales of parallel dimensions: dream-like landscapes near the end of perception, with scenes of cursed high-rises, giant speakers transmitting across the city, and unknown horrors at the bottom of the sea. ‘Guild of the Asbestos Weaver’, his eighth studio album and the follow up to 2018’s ‘Don’t Look Away’, leans even further into Alexander Tucker’s fascination with science fiction and cosmic horror, bringing it closer into the orbit of his work as a visual artist. Minimalist motifs are sculpted into deep drone constructions, weaving dense layers of maximalist sound to powerful disorienting effect. Through inventive studio manipulation Tucker conjures vivid preternatural landscapes from a synthesis of acoustic instruments and electronic sources. The resulting pieces occupy a unique territory somewhere between paranormal electronics and cosmos-seeking psychedelia, standing as some of Tucker’s heaviest and most hallucinogenic work to date.


FACTS:

1: I can sing ok.

2: I can’t play a single instrument.

3: I can play every instrument.

QUESTIONS:

1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Aside from outside influences, I think the process of making and the journey this takes you on feeds each stage of creating a piece of work. It draws on past experience intersecting into current obsessions to present different and new ways to approach my work.

2. How and when did you get into making music?
In my mid-teens I started making noise at home with broken guitars, synths and loop tapes. Then I sang, wrote and composed lyrics in hardcore punk and post-rock bands before going on to develop my solo work and future collaborations.

3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Cardiacs – On Land and in the Sea
Paul and Linda McCartney – Ram
Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Live in Rome
Stars of the Lid – The Ballasted Orchestra

4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Wings of Desire, Bowie’s Low, Berliner Comic Festival, playing concerts.

5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
My home in Walthamstow, London.

6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I’m always concurrently making visual work. I’m working on a graphic novel called ‘World in the Forcefield’ and making collage, painting and sculptures, so i guess I would do these things instead.

7. What was the last record/music you bought?
Catherine Christer Hennix – The Deontic Miracle – Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (Blank Forms).

8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Oren Ambarchi.

9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
Fugazi at Brixton Academy, 1995.

10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Extremely important. I’ve always used electronics to process sounds, most recently I’ve been making music with my modular system and sampler in a new project called MICROCORPS.

11. Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career/art?
Yes I have an older sister, she was really instrumental in getting me into music when we were kids. She could tell I was geek and encouraged me to buy and seek music out.


Thrill Jockey Records releases Alexander Tucker’s ‘Guild Of The Asbestos Weaver‘ on 23rd August 2019!

Photo © Dom Garwood

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