Two and a Half Questions with Tim Hecker

Where is The Imaginary Country, and is there a deeper story behind this album?
Nowhere! The second part of that question is a sort of yes and no. Putting ornamentation around a record, like artwork, titles and narrative-stuff, is a sort of appendage that really only takes shape and the end of working on a record, when that side of things becomes more clear. Its a poetic interlude but doesn't really, at least in my case, usually drive the record as a sort of 'concept' work. Bare sound mostly comes first.

How did you come about the quote from Debussy, and what particularly about his comments inspired you to title the album that way?
It was a cited in a recent history of classical music in modernity. I just liked how the comments rang of a sort of outsider melancholy because of how his work rubbed up against dominant institutional norms in music at the time.

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Read the entire interview on Headphone Commute

See also Headphone Commute's Review of An Imaginary Country