Tone Glow 226: Florian Hecker
An interview with the German artist about formative experiences with electronic music, intensity in art, and his latest album 'Natural Selection' (2026)
Florian Hecker
Florian Hecker (b. 1975) is a German artist whose sound installations, live performances, and recorded music grapple with sonic boundaries and psychoacoustics. Initially intrigued by electronic producers on labels like Mego, Sähkö, and Cheap, Hecker began constructing his own computer-generated music in the 1990s, and has since released a large number of records and CDs that speak to his evolving interests in synthesis, composition, and perception. Most recently, he released Natural Selection (2026) on PAN, a collection of tracks that are built on ideas related to “automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems, and the prospect of synthetic cognition.” Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Hecker on February 10th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his earliest experiences with electronic technology, “sound art,” and his newest album.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was revisiting some of your early work, and I love that the first album under your name, IT ISO161975 (1998), has a 14-minute hidden pre-gap track. And then your first album as CD_slopper, SaskieWoxi (2000), comes with a .zip file featuring ASCII art, among other things. It’s clear from early on that you were enamored with technology—when did that start for you?
Florian Hecker: My dad had a Grundig Weltempfänger, a short wave radio with a particularly attractive industrial design, but maybe my first CD player is something to start with here. I remember getting one in the late 1980s for Christmas, just the unit on its own and not an entire stereo system. It has a headphone output with a tiny volume control knob, and I listened to CDs with wired headphones for a year. Then, for next Christmas, I put an amplifier on my wishlist (laughter). The stereo system grew slowly, and there was this sort of forced focus on each device. Fast forward to the releases you mentioned: I made these albums with the format in mind, looking at what the CD could offer. In the end, IT ISO161975 had to be mastered twice since the mastering engineer I initially worked with did not use a system that could write information into the negative space of a CD.
Other than that, my curiosity stemmed from hearing sounds that I couldn’t classify as a child. I would hear part of a strange synthesizer solo in a pop song on the radio and have no idea what it could be. These were sounds that were different from a guitar riff, a drum beat, or—for me back then—visually plausible instrumentation. And then when I saw these tools—synthesizers—that presumably made those sounds, they felt like black boxes, which made me more curious.
I never played a classical instrument; many of my peers that I’ve become close with over the years were far more exposed to underground music when they were young. However, the very first concert I went to was Kraftwerk. This was in Munich in 1991. My friends at school told me that if I were to go to a concert, I had better be there many hours in advance to get a good spot, but their references were popular metal bands like Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Metallica. With this in mind, I took the train to Munich at 12:30pm to make sure I’d arrive early. I grew up close by, though, so it wasn’t a long commute. When I arrived at the venue, Circus Krone, nobody was there (laughter). Luckily, a poster reassured me that the concert was still happening. People started to arrive around 6pm or so, but because I was literally the first one to enter the space, I got to stand in the front row. At the time, they still performed with the entire hardware studio on stage. And “Pocket Calculator” still featured this little synthesizer that they held out to the audience, and you could press a button on it if you were close enough.
It’s this black-boxiness of musical equipment, where you wouldn’t know what it was, that made me curious. And then much later on, I was listening to electronic music at Ultraschall in Munich. I remember seeing Pan Sonic there, using these instruments that Jari Lehtinen built for them, including the famous typewriter synthesizer. It looked so different from the instruments that other artists were using at the time, and this fascinated me as well.
When did you first get a synthesizer? I’m assuming it was the first instrument you played?
The first thing I owned that was more of an instrument was a Roland Space Echo. And then when I came across the first records from Mego, I got curious and wanted to know how they were made, especially once I understood they’d been produced with computers. I was also briefly studying computational linguistics at the time, and through that encountered NeXT Computers before moving to Vienna in 1997; these had a built-in sound card for real-time audio, and they’d become a favored platform in computer music as much as in speech synthesis. So those were some starting points. Also, before that, a friend and I were DJing at a small bar in a nearby city on Fridays. Music-making started from listening. Through Mego, Sähkö, and some Cheap releases, I was drawn to material that featured a large number of “refusals”: no beats, no rhythms, no melodies. I was left wondering: what’s left? There was the occasional piece that might have only been a bonus track on a 12-inch or CD, and I found those the most attractive.
Were there any live shows in particular that stood out for you when you were younger in club settings?
Many. Seeing Pan Sonic back then was really special. There were performances from a group of musicians from Cologne who performed as Global Electronic Network, and those stood out. The Rephlex crowd came fairly often to Munich, and artists associated with Hard Wax from Berlin were distinct. For some years in the 1990s, Ultraschall in Munich had a quasi-encyclopedic program and an “ambient” room that was rather experimental. It was really informative.
All the early releases in your career—IT ISO161975, which I mentioned earlier, but also [OT] Xackpy Breakpoint (1999), and the CD_slopper releases—were super minimal in a way that aligns with what you’re saying about “no beats, no rhythms.” That even feels true with the collaborative Esognomig (1999) LP. What were the intentions there?
IT ISO161975 was very much me experimenting with tools. I partly made it at home, partly at the first Mego studio in Vienna. This stripped-down, low-frequency material was oriented along the tracks carved out by Sähkö. Really, this first album was more a matter of mimicking things and less about having a clear concept. The untitled long track on [OT] Xackpy Breakpoint was done almost exclusively in a software called Sound Effects at the time, which could handle the playback of multiple files simultaneously and offered particular ways of pitch shifting. Over the years, I got more invested in working within a single software environment to produce something. So these early releases you mention are a mix of experimentation, and looking up to certain artists you admire while making sure you don’t sound exactly like them.
At what point do you feel like you really came into your own? Was that with Sun Pandämonium (2003)?
It’s connected to that. I made a CD as a contribution to the exhibition Ausgeträumt… at the Secession in 2001. The pieces were later reissued as a 12-inch around the same time that Sun Pandämonium came out, and that was called Pandämonium 9 Playlist (2003). The pieces on both releases, and more so on Pandämonium 9 Playlist, originated from my encounter with Alberto de Campo, whom I met in 1999 during a year-long workshop on physical modelling synthesis at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. At the time, Alberto was working with Curtis Roads at UCSB on the first version of PulsarGenerator. This, and also a previous instrument from Curtis, CloudGenerator, embodied for me a certain angle of computer music that I wasn’t familiar with at the time. It sounded intense, direct, and raw, and not like expensive or overambitious ambient music. Alberto made a version of Xenakis’ GENDYN algorithm at the time, and we experimented with feeding this into a reinterpretation of Trevor Wishart’s waveset concept, from which Alberto made a playable real-time version. Also during those years, Florian Pumhösl invited me to contribute a soundtrack to an exhibition he was working on, which ended up becoming PV Trecks (2004). The pieces were not actually included in the exhibition as such, but functioned as an artifact to accompany the exhibition—an extension—in parallel.
What’s it like collaborating with other artists in general? Around this time you released Palimpsest (2004), which was made with Yasunao Tone. You mentioned the black-box nature of these machines that you liked, and I’m wondering if there’s something similar you feel when collaborating with others?
The notion of working with others is so particular in sound; it encompasses much more than only doing things with other artists. I’m thinking of these ongoing, very long collaborations with Alberto de Campo, Vincent Lostanlen, Maya B Kronic, NORM. So many sound productions benefit from others being part of them. These exchanges are crucial.
Has any label you’ve released an album on shaped the way you thought about the music you wanted to make? You’ve mentioned your love for Mego, as well as Rephlex, and you have that one album called Recordings for Rephlex (2005). Has anything like that ever happened, or was that never really a factor?
With Mego, it’s difficult to dissect this in retrospect given the moment and conceptual formation that was part of my time spent with them. Recordings for Rephlex was simply chosen as a pragmatic title; the tracks on that are certainly not the “braindance” that Rephlex followers were after, and there were some good reviews, with audiences lamenting it being so out of line with their expectations. But Rephlex did that all the time; there were so many releases that were just utterly different. The same goes for Resynthese FAVN (2024) with Blank Forms. When Russell Haswell and I were working on the Blackest Ever Black UPIC record, we wanted it to come out on a classical music label. This was conceptually relevant for us even before we started working on it at CCMIX in Paris. It took some time, and our manager knew someone who had just started working at Warner, but again, it did not affect how we made the music.
Can you talk about the difference between releasing music on a CD or LP versus having music as a multi-channel installation in a particular space? I know you had music playing at the DMZ in 2014, for example.
At the DMZ, I had an installation and also a performance in that auditorium with staged seating directly overlooking the border, and a little later also a 12-inch vinyl publication. But let us go back quickly to the pieces Pandämonium 9 Playlist and Stocha Acid Vlook that were part of the exhibition in 2001. Back then, I had strong skepticism towards anything labeled “sound art,” a term I still find outdated today. Contributions to an exhibition—as something that would be in sync with a publication, like a CD or a 12-inch—was a shortcut that worked for me. There was also this pretense that an exhibited work would allow for a sense of sonic and conceptual continuity with something that is published or performed. CDs and records also have this particular afterlife: once they’re out, they take on a very different existence.
Around 2005, Cerith Wyn Evans invited me to contribute something to his exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and suggested I occupy one of the exhibition spaces, which put me in a situation where I knew I could work in formats other than before. Specifically, this meant I could work with a particular number of channels and sound sources in the space, yet in terms of integrity and fit, I still thought of working with synthesis and editing concepts that would unify into something, not unlike how I would structure an album. The multiplication of sound sources challenged this perspective immensely. At the same time, I could continue the way I edit and structure sound; that is, mainly by avoiding the concept of mixing several sound sources altogether, meaning there were no superimpositions of sounds. Instead, I was securing a space for each process and algorithm through a dedicated channel and loudspeaker.
You mentioned that you were skeptical of anything labeled “sound art.” Why was that?
I felt that “sound art” was too disconnected from non-academic electronic music, such as techno or ambient. It felt like a relic of a time when the compartmentalization of genres seemed odd. It’s a bit like “video art,” a term that’s barely used any more. But it’s also probably because what was labeled sound art back then—the late 1990s—lacked a certain intensity, which is a quality in sound material I’ve been intrigued by for a long time.
How are you even measuring intensity? There can be an intensity in volume or in rigor. I love your album on Presto!?, 2⁄8 Bregman 4⁄8 Deutsch 7⁄8 Hecker 1⁄8 Höller (2012). To my ears, that album is intense but also scans as funny and playful. The sounds and timbres scan as unexpected and consequently humorous.
Intensity is as strange a concept as timbre, sitting on the continuously moving Möbius strip that oscillates between the subjectively felt, the unknown, and the measured. In the mid-2000s, I became interested in the psychoacoustics of non-standard sounds. By this I mean not musical psychology, nor psychoacoustics in the sense of experiments employing quasi-clinical test signals, but rather how these concepts hold up when applied to sounds generated through algorithmic synthesis, such as GENDYN oscillators, chaotic oscillators, and so on. Intensity here also has to do with processes that wouldn’t diminish the qualities of an input sound through alteration, but instead intensify the overall sonic field by suggesting a specific constellation of relations. These often minimal but highly effective twists are often just time-shifts in milliseconds, particular pitch relations, or concepts stemming from visual Gestalt theory. Apart from the Presto!? album, Hecker Höller Tracks (2007) also featured this throughout, as did many subsequent productions.
When did you come to the realization that mixing was not achieving the effects you wanted?
I’ve barely done any mixing from Pandämonium 9 Playlist onward. Something that triggered this was experiencing sounds generated with software that my friends at Mego were using. It was this idea of using, as much as possible, only one tool, concept, or algorithm as the sound source and producing a kind of quasi-enclosed sound, where any additional processing might diminish qualities rather than support them. This is applied in most of my productions. Synopsis Seriation (2021) features segmentation and automated arrangement of four three-channel pieces into one long continuous stereo arrangement. Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (2015), originally a three-channel installation and performance, only made it into a publication once the label [PAN] started to work with digital downloads; hence, channels one and two are featured on the respective sides of the 12-inch, and the third channel exists as a digital download.
Earlier you mentioned video art. I’m especially fond of the early video art from the ’60s and ’70s—artists like Bruce Nauman and Joan Jonas, the latter of whom appears on Chimerization (2012). Can you speak to how video art has affected the way you approach art? The earliest stuff reminds me of this stuff you’re talking about regarding reduction, stuff like Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) and Left Side Right Side (1972). And what was it like having Joan Jonas on your album?
Video art as a category certainly was not an input. When I was producing Chimerization, I was teaching at MIT, where Joan was a colleague, so this was also pragmatic (laughter). She has a fantastic voice and was up for the idea.
How did you decide on the vocalists on the three different versions of Chimerization? You’re editing the voices in some capacity, and I’m wondering what it’s like to work with something more concrete.
Well, there really was a good dose of pragmatism at work. I was based in Cambridge at the time and that certainly had an impact on the radius. East Coast. Guerino Mazzola already appeared in a footnote of Reza Negarestani’s libretto, and he happened to be in the same city as the Orfield Labs, an interesting place regarding anechoic chambers in the US. With the follow-up piece, Articulação (2014), I could work with Joan La Barbara. What shifted with these pieces was that I started working with external signals rather than synthesis directly, which was the case with more or less everything before.
When you’re teaching students, is there a specific guiding philosophy that you have?
One aspect is about raising awareness of the material conditions you’re working with. The question of how something is produced seems to fade away, but looking at sound, you can see that the “how” has immediate effects on one’s sensorial and aesthetic encounter with a sound. So it’s about reflecting on the tools you’re using to make sound, and that this choice of materials is never neutral. It’s important to see the diversity of approaches. This idea is under pressure; there’s a troubling degree of homogeneity being produced, and I want my students to develop a critical mind and ear for what each tool actually inscribes in their work and what it forecloses—what are its conditions, origins, possibilities?
How do you feel like you’re avoiding sameness in your own music? And we can talk about this in relation to your new album, Natural Selection (2026). What’s different now, and how do you stay fresh over decades of making music?
The recent pieces all look at the notion of difference and cognition, human and synthetic. With the pieces from around Chimerization, I started looking into tools and concepts stemming from audiology and psychoacoustics that were originally conceived for sound analysis, but then used them as a means for synthesis. Within synthetic cognition and machine listening, some of these processes employ iterative optimization steps, guided by gradient descent, where the uncompleted resynthesis of intermediate computational steps bears a vast range of artifacts and byproducts, considered debris or remnants, that add new characteristics to a sound.
Can you give an example of a track like that?
“Syn 21845 8 J15 Q12” and “M 35 36” from the new album. Also Inspection II (2019) and Resynthese FAVN, but they’re all using different algorithms at their core, so the byproducts that appear are also different. This notion of difference is quite closely tied to the shifting notion of timbre. Another album, Synopsis Seriation, took this as a structural point of departure: four differently resynthesized three-channel pieces served as input for an automated segmentation and sequencing system, through which they were collapsed into a single, long two-channel piece. Natural Selection, however, is more varied and less programmatic; it resists the kind of systemic logic that governs these other releases.
The album is characteristic of how you’ve presented work throughout your career, where you’ll have much longer tracks juxtaposed with these shorter ones. Do you just like having these two extremes? What’s the thinking behind the drastic differences in runtime?
Often, the differences at work here are extremely subtle and simply need space to become perceptible. So, a certain number of iterations is required as these pieces slowly scan through the different resynthesis steps. In terms of duration, these pieces are far from extreme. Syn As Tex [AC] (2021), released on Stefan Juster’s [aka Jung An Tagen] ETAT label lasts around 53 hours as a monophonic track; and the pieces of the Resynthesizers exhibitions exceeded the duration of the show itself, running for a little over three months. I have also been a bit puzzled by the recent excitement around so-called long duration; perhaps that is just my way of processing it.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Oh (laughs). I have a sympathy for details. When you’re into this really unpopular form of music, you need to have an obsession.
Florian Hecker’s Natural Selection is out now via PAN. More information about Hecker’s work can be found at his website and Galerie Neu.
Thank you for reading the 226th issue of Tone Glow. Obsessions.
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