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Music

Meet The Artist Behind Tim Hecker's New Psych-Drenched Video

Sabrina Ratté takes us on a trippy tour through the Cathedral Of Santiago De Compostela, and reveals the meaning behind Black Refraction.

If you’re a Canadian the start of your week was likely marked by two major events: CA Thanksgiving and the launch of Virgins, the newest album by fellow countryman Tim Hecker, released in tandem with the above music video for Black Refraction.

For the last 15 years Hecker has been creating music inspired by drone, microsound, and ambient influences, and is widely considered a major presence on the independent experimental music scene. Years of sound manipulation have led the Montreal-based artist to the next phase of his exploration of electronic music. Virgins, his latest project, is one of his deepest explorations yet--no small feat after his now-cult-classic, Ravedeath, 1972.

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Natural and digital sounds, sampling, acoustic, analog, and electric instruments inhabit the album’s sonic roster, one built on a rich rhythm-base of motif repetition and arrhythmic sequences. Although Hecker’s music more than stands on its own, it enters into a new league when paired with the surrealist video created by Montreal-based video artist Sabrina Ratté.

Collaborating with Hecker for the Black Refraction EP, the accomplished artist was able to push her creativity even further as she merged her signature abstract motifs with organic, faded patterns.

Below, we catch up with Ratté to learn more about the collaboration with Hecker and the inspiration for the video:

Still from Black Refraction, courtesy of Sabrina Ratté.

The Creators Project : This isn’t the first time you've worked with Tim Hecker. Can you explain how the collaboration came about?

Sabrina Ratté: The first video I made featuring Tim’s music was a commissioned work by Pop Montreal’s Auroratone Project, curated by Kier-La Janisse. Alongside with a group of experimental filmmakers and video artists, I was approached to create an original abstract video guided by the principles of Cecil Stokes’ Auroratones. [You can read about the genre here)]. Having to choose among the musicians who were performing at the same festival that year, my decision was easy to make; I definitely wanted to work with the music of Tim Hecker. Tim was kind enough to let me use his beautiful track The Piano Drop for this video. Tim is also a friend, and this project was the first time that our work got mixed together.

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How did you find yourself making the video for Black Refraction?

Tim approached me last summer for a video for his new album Virgins. He invited me to his studio where we listened to his album together. We then discussed our respective creative processes, and exchanged some ideas about the video. After this first exchange, Tim sent me a few Youtube videos that inspired him, and we both agreed on using as found footage a video documenting the “Botafumeiro" in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

Did your choice of the Botafumeiro footage depend mostly on the aesthetics of the footage, or does it also signify something religious, spiritual, mystical, or otherwise? 

I personally appreciated the formal aspect of the original video. As I was working with the footage, I enjoyed the organic and hypnotic rhythm of it, the soft light coming from the windows and the architectural glimpses we get of the cathedral. The smoke of the burned incense was the inspiration to use the video feedback technique. It has the same kind of fluid movements, and both seem to dematerialize matter and transform it into some kind of entity free from the constraints of gravity… I was also interested by the rawness of the footage, the unstable camera movements creating interesting accidents. There is absolutely no message behind this video.

As you were preparing the video, how did Black Refractions inspire you as a song?

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Black Refraction is such a wonderful track… Its repetitive structure and subtle work on textures was a real treat for me to interpret visually. It seemed natural to create within this atmosphere, and I felt a personal connection with the composition; I could see correspondences with the different approaches and techniques that I use in my own work.

What tools did you use for this project?

For this project I used a video mixer, video feedback technique, an iPhone, and a little bit of the LZX video synthesizer  for the textures.

Would you say your practice for Black Refraction departed from your usual practice?

Every new video project is obviously a different challenge, but it is also unavoidably part of my personal approach to video. Black Refraction is interesting for me because it gave me the opportunity to work with found footage again, which I hadn’t done in a while. It also allowed me to revisit a more sober and concrete kind of imagery, which I am very fond of but from which I had recently drifted away, exploring a more abstract and colorful vision. But all of these aspects are definitely ingrained in my work, and that’s the reason why I appreciate this kind of collaboration; it’s a way to reconnect with different facets of my work and push them a bit further.

Do you have any more collaborations with Tim Hecker on the horizon? What’s next for you?

Tim and I don’t have another collaboration planned for the moment. I have a few very exciting projects coming up, among them the release of a video series I did in collaboration with Brenna Murphy, and the music of Birch Cooper and Roger Tellier-Craig. This will be released this fall on a new web video label, Undervolt & Co., curated and managed by Yoshi Sodeoka and David Quiles Guilló, which will also be launching at the same time. I will also be working in collaboration with the musician Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, whom I will join for a residency at EMPAC in New York in February. I’m also planning a European tour with Le Révélateur in the spring.

Above, Le Révélateur, composed of Ratté  and Montreal-based electronic musician Roger Tellier-Craig, explores the intersection of electronic image and sound through the use of technologies. As a duo they have performed in locations as diverse as Mexico, Paris, Brooklyn, and at the Root Strata-curated On Land festival in San Francisco.

Below, watch AURORATONE, another collaboration from Tim Hecker and Sabrina Ratté: