Guillermo CastroWhenever I try to talk about Carnelian, the new record from composer and filmmaker Chris Hunt, I inevitably find myself speaking in abstractions or resorting to the language of the visual. His vivid soundscapes are haunting and beautiful precisely because of the way they invade your thoughts and etch their presence onto your consciousness. Texture, shape, color, movement, light and shadow—these are the defining features that pull you through the album’s six beguiling tracks. While most ambient music points to pensive contemplation and dreamlike reverie, Hunt instead leads us through the mystic haunts and unclassifiable terrains of Carnelian’s formidable wilderness. As optical experiences go, it’s less like staring at paintings in a gallery, and more like wandering through the set of a film or roaming the pages of a novel.
So it comes as no surprise when I speak with Hunt that we find ourselves discussing cinema and writing far more than the process of composing music. As an artist, he’s the sort to find inspiration in the little things, the tiny details and endless minutiae that merge to shape our experience of people, places, and events. How abstract concepts like time and temperature and history work their way into his compositions is never immediately clear, so Hunt controls what he can—namely, the work, or more so the habitual act of doing the work. “I find it important to be sensitive but also to pummel forward,” he says early in our conversation, and it’s as good a summation as any of his creative ethos.
During the course of our interview, it becomes clear that Hunt is an expansive thinker that enjoys sorting through the strands and fibers that cross through his mind as much as he does weaving them into something tangible. As such, we wander through various topics—from cephalopods to Cormac McCarthy—with each twist and turn (hopefully) leading us closer to the dark and seductive heart of Carnelian. Like an album, every conversation is a journey, and this was an especially absorbing one to take.
When composing an album like Carnelian, where everything seems so interconnected and one passage overlaps into the next, do you have to put yourself into a particular mainframe to compose? Or is composing something you can sort of turn off and on?
Right, when I read the question the word “fiber” appeared in my mind for some reason. Then I thought about how fibers are spun into threads and then woven with other threads into tapestries. Then I thought what if at various points the tapestry frees up frayed ends that then weave themselves into new tapestries. And also, the fibers in-between tapestries may begin to unravel and reveal new arrangements of fibers, maybe micro-tapestries or weird knots. This is probably an unnecessarily pretentious way to say it, but I find that this is more or less what the architecture of the process looks like for Carnelian, or any of my work really. It’s all a sort of rhizomatic thing. As far as I can tell, it happens pretty much constantly. I don’t turn it on and off. It’s not so much a particular frame of mind that is important to me, but the older I get the more I notice that there are more productive pockets of energy that bubble up throughout the days that make working on certain types of things more productive. Also, in the most basic sense, I am a huge believer in trusting the process. So even without a relevant frame of mind, I like to work a little bit on as much as I can as often as I can and then sort it all out later. So I find it important to be sensitive but also to pummel forward.
Yeah, I imagine it’s similar to writing prose or poetry where you try to free yourself from the idea of an end product and just start putting words to paper. Eventually you’ll stumble across one of those threads that you can pull on or follow into something productive. Do you have any techniques you use to stimulate your imagination or break out of writer’s block?
Right, from what I’ve absorbed, the common feeling among writers that care about their work seems to be that the most important part is just doing the work. This notion applies to literally anything. I mostly tinker with prose when working out my films and it’s the same—sit down and do it. Sit and suffer. If I can do some amount of work consistently over a long time, I’ll inevitably have something workable. Most of it will be trash, and that’s OK, too. Just commit to it. Or even further: give yourself to it.
Fortunately, because I really try to show up and commit to the work, I end up steering around too much heavy writer’s block. I definitely end up with a ton of not great ideas and that can be a chore to sort though. As for getting through the less inspired times, I’ve tried to learn to appreciate space from the actual sitting-in-front-of-the-screen work. I’ll do my best to audition ideas in my mind’s ear or mind’s eye, for instance. This sometimes helps organize which ideas I’m most interested pursuing. This is beyond cliché, but I like to stay fairly saturated with other things that resonate with me. Sometimes not though, too. I recently read a book about cephalopods and the how those animals are equipped with sensory equipment that seems to exceed their body template and that provides them with the opportunity to have incredibly expressive and curious lives despite only having a life span of a few years to figure out how to express and explore. This is very haunting and profound to me. Those ideas then offer a window to other aesthetic-emotional textures that I might then try and work through. It’s all connected and it never stops.
What are some of the ideas that influenced you while composing this record?
For this record, and with pretty much all of the music I’m working on now, I find myself chasing aesthetic ways to work through certain emotional, nostalgic, or existential waves that I encounter in my life. I experience this process in an abstracted way that I’m sometimes frustrated with not having a great way to explain it. So, for instance, I’ll go to a museum and look at pieces of Egyptian hieroglyphs and broken columns and sarcophagi and this might make a particular impression on me that includes all of the various thoughts about what I’m looking at, historically, intellectually, what it all means to me, the sense I might make of it, and woven through all of that is what the space is like, the temperature, what the marble feels like to the touch, what that particular room sounds like, what the pressure might feel like, etc. Basically all this “stuff” feels a certain way to me and it sometimes lasts and I carry it longer than other moments. When something sticks around, it usually ends up as an idea I end up trying to work through with sound. For some reason, “texture” makes sense to me as a language to talk about this kind of super abstract, existential process. So I do my best to get through it. Some of it is literal—reverbs can speak to spaces, some noise or inconsistency in the sound could speak to the sounds in a particular room or the sound of a particular experience. It’s all a big mess, but it feels right. Does that make any sense?
Yes, for sure. Do you work off notes of these experiences or from memory?
I’ll sometimes make notes about fragments of things, but this is mostly all memory. The literal, episodic bits as well the mushy, impression/existential bits.
Outside of music, who are some artists you look to for inspiration?
I feel like I can never really nail it down. I read a handful of Cormac McCarthy books last year; I really appreciate those landscapes. I’ve done more museum visiting in the last couple of years than I have in awhile and I seem to be slowly starting to appreciate painting in a classical, general sense. There’s a guy called XRA out of Seattle that is doing some inspiring work with his video game “Memory of a Broken Dimension.” I’m sure there are plenty more that escape me. The day-to-day is typically inspiring enough. Literally everything is there.
I’m actually reading The Road right now. I found a copy of it at work and I just started devouring it. There’s so much about that hellish landscape that seeps into your bones; it really is the antagonist in the novel, the villain in a sense. What is it about those landscapes that you find appealing?
That’s a great one. And that one in particular is so technically sparse and yet so densely thoughtful and caring. I guess part of it is that when you read those books you really get a sense that they emerge from someone who is deeply affected by landscape. In Blood Meridian, for instance, it’s obviously this mythically beautiful and haunting desert environment that brings truth to the horrors in those stories just as much as the characters do. Or at least that’s the conversation that’s happening. The space and the characters. Where does one begin and the other end? Or is it all one big thing void of rules? Part of it that resonates with me is the textural, the way the light hits the mountains and the various shades of reds and purples that seems to really only come out in the Southwest. The hellish outcrops of rock that remind you of how old and indifferent to us everything around us really is. In The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, etc.—it’s that intensely green and mushy Appalachian forest environment that’s overgrown and indifferent in its own vine-y and unnavigable way.
This seems like a good time to talk about “Of Will and Descending,” which seems to carry with it a similar sense of bleak darkness and desolation coupled with moments of stark beauty. What can you tell me about that track and how it fits into the thematic framework of Carnelian?
The components of that piece reminded me of fire and ritual and density. Really dark greens and some orange. Maybe in a jungle atop a slab of limestone or marble. Not near the coast but maybe near a river. It ended up being the more dynamic piece to me and it sort of encompassed themes that weave in and out of the rest of the project. The colors shift and the spaces evolve a bit before and after, but “Of Will and Descending” is a sort of culmination. Most of the action happens there, I think.
Your description is very cinematic, and indeed, I find it hard to talk about Carnelian without using visual language. As a musician and a filmmaker, what would you say are some of the unifying traits that bring those two disciplines together?
I feel like the language frees the work to some degree. Or at least it can free us as the viewer/listener/receiver. If you talk about music or anything with genre conventions, the understanding of what it actually is might be is missed. In film, if you say “let’s do a two shot” or “this will be sci-fi,” for instance, that it is a two shot isn’t going to say anything about the texture of the image, what the colors of the set or the materials of the costumes or the actors’ faces communicate to us. It’s probably not the best example but I feel strongly that talking about sound and music in visual terms, or really any terms, than the right ones can really offer us more rich ways into what we hear. There is different information intrinsic to seeing film and because in a geological sense there is less time spent with recorded sound than we have looking at painting/sculpture/drawing etc., we have a bit more cultural-preparedness to enter into images. But I believe that ultimately the more rich ways to think and talk about sound are ways that really challenge us to SEE and HEAR it. There isn’t as much rigor to these thoughts as I’d like to have, but film or sound or food or olfactory—it’s all ultimately light and energy and texture and curation. So what are the unifying traits really is the question. How do we talk about that? It all does some kind of work on us.
If you weren’t doing music or film, what would you be doing?
I’d probably be out in the desert looking for meteorites.
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