Torn Hawk: "Born to Win (Life After Ghostbusters)" (via SoundCloud)

Torn Hawk, the alias of Luke Wyatt, makes visceral and toxic music somehow feel sunkissed and melodic. His beats can sound as though they were programmed by William Burroughs, garbled and diced to the point of mesmerism. "I found a note I made a few years ago, urging myself to make 'music that sounds like out-of-time artifacts,'" he explains. As a kid in Charlottesville, Virginia, Wyatt's stepmother operated an indie movie theater, which instilled in him a deep respect for film. Today, in addition to his music, the 35-year-old also makes bizarre video collages combining footage from homemade go-go videos, 80s action films, and pornos, turning them into fever dreams. He calls it "video mulching."

Since Wyatt joined Brooklyn underground dance label L.I.E.S. in 2012, a wealth of Torn Hawk projects began to see daylight, each one expanding his sound palette a bit more. He creates tracks that could be slotted alongside the ambient guitars of Fennesz; others that sound like Throbbing Gristle, 90s trip-hop, or Krautrock warrior Manuel Göttsching. At times Wyatt can evoke an imaginary horror movie soundtrack, or the kind of fake reggae music gleaned in the background of an 80s teen movie. Other moments can sound like a lost minimalist composition. All of these styles can be heard on his new album for Not Not Fun, Through Force of Will, two upcoming four-song releases, Quadrifolio and Songs From Bad Kid School, and the many CDs, cassettes, and 12"s he's scattered out into the world already.

Torn Hawk: "'96 Galant" (via SoundCloud)

One afternoon in January, Wyatt invited me to his loft space in the Hasidic part of South Williamsburg. When I got to his home, he ushered me upstairs to a room soundtracked by Slowdive demos, which Wyatt appreciated in part because they were “compressed four different ways.” He would later tell me that he "prepared" for the interview with "a One a Day Energy vitamin, a decent workout, and a little booze to bring things back down to a simmer." We chatted about his teenage delinquency, Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and life in Washington D.C. And then I got home and realized my recorder malfunctioned; the interview was lost. While undoubtedly frustrating, the technological glitch seemed oddly apropos considering Wyatt's way of screwing around with broken-down media. The following exchange took place over email following the botched interview.

Pitchfork: Why did you start playing guitar in the first place?

Torn Hawk: There is this thing I call the Gesture Disease that comes packaged with bipolar disorder. It makes you want to touch stuff, scribble on things; make a mess, then clean it up in an interesting way. For me, guitar was a beautiful and bratty way to channel this. My guitar teacher, Charles Bissell from the Wrens, was one of the only resonant mentors I’ve had in my life. My friends and I would go see them play at Maxwell's. I am sure, like all his students, I felt personally vindicated when they had such a success with The Meadowlands. 

I was 13 and my friends were ordering Operation Ivy records, but I was interested in things that were more textural and expansive. Sonic Youth's Dirty came out. For me, this led to Glenn Branca, which led to New York composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and other thoughtful non-rock avenues. Lucky for me Charlie was actually into Sonic Youth. Though my lessons with him were far too few, he opened the door to improvisation with chord tones and scales and modes. As long as I knew what key a chord progression was in, I could scribble all over it.

Pitchfork: There's this thread to some of your song titles which leads me to believe you might have previously been a video clerk...

TH: My stepmom owned an independent movie theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, for many years, and the atmosphere of film literacy and enthusiasm around her and my dad rubbed off on me. My tastes tend to be unfashionable in both directions: I champion movies that aren't the top name-drops for either the hip or the square. Like, I really dislike Oliver Stone but was really moved by Born on the Fourth of July. William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is a movie I like to have potential friends watch to make sure they are for real.

Appropriating B-movie content for videos often puts you in the position of making fun of people, but I hope that the context I deploy it in sets me apart from that kind of crippling ironic distance. My videos aim to be statements of deep sincerity.

Pitchfork: Do you perceive your "video mulch" to be of a similar discipline as the Torn Hawk tracks or do they come from different places?

TH: It’s just two different ways of telling the same story. I had made an intentional swerve toward making music that was more smeared and less delineated, like video. Andrew Morgan of the Peoples Potential Unlimited label out of Washington, D.C., asked me to do a video for one of his label's releases (Wavelength's "Funk Dreams"). This was just as I was getting a handle on incorporating VHS and glitch-management into my practice. That video went well, and he proposed the Video Party DVD series, which provided a platform for me to stretch out and basically define "video mulch" as a form for myself.

Besides aesthetics, I began to work with tape for my music because I was tired of so many choices in editing music on a computer. When I bounced a mix to tape, those decisions became locked in. When working with video, I like sending images I have honed in Photoshop, for example, to VHS, because it provides a sort of anti-sheen and flatness that smears your decisions. The key word is "inevitable"—beyond individual images, cultivating inevitability is about creating a sense around the edits and the sequence that there was no other way to assemble things. That this was something preordained that had always existed.