You can tell that Hughes is indeed used to being interviewed. He can pontificate; he knows how to maintain eye contact for long stretches of speech. It must come with the territory of being the frontman for a record company. What, then, justifies Hughes' claim to studio-hermitism?
“I like being at home,” he says. “I like feeding off of being in the studio, working one-on-one with people.”
Hughes works in his home, a home with a yard to maintain and a lot more space than he's used to having available. His forthcoming Slicker album, the product of much time spent in his studio/home, will be released in March.
“I wanted to sit down and do a record that was a little more live,” he says “less about glitchy programming and sound design, and more about seeing what I could actually write, and trying to worry more about doing records that are going to hold up in a few years.”
Hughes' music notoriously couples a dirty electronic style with organic vocals and instrumentation, and his new record is no exception. The record is extremely vocal-heavy and influenced, according to Hughes, by a lot of the jazz and soul albums he's been digging up lately. “I tend to get into something and then I'll buy every record and totally indulge myself,” he says. “Then I'll get on to something else but go back to it in little pieces.”
A vacuum starts up behind the bar and stirs panic in the air. There is a pause in the dialogue. His eyes widen inquiringly. Our brains fill with the sound; sucked bar carpet noises replace the lobe of my brain in charge of maintaining a guise of witty dialouge. I raise the tape recorder unflinchingly towards his mouth like an airplane spoon delayed, mid-air, about to drop with all its passengers in it.
“You've worked on some soundtracks,” I somehow come up with. “What is that process like? Does the way you work differ knowing your result will supplement a film, rather than stand alone as the main event?”
“It's a lot easier,” he says, “It's just filling in the blanks … it's the difference between working at home and being your own boss and going into work and doing a project for your boss. One's about pleasing someone and making it work for the film and the other's about pleasing yourself which can be so much more complicated.”
Hughes' process as a musician is one that thrives off introspection as much as it does off collaboration. When asked when the music “happens” for him - as he's writing it, recording, releasing, or performing - Hughes is quick to assign his home as the site of the music's “making.”
“I don't feel like a performer as much as I feel like a songwriter. When I make a record I feel like my part is done. I've written it. I've recorded it. What I could take live as a performance wouldn't do as much for me. With electronic music I feel guilty, I feel like I'm almost cheating the audience. I don't want to go up somewhere and open a laptop and just hit the space bar. It's boring to me.”
Having been present at a few too many shows in which the performers flaunt the minimal action of their index fingers as the main attraction, where the performers themselves look bored in a stoic, self-important kind of way while audience members take turns shouting a snickering “Hey, turn up the art!”, I find this sort of self-awareness as a performer remarkable in Hughes. He doesn't want to bore anyone.
“Boring, huh?” I ask.
We forget about the recording device. We are, at the moment, having a candid conversation without overt self-concious tendencies. We are not boring.
“Actually the few times I did play live, I had a lot of fun,” he says. He's quick to dispel my assertion that he doesn't see music as a performative art. “It's just not my priority. I think it'd be interesting, especially on the new record to see what it looked like live. If I could get the people together that worked on the record.”
Hughes' forthcoming Slicker record has been such a product of collaboration that live performance may lie somewhere in the future this time around. All the jazz albums he's been digging up have increased his interest in performance lately. The new album has been heavily influenced by jazz and many of the musicians that have played on the records are, according to Hughes, great performers: Dan Boadi of Ghanatta, as well as Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin of Tribe, to name a few.
“These guys played live music their whole life. They would crush me.” He pauses. “As an observer I'd like to see all those people together, see what it would be like.”
“And, what? You just happen to be on stage too?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he laughs, “I'll just be in the middle, conducting.”
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