Alien in Resonance: Bryce Hackford 🐳🩵

Editor’s Note from Sally 💌

When I first met Bryce through my partner Rich—I’d find myself asking, “Who is this beautiful man?” As our paths crossed more often, I got to experience Bryce in a completely different light when Rich and I were lucky enough to attend the experimental launch of Somatic Resonance, his collaboration with Nanse Kawashima exploring the intersection of sound and reiki.

They’ve since been offering this experience around different Brooklyn venues, and it’s been so special to witness its evolution. I’m thankful for this interview—for the way it brings more context and depth to someone I’ve always seen as so sophisticated and quietly enigmatic. I love how this conversation uncovers the many layers I’ve only ever caught glimpses of in passing. Bryce, welcome to the Whaleness Club! 🐳

Intro & Interview by Rich Awn

The year was 2014 and I was attending a festival upstate called The Wassaic Project. There I came upon a small green woodshed at the top of a hill outfitted with a complicated interconnection of electronics and synthesizers. The performance was just about to begin and the artists began to emerge from the crowd. A tall, slender, well-dressed figure glided into position around a small hand-held device that resembled a tape recorder. The sounds that slowly faded into audible perception are some that still haunt and delight me to this day. 

This experience in Wassaic was distinctly unique; it was as if something other than music was being performed. I can only describe it as the soundtrack of a distant memory with an undeniable feeling of familiarity. It was simultaneously comforting and unnerving, rhythmic and irregular, earth-bound and alien. 

I was later introduced to the artist whose name is Bryce Hackford. I’ve become closer to him over the years and I’ve had the great privilege to collaborate with him on many projects and explore the weird world that lies somewhere between the defined and the ambiguous. The following conversation delves into this world, his life, his work, and things to come.

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Richie: We're starting at the end of the story, which is the present time. Where are you at with the production of sound? From what I know about your work and your life currently, you're a recent grad with your master's in…

Bryce: Master... whatever that might mean.

Richie: What does that mean?

Bryce: Depends on who you’re asking.

Richie: Sure, it depends.

Bryce: I guess it means that I've spent three years rigorously interrogating what it is I do, deeply engaging with the work of a really wide array of artists and thinkers. I've immersed myself in that very deeply.

Richie: To what end?

Bryce: I think I’ve done it primarily for the sake of the experience itself. If I didn’t want the experience, I wouldn’t have done it. But there are also different points of access that come from having such a degree.

Richie: Did you have any goal in mind when you embarked on your post-grad journey?

Bryce: Conditioning. It makes me think about martial arts because martial arts practice also involves a sort of physical conditioning.

Richie: Have you applied your martial arts practice to the rigor of your studies?

Bryce: I see a parallel in how both create spaces that give form to time in very particular ways—giving form to time as opposed to unstructured time.

Richie: Terence McKenna talked about different types of time. His psychedelic journeys in the Amazon led him to some pretty heavy conclusions about time and space.

Bryce: Exactly. It roots back to some relativistic discussions about our reality, like how time and space are one fabric.

Richie: Being a thing—a material that we have some control over. I guess I'm curious about your experience with the metaphysical in sound and in your work—both as a listener and a producer, live and recorded. Where do you go when you're making music?

Bryce: Maybe very intensely wherever I am at that moment.

Richie: I can see that when I watch you perform. I'm always wondering where you are because it's a different person—a crazy focused person. I see the martial arts training working for you in recent performances.

Bryce: That's cool. Interesting.

Richie: Even back to when I first saw you play at Wassaic Project in that little shed with the guy playing with solo cups.

Bryce: Was that with Ed and Beth?

Richie: You and Tim Love Lee were playing, and you had a distinctive performance I never forgot. Tim was really hyped on repping you that summer, which led to our Magick City interactions.

Bryce: Sort of proto-now.

Richie: Back to this heavy question about the hidden realms you channel in your work—how would you describe your process?

Bryce: It varies a lot from situation to situation. But these situations are always frames, right? A frame is something I'm always thinking about as the structure that makes what’s happening a phenomenon that people consider art.

Richie: What does the frame consist of?

Bryce: Words, colors, architecture, language, imagery—whatever communicates what an experience will be before it happens. That frames a situation, a room, or an amphitheater. It creates an acoustic situation but also a social situation. These are all materials I think about and engage with when I mix them.

Richie: Could it be the situation in the moment when you're making music?

Bryce: Yeah, I think of it as a component of a situation—something happening within it. Depending on what I'm trying to bring to the conversation and the factors I’m listening for, I guess I’m almost like a conduit for those things.

Richie: Is there a part of you that’s consciously thinking about material, and part of you that’s being influenced by your environment?

Bryce: Yeah, sure. I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

Richie: That’s it. That’s your job.

Bryce: But also, that could be the job of the audience.

Richie: Do you find as an artist that you're perceived in a certain way? Is it accurate to what you're trying to convey? What is your identity?

Bryce: Such a big question. I don’t know. I think it’s very multivalent. I do a lot of different types of things—collaborating with various people, playing records at six in the morning, or performing extremely meditative music at sunset. A lot of those experiences happen in specific social situations that might not overlap. Some people know me as a dance music nightlife person, while others see me as a weird experimental music person. So, I’m not really sure.

Richie: How are you with that term, “sound healer?”

Bryce: It’s not one I’ve ever used to describe myself. I don’t take words like that lightly. I’m not a doctor, you know.

Richie:  Nanse brought this up in our interview too when she quickly turned it back on me, saying, “You know what? I can’t heal you. You’re going to have to heal yourself. All I can do is be present and hold space in the context of health or introspection.” It’s self-discovery that leads to healing.

Bryce: Sure, you know. And the term often ends up as a default description once you start entering into experiences where people lay down and are worked on in some way.

Richie: I’m interested in how you feel about your association with that type of experience and your multivalent collaborations, one of them being with Nanse Kawashima and 'Somatic Resonance'.

Bryce: Yeah, we’re working on that a lot right now.

Richie: You’ve got an awesome thing going and I can’t wait to see how it evolves. Are you aware you’re entering into this world of sound baths?

Bryce: That’s not entirely new for me, although it’s been a while. When Body Actualized Center was around, I definitely played live music in a yoga context.

Richie: I didn’t know that.

Bryce: Yeah, I have some experience. That was a very different context, but maybe in some ways, it was very similar. A lot of time has passed, but I’m learning about being in a healing space and the intersection between healing and art.

Richie: What do you mean by that?

Bryce: Particularly in working with Nanse, a lot of things are intuitively inverse regarding our expectations for a given session. In terms of audience engagement—introducing oneself, talking about what’s going to happen before and after a session—we often have a debrief at the end where people ask questions about their experiences. I understand this makes sense in the context of healing, but it also feels like what people think of as a workshop in the context of art. That’s one of the first times I’ve ever given a performance and had immediate large group feedback. We sat there for about half an hour talking about it.

Richie: It seems like a good idea.

Bryce: It certainly can be, but in the context of a performance, that’s completely unfamiliar to me. In my experience, that’s something that usually happens backstage. It’s interesting to interrogate that and think about why one chooses to reveal or conceal or withhold access to oneself. What are the boundaries and distinctions between healing and art? There are lots of things about art that can be therapeutic, and that goes for more than just art—it applies to many aspects of life.

Richie: When you receive this feedback, does it feel like you’re being heard?

Bryce: Sure. I think sometimes, in a world of abstraction—especially in experimental music, where it’s about tone and the improvisational unfolding of the result—control and intention are key elements during production or performance.

Richie: What is your intention when it’s a dance music performance? Is it dependent on who you think the audience is or what you want that experience to be?

Bryce: Well, when I play records, let’s think about the dance floor for this conversation. Usually, there’s a specific kind of energetic intention and a portal I’m trying to open for people to have a certain ecstatic, physical, and sensual experience. Different rooms and sound systems create different atmospheres, and different audiences peak with different tunes. My intention is to open that portal, make it happen, and say what I want to say with the music — figuring out how to do that — so it will be received.

Richie: Message received, loud and clear. I’ve felt some very specific sensations that identify what you’re doing. Do you think the brainwaves of your audience might be changing, sending them into a different state of consciousness?

Bryce: That’s a great explanation for what’s happening. I probably should see what it’s like to do certain things while wearing an EEG meter. I do think a shift—maybe not measurable brainwaves, but a change in consciousness—is what I’m trying to find. The closer we get to the core of that, the less an EEG explanation is possible. 

Brainwave modulation is a great way to specify how sound affects the body and its molecules. I’m very interested in science, but I don’t critique its basic formal understanding. I tend to privilege subjective experience as the access I have, which is probably why I haven’t measured it with an EEG. But I suspect that changes occur in the electrical currents within the body, as they surely do without sound. So maybe there is sympathetic electricity or something like that.

Richie: Traveling further back, when were you first interested in dance music?

Bryce: I became really interested in the idea of it, which is weird in some way. I was drawn to music that could perform specific functions, which is still true. I listened to a lot of what people call Krautrock, Afrobeat, and lots of very rhythmic, pulsing world music. I liked long-form music and minimalism. I discovered David Mancuso and Basic Channel—these perennially referenced guideposts of certain lineages of music—before I even thought about DJing.

Richie: Sounds like college cracked open your music brain.

Bryce: I was always really musical. My parents are musicians, so I was exposed to a lot of music growing up. I played in lots of punk bands in high school centered around the DIY scene. I quickly became interested in so much more than that. I was always trying to listen to hits I’d never heard before, learning about as many fresh music makers as I could.

Richie: Would you say punk and teen angst provided a kernel of origin for you?

Bryce: Middle school days, definitely. The anger and aggression, but also immersion in ambiguous, weird worlds. Even listening to Nirvana was super formative.

Richie: Yeah, same.

Bryce: Intuitively understanding something, but also finding it strange and murky—voicing both deeply personal and deeply political ideas.

Richie: Growing up on Long Island, did you identify with alternative cultures because your surroundings seemed somewhat normal?

Bryce: I hated everything about the adult world around me—suburbia, malls, strip malls, small highways, big highways. I don’t think anyone creative can stand that. It feels foisted upon us. In some respects, our creative expression is like the 10% of control we might have.

Richie: It seems like our parents’ generation fled the city in search of their version of utopia.

Bryce: Utopia. I get why our parents thought the suburbs would be a good place to raise kids. But what is a good place to raise kids? Is Planet Earth a good place to raise kids?

Richie: Only an alien would know.

Bryce: Which maybe you are.

Richie: It takes one to know one. To cap off our conversation beautifully: as you’ve emerged artistically from punk and alternative origins, leading into curiosity about world music, sliding into seminal soul-funk disco, and now evolving into experimental and even sound healing, what are you going to do now?

Bryce: Well, I'm trying to get access to unique spaces. My goal is to create an entire situation that’s unique and specific to the event.

Richie: What does that look like? What does that feel like?

Bryce: It has the potential to look like many different things. I haven’t been in this space yet, but it looks like extreme volumes with lots of spatial activation through tuning and queuing—turning the space into a sounding, resonant chamber, like the body of an acoustic guitar. The end result would depend on many parameters, like aromas wafting into the space and whatever else is possible. That’s a direction I’m very excited about.

Richie: What other signature techniques or multi-sensory elements do you use in your work?

Bryce: The structures I use for tuning are usually physical, and I don’t engage in rule-based systems that fall outside of that. I don’t pre-determine the pitch by a certain Hertz or frequency. Some of the music I’m engaged with could be described as microtonal. 

I’m also interested in creating overtone-rich sounds, where one octave and another create an overtone. Let’s say you strike a key on a piano; the loudest sound you hear is that note. If you really listen closely, there are many other pitches happening at higher registers. If you play different notes at once, they all have different notes occurring simultaneously, which interact with each other. That’s where I can use equalization or different types of processing—both acoustical and electronic—to focus on those sounds. I’m discovering ways to make sounds influence the reflections of sound in the room to enhance the music.

Richie: Do you feel there’s ambiguity in how you’re perceived based on the kind of music you choose to play?

Bryce: I don’t know. Do you?

Richie: I celebrate your ambiguity.

Bryce: Thank you. I enjoyed our conversation.

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Outro by Rich Awn

Bryce Hackford is a Brooklyn-based artist and musician boldly traversing realms that can conjure varied emotions and physical sensations. In a healing context, his compositions can elicit an inner dialogue catalyzing a confrontational inquiry between the listener’s perception of their identity and the revelation of their true self. In a dancefloor context, he’ll take control of a journey that envelopes and holds the dancer in a perfect cloud, drifting with awesome and ferocious magnitude in a tumultuous alien sky. In a purely experimental context, his transmissions are site-specific with unique and profound results for those lucky enough to catch them in the wild.

For your personal realization of “unusual moments in the continuous stream of auditory experience,” follow Bryce here.

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Rich Awn

Edits by Sally Choi