The alias “Benoît Pioulard” famously arrived in the middle of the night while you were studying French, scrawled in a bedside notebook. You’ve previously said that the name chose you rather than the reverse. Twenty years on, does the pseudonym feel like a mask, a second self, or simply a signature you no longer think about?
At this point it’s more the latter – just a familiar tag attached to these things I make. The original use of the name was part joke, part necessity, but then nothing ever took its place. The only other moniker I considered was “Thelma”, a partial anagram of my real name, but there were already a couple folks using that pseudonym, and it didn’t feel quite right anyway. I’ve had people misremember the alias as “Didier Foucault” and “Renoir Leotard”, I’ve been addressed as “Ben” at the merch table a few times, which is all amazing. Some friends who’ve known me since the beginning still struggle to pronounce “Pioulard”, so I just stick to the idea that, however you say it, that’s the correct way to say it. Like “Autechre”.
Let’s flash back to Ann Arbor in the early 2000s. You were drumming and playing guitar in the post-rock band Esmae while quietly making handmade CD-Rs for friends and family under no name at all. What did the private, for-friends-only nature of those early recordings let you try that a “band” couldn’t?
At the time of the CD-R albums, I was under the spell of Phil Elverum, particularly his album The Glow, Pt. 2, and I just loved the ethos and aesthetic of K Records. Some of that stuff gave me early cues that a single person in a bedroom could make something authentic and full-sounding, which was a revelation. My Leo side doesn’t come out in too many ways, but that auteur ability to control all the parts and multi-track – to feel a piece coming together and kind of write itself, ideally – was just the most fun thing I could imagine, and often still is. There’s really nothing like the feeling of finishing a song that’s completely your own from front to back. Being in a band certainly has its own virtues and unique benefits, too, and I still make music with my long-time friend Luke Entelis (aka Viul), who was the guitarist in Esmae – it’s an incredible thing when those creative bonds can transcend so many eras of life and friendship.
Kranky, which at the time was home to Windy & Carl, Grouper, Stars of the Lid, and loscil, signed you off a demo (a route you’ve noted barely exists anymore). What did it mean to a young Michigander to be welcomed into that particular lineage, and did it feel like an aesthetic mandate or a blank cheque?
Yeah, it’s beyond an honor to be in that kind of company – at the time I sent demos out in 2005, I adored Windy & Carl, Labradford, Godspeed, Bowery Electric, and several other Kranky artists, and really only approached them as a matter of respect, totally shooting the moon. No other label responded, but Mr. Kranky asked me for another set of songs, so I recorded six more that summer, which led him to offer a two-album contract, and I thought maybe I was getting Punk’d. One of those songs ended up on a Ghostly compilation (Idol Tryouts 2), and the other five were the beginnings of Précis. I definitely felt a mandate to cull and refine what I thought were my best ideas, to find the greatest focus I could in the midst of school, work, and band practices, and it became this kind of secret passion project that I only shared once it was done in early 2006. I still felt shaky about it, but conceded that it was at least an accurate representation of where I was at in my life at the time. Also, I think the only music I listened to during those months was The Disintegration Loops, because I was afraid of being influenced by songs and melodies that other people wrote.
You’ve been strikingly candid that “Précis” (2006) was, in your words on the “Sound Methods” podcast, “basically a breakup record… just sad sack 21-year-old romantic Tom”, full of a “pretty sadness” you were drawn to at that age. Looking back at that “morbid romantic,” what do you recognise in him, and what feels like a stranger?
A really wonderful effect of having all these very diaristic records from over the years is a sense of personal continuity – the same goes for all the notebooks I’ve kept since my early teens, which I have in a box here at home. I can easily recall a lot of sense-memories from the era of making that album, and put myself in that place with a little mental effort, while recognizing the growth and change that’s happened since. I think in general I’ve let go of the ‘tortured poet’ ideal that I was drawn to as a teenager, and am more into the question of how to make meaning out of nothing, how to square consciousness with the scale of the universe, that kind of thing. Feels like, as I’m getting older, I only have more questions, but I can also ease into the peace of knowing they might not ever get answered. And sometimes I just want to make a tape loop piece that tickles my ears, without any particular motivation otherwise.
You’ve said in the past that your best collaborations all grew from pre-existing mutual admiration, and that the joy is when a listener can “pick out the elements that each person brought in, yet the whole is cohesive.” When a collaboration is working, what does it feel like in the room?
The only collaboration that has consistently been done in person is Orcas, with Rafael, and in that dynamic there’s always been a lot of mutual trust and respect. Like, we come from very different backgrounds – both culturally and musically – but we connected at first based on our respective solo work. As we discussed in another question, my processes and setup are very basic and uncomplicated, but since I’ve known him, Raf has always had a professional setup that often blows my mind with its versatility. His obsessiveness also works in favor of the partnership, because my chief roles in Orcas have always been just songwriting and singing, so I’ll bring a dinky little song into the studio, he’ll hear a few ways it can be produced and start finding instrument sounds, we’ll kind of snowball from there, and he ends up working on details during seemingly every free moment he has, sometimes for weeks afterward. His intuition and ears are pretty astonishing. Of course, we’ve had a lot of dead-end variations on songs, but we are both generally good at pushing through those failures, knowing that the right version is around the corner somewhere, which to me is always an exciting and motivating prospect.
A whole decade passed between “Yearling” and “How to Color A Thousand Mistakes”. In that gap, you and Raf both weathered enormous change. What made it finally feel right to become Orcas again rather than release the songs under your own name?
For whatever reason, Orcas never felt like something that would be the same if it were a remote project, so the hiatus was initially a default because Raf moved to New York in 2014. My first visit out here was in early 2016, which is when we made the Seventeen Words record as Gailes, during a weekend blizzard. The earliest material for the third Orcas album came about in spring 2018, when I was on a day job hiatus and had just finished Sylva – Once again we started with no goals in mind, but pretty quickly put together a version of what became “Heavens Despite”. Another year goes by, I write a couple of vocal songs and decide I’m moving to Brooklyn, and the album feels like it’s starting up, then lockdown delayed us by probably another two years… We did a few things over the wires or live on the phone during that time, but really the bulk of that album came together in 2022 and 2023, by which point time itself felt like a meaningless, elastic mystery. The project hasn’t been without its challenges, but ultimately everything that has resulted is a true mark of our friendship and the ways our aesthetics can mutate and reform into something very different, but just as honest every time.
Both Deck Amber and Konec close a loop within your wider community: Raf mastered both records, and Konec even features original artwork by Liz Harris, better known as Grouper (a fellow traveller from your Kranky years). The ambient world often looks from outside like a constellation of solitary figures, yet your discography suggests something closer to a village. How consciously do you cultivate that web of friendships, and what does this community give your music that solitude never could?
I give a lot of credit for that community to kranky, because once I was part of that stable, at least in terms of public-facing perception, I was in league with some of my heroes and had a certain amount of built-in credibility, which is still a trip to consider. The relationships that have come together in that sphere have felt pretty organic, and I have generally approached things with the mindset that “it can’t hurt to ask” if someone wants to collaborate or play a show together or something. And of course the answer (if there is one) isn’t always yes, but that’s how I ended up on tour with Eluvium, and Windy & Carl, how I ended up collaborating with The Humble Bee (who is half of The Remote Viewer, one of my Top 5 ever), and so on. Solo work is always a default, but I have generally found it incredibly heartening just how genuine, warm, and supportive the ambient experimental community is. There’s a lot of camaraderie and mutual understanding of the joys and the drawbacks of operating on the fringes, and genuine drive to make things that get at something crucial about existence.
Let’s talk about how your work feeds back into the community. Your Polaroids grace album covers for Hotel Neon, Past Inside the Present artists and others, and you’ve penned press notes for friends’ records. How do you think about being a contributor to someone else’s object rather than their music, and what responsibility does that carry?
As both a former film student and English major, it’s a natural compulsion to involve writing and visual imagery in what I share with the world as much as I can. I defaulted to my own photos for album covers, even when they were just CD-Rs of my 4-track recordings, and at a certain point I started getting the odd request for an original image for someone else’s record, which was of course very flattering. Zach from PITP and I have become very good friends over the years, and we share a deep love for grainy images and sounds, so especially with his label’s releases, it’s a great pairing. I think about the fact that I’ve bought a lot of records over the years based on their covers and aesthetics, so when I’m trying to select an image with the LP bins in mind, that feeling of innate appeal is really important, even though that’s obviously a fully subjective thing. As far as writing, I used to do the press bios and related verbiage for Ghostly International when I worked for them a lifetime ago, and it came back up as an option when Zach was looking to create a little more cohesive narrative in his label story, and treat his releases as the fully formed worlds that they are. Anyone can record and post an album on Bandcamp with no context or liner notes or anything – which is a good thing for sure, the democratization – but we both believe these things can be meaningful events and experiences for the listener, and context and a good backstory can really heighten an already-good album.
