Between Beauty and Horror: A Conversation with David Torn

Jean-Michel Basquiat once noted that “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” But such a sentiment oversimplifies the power of music. Instead, some of the greatest works transport you to another place. They force you to leave behind your surroundings and find yourself lost in a new terrain. Has anyone ever listened to Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananada (Impulse!, 1971) without being teleported to some space of meditative Zen? Or to most works of Sun Ra’s without being shot into the cosmos? The conceptualization that music is merely a measure of time fails to adequately address how textures, even spread across time, can decorate space, similar to physical art, even if sound waves ultimately slip into the ether. Thus, it is easy to label David Torn as a guitarist. But listening to now i imagine a place not the same (Kou, 2026) reveals that he is more than a mere technician. He is a landscape painter who chooses to use sound as his paint.

Do not misread that last sentence to interpret Torn’s paintings as simplistic. now i imagine creates scenes through abstraction. It demands that the listener fully open their ears to appreciate the spaces in which the tracks thrust them. At times, things seem peaceful, reflective, and tranquil. Perhaps you are looking into a slowly shifting cloud or a gently babbling stream. Just as quickly, however, things turn moody and disconcerting like the edge of a jagged cliff. You are left with extreme beauty on one side and consistent peril on the other. It is like you are lost in a dream, exploring a space equally full of wonder while trying to avoid the nightmares to come. In large part, this traversing of otherworldly terrain comes by way of Torn’s distinctive work in electric guitar processing. Over the last four decades, he has blazed a path with looping systems, touch-sensitive electronics, tube saturation, and alternate tunings that blur the acoustic and electric as he creates an aura both familiar and foreign.

Even more impressively, the depictions of Torn’s trajectory are not massively preplanned. Having worked with some of the great composers of our time – Ryuichi Sakomoto and Howard Shore among them – Torn easily could have set a masterful preplanned course. As a film scorer, he is also no stranger to expressing narrative through sound. But instead, he sets aside the formalities of precomposition in favor of improvisation and creation in the moment. In so doing, he does something the stereotypical painter cannot: he explores in a time concurrent with the perceiver. Torn makes clear that as much as he is painting the landscape, he is also navigating it as he goes. This aspect even makes now i imagine seem to stand outside of time. In a sense, the album is a natural development upon his last solo guitar album, the incredible Only Sky (ECM, 2015). But in another sense, he reaches back to the raw emotional anger also more readily found in his earlier works. Is this a look back or a look forward? Can’t it be both, or neither?

For one willing to brave the trek, now i imagine is a fantastic voyage through sound to places left underexplored. We sat down with Torn to discuss the album, his creative process, his work in film scoring, his Sun of Goldfinger band with Tim Berne and Ches Smith, and more.

PostGenre: How do you feel you have most changed in terms of how you approach solo performance in the decade between Only Sky (ECM, 2015) and now i imagine a place not the same (Kou, 2026)?

David Torn: It’s hard to say. In a way, I’m allowing more things from my youth into my playing. And on a psychological level, I can relate to that because I also feel I have developed a new level of immaturity socially and in terms of humor. But a lot of stuff from the old days has come back to me, and I’ve enjoyed not only being reminded of those things but also taking them further than I have in the past. That is especially true solo, but also the case with a band or any context where I am free to do what I feel I need to do.

PG: What are those sounds from your youth that you are revisiting?

DT: Heavy sounds on the guitar. Really intense and chaotic-seeming things. Those are all really in focus for me now. I feel them in my field of expression. And I play with them differently than I did thirty or forty years ago.

The same goes for the things that aren’t horrific but instead beautiful. I find that I attach myself to those beautiful things more, too. It feels like I’ve grown in the idea of music being able to be simultaneously beautiful and absolutely horrific. And that’s where I sit in this weird hyper-geminetic split-personality thing that I have allowed to turn into one thing rather than being two things. They are all together.

PG: Do you have any sense of why you’re looking back more?

DT: There is so much anger and frustration in our daily social lives now. For better or worse, now is the time to make a point with anger musically. I think my focus on chaotic moments happens naturally. It reflects the difficult world we live in. Things are not what we aim for in our country, but I know that is true not only in the United States but around the globe. As far as growth or regression, maybe I just like movement. Don’t be the same. Don’t do the same thing every time. Don’t make a record that sounds too much like another one I’ve done. I think that has always been buried in my roots, that sense that I don’t have to be the same person for my records, and instead should go discover something new.

PG: That perspective must help with creating film scores.

DT: God, when working on some of the more staged and typical scores I’ve done, especially when I took on Lars and the Real Girl (MGM, 2007), I knew exactly what I was headed for. For Lars, I wanted a score that would be both orchestral and beautiful, but also a little off base. Everything had to have a feeling to it. I don’t mean easy music because I don’t want to go there. But I really dug into the score and loved doing it precisely because it was like writing songs that had orchestral tinges and dimension to them, but in a way that fully suited the film. I wanted to not only write freely, but write within a genre – songwriting- that I know and love, but don’t normally do. I fucking loved that.

PG: Was Lars your favorite film to score?

DT: It was definitely my favorite score to write. I was so adamant that I had to be the composer on that picture that I told my agent that if they didn’t get me a meeting with the directors, I was going to look for a new agent.

PG: Wow.

DT: I really wanted to do that film. I saw the cast, had read the script, and thought, God, this is a film about mental illness. I completely relate to it. And it was a great challenge.

I also think one of my personal successes was in showing people I could be outside of what I normally do. It let me create something that fans of my guitar playing wouldn’t recognize as my music until a friend or partner pointed it out to them.

PG: When you are writing, especially in the solo context, are you approaching it similarly to how you would score? There is a very narrative cinematic feeling to your solo performances.

DT: Arik Roper, when he did the album artwork for now i imagine a place not the same, made a little story about it. He and I both share an interest in storytelling. I’d never said anything about the story for the album. He asked me what I was attracted to in his work, and I said, forests, the severity of altitude, and places that have a lot of stone and rock in them. Darkness, wetness, and I had a couple of other words in mind, too. I listed them out as I looked through his artwork and sent the list to him.

And he came up with a story about some lost fucker like me wandering around. not knowing whether to go through the green door or through the red door. I looked at the artwork and  went, “Wow, I am so lucky that I got this guy doing the artwork for my record.”

In terms of having an actual script for any of the music, I just play solo entirely based on feel. If I have some planning, it’s so small that it’s only a starting point. So, I don’t have a narrative. Any narrative someone might hear in the music comes from something outside of me because I’m just doing what feels right in the moment.

PG: The music certainly evokes stories to the listener, either way.

DT: I had an amazing experience the other night at a Sun of Goldfinger performance in Columbia, South Carolina. We were playing at a very nice club. After our performance, a woman in the audience came up to me. I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me, and she had no idea what our music was going to sound like before she heard it. But she told me something happened to her while she was listening to us. Something triggered her to imagine a story unfolding. She was fully immersed in her interpretation to recognize that there was a narrative to the music. I was really touched that she came over and told me a story of her listening to what seemed like a story being told, wide-eyed, like a little bit of holy shit, what just happened here?  I felt so lifted by that.

PG: I think a lot of the finding of a narrative comes from how you create sonic environments on each track. How do you go about creating these sound worlds?

DT: There are a couple of things going on electronically that I’ve been doing for so long, albeit with different electronic instruments as they develop. I basically wait.

With a band, sometimes I go on stage for a sound check when nobody else is playing. Or sometimes it is when everybody’s playing. And I’ll play something then loop it before the show starts. I also make sure the stage crew knows not to turn the electricity off or unplug my shit and leave it there. By the time we play our set, a few hours later, I have no idea what is on that loop. If I’m fishing at all at the very beginning, I will try to figure out how to open up the loop that I did three hours ago and manipulate it in terms of pitch or time. I can change those things in a very active and noticeable way or very subtly. I can send what I am playing to a gigantic reverb and make the actual signal itself so it is not heard for what it is. Instead, it is being heard as a feeling out in space, something way behind us, or something enveloping us. And then I manipulate that stuff until it works with whatever the band is doing. Once that gets established, there are a hundred other ways for me to do that while we play onwards.

For me, everything is about flow; entering it and then knowing when to interrupt it. In that flow, I have learned to pause. I will stop playing and think for a second. Or feel. It’s better to say feel because it’s truer. I’ll feel something coming up, and then I’ll reactivate. I always listen to what’s going on in the music, even my own stuff that may be running off by itself. I’m aware of it, I hear it, and then I’ll wait through it.

PG: Do you take a similar approach to performing solo?

DT: When I play solo, I tend to take the same approach, but to the extreme.

There was a moment in the Sun show I mentioned earlier, where I was listening to stuff that I had set and had already played. It was something super aggressive, and I wanted to establish the potential size of my voice right away. I went into some very pretty stuff and got stuck. So what do you do when you get stuck? You panic and play some shit. Go fishing. Or whatever. But in this case, I decided to wait for a moment where I heard something. Simply wait and then start something, whatever it was that came to me in that moment.

I think that’s another big part of my improvisational practice, and applies to my writing practice as well: to wait shit out. I’ll take a phrase and listen to it on repeat for three minutes straight, just repeating itself. And if nothing comes to me, I’ll start interrupting it.

PG: It sounds almost minimalist in a way in that you are repeating something and slowly changing it a bit and seeing where it goes.

DT: If I weren’t a maximalist, I think you’d see that there are lots of little minimal things going on in the music. There are always some unsynchronized sectional pieces of the improvisation. I will unsynchronize things away from square time. I’ll just move it. Maybe I don’t want to hear a beat anymore. Or maybe I wanna hear a beat that’s gonna make me trip and fall, and I have to jump up so I don’t smash my head on the ground. I want the listener to do something like that, too. I love it when the listener hears something and asks, “What the hell was that?”

I think that’s a major part of my improvisations. Especially when I am doing pure improvisation. But it also applies to my writing. When I was writing for film almost every day, I was in Pasadena, California, and would walk down to the Arroyo and come up with ideas as I walked.

PG: If you are not writing ideas down as they come to you, how do you remember them later?

DT:  I have a set of memory triggers that is like a mnemonic. There’s always something that represents something that will trigger the rest of whatever I’ve imagined in my head. Sometimes it’ll be as simple as singing a chord to myself because I hear something harmonically that I really want to do. I’ll just sing the chord to myself many times, make up a beat with my feet, and see if it slots into a time frame or not. I got really interested in writing while not sitting in front of paper or my instrument. I ended up doing a couple of scores that way, where the primary pieces of music were based on something I came up with while driving the car. But I think a lot of composers do that.

For now i imagine a place not the same, specifically, there were zero plans. I said to [producer] Randall [Dunn] that for the solo record, I was only going to improvise. I was not gonna write anything, really. I might wanna do an overdub, but I think I did on the whole record, one overdub, because it just seemed like it was very fitting. There’s one piece where Randall plays something very drone-like that has like a little North Indian flavor. People will probably think it’s me making the sound on the guitar because it’s very subtle. I asked Randall to change a little bit harmonically what he was doing at first, so that it had a little more irregular movement in it. And he killed it. Only one comment to Randall, and he just gets it. It’s pretty amazing.

PG: So, Kou Records is a good label for your work, then?

DT: I feel very lucky to be on Kou. It’s very cool and is going to get better and better. It may be slow in terms of the way the business goes, but these guys really have their eye on working with people who struggle to develop a singular personal voice. I love that. That’s how and why they invited me in.

PG: You have done a lot of your own production work, so bring that experience to your perspective as well.

DT: Yeah, over  the last fifteen years, I would say that I have produced probably thirty records for Tim Berne.  I’ve done almost all the records for people in his crew except for Ches [Smith]. I’ve done a lot of records as a producer but also as a mixer. In this case, Randall is a better mixer than I am. And he has his own perspective, which I respect. And because of the way we were working together on the album, I told him I had no plans but didn’t want to mix it myself, and asked if he would. And he agreed. I really like the idea that there’s somebody there who’s critical in a way that it’s not being pushy. I want someone who looks into my process and how they both, Randall and Charmaine [Lee], saw right into the process. God, Charmaine sat in the room the whole time I was recording and just listened, took photos sometimes, slept a little, fifteen feet in front of me, just chilling, commenting a little as a piece would end. Both were incredible to work with. It was like finding a new family in some way. You never know what happens with people over time, but to just to get that once or twice in your life is amazing.

PG: It sounds like that is very different from your experience with ECM [Records].

DT: Honestly, I had a strange response working with [ECM founder-producer] Manfred [Eicher] towards the end. I think  he wanted to be on one of my sessions, but I was already in my thing, constantly producing music at home. When I’m not working for somebody else, I’m writing and recording. And Manfred gave me a special spot for quite a few years there from Prezens (ECM, 2007) through Only Sky. In those days, I did everything myself. I would organize the session and would co-produce. I’d pull the material together. I’d edit it. And I’d master it.

Manfred sometimes sent me somebody else’s record to master while I was doing mine. I did that for Mike Formanek, definitely Tim [Berne], and a couple of other people. But there was one gigantic failure at the end. I won’t mention any names, but somebody sent Manfred a version of a piece I was sharing with the artist, only because I wanted them to see only that the drums were going to sound great. I had said it was not a mix, but just so the person could hear how the drums sounded, because they were having some doubts. That artist’s manager complained to Manfred, who exploded at me. Manfred’s response was so beyond any normal, thoughtful social politeness. It was really a drag. I just bailed. And Manfred and I haven’t spoken to each other since.  I never even told him what that was, and what happened, because it was a waste of time. He made it clear he didn’t  fucking trust me. It was sickening. I have that little corner of pride that can get really angry when you’re in the position of what I presume to be trust, and the other person just bails on you.  

But it’s okay because ECM has now gone back to quieter music, and I went louder. I don’t know if anything would have been welcome from me at this point anyway. But I have been so fortunate to have met Randall and Charmaine and to be part of this new company. Kou already has its own distinct voice. Whether people like every record on it or not is up to the particular listener. But I’m very happy to be a part of it.

It’s been a strange year so far. Everything sucked at the beginning of this year. The film industry destroyed the Musicians union – it started in 2009 but fully finished this year. No one stood up to protect our ability to negotiate our royalties,  residuals, or copyrights. Because of that, I walked into the beginning of this year thinking, “What the hell am I gonna do? I’m just gonna keep going, I guess.” I never thought a label I love would pop out. And I worked on a film called The Dog Stars with Harry Gregson Williams as the main composer. I contributed seven pieces of music and a whole bunch of other stuff that he could throw around in his own way. [The band] Sonar [with whom I have collaborated several times] had a massively fun and successful tour in Colombia. We played sold-out shows every night in every city. I had the premiere of my most recent string quartet in Paris back in January. I am about to go to Minneapolis to work with Chase Bliss, an electronics company mostly for guitar players. And Sun of Goldfinger is on fire right now. We made a record two months ago that is absolutely the best thing we’ve ever done as a band. It’s a really different vibe than our other records. The band is relaxed, and we both get much quieter, and can go super loud and incredibly chaotic. We took a break and then came in smoking, and we knocked off again. I love that marriage of beauty and the horrific, and can’t wait to see where we ultimately go with it all.

‘now i imagine a place not the same’ will be released on Kou Records on May 29, 2026. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information about David Torn is available on his website.

Photo credit: Charmaine Lee