Listening and Looking with Steve Tibbetts

There is a specific thread of experimental musician whose real motive is to deal in mystery and wonder. Think conceptualists like Brian Eno and David Bowie, sonic conjurers Sunn O))), transcendent improvisers as varied as Alice Coltrane and Loren Connors, song mystic Annette Peacock—each artist’s work is tied to something that happens beyond the notes, something bigger than just the sounds we hear. And for the listener, there are no easy answers. You can research and dissect compositional and production methods, know all of the gear that was used inside and out, break down all of the influences. But you’re always left with something to chase, to try and understand more deeply. For some, that’s the thrill.Steve Tibbetts works with these ineffable parts of music, and he has ever since his 1977 self-titled debut. His albums create experiences that, at times, approach definability, but remain elusive: He’s a guitarist, but his music isn’t necessarily “guitar music”; his work is rooted in traditions, but it’s not traditional. So, what is it?
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Tibbetts’ records have been released primarily on the ECM label—the longstanding preeminent home of meditative and ambient jazz and jazz-adjacent sounds. On his earlier releases, you may hear grooves assembled around percussion from various global cultures mixed with suspended 12-string acoustic strumming, soaring evocative melodies, and, at times, blazing electric guitar solos. The cover images on his albums are striking, and often created by the composer himself, capturing some moment in a similarly un-pinnable land—check out the rock formations on either 1980’s Yr or 1986’s Exploded View, for example. The whole blissed-out package is conceptually inspired by place and tradition, yet totally untethered and fresh.“If I just sat around and played guitar all day long, I don’t know how that would go.”
On more recent releases, and especially on his latest, Close, Tibbetts’ sound has evolved toward something else—more big-picture, but also more personal. Raw and organic sounds mix with a futuristic sonic landscape (and yet, he uses antiquated technology to create those sounds). Close feels like a universal meditation, a grand vision that pulls sounds from across the globe and reaches beyond, toward some distant sonic horizon, overcoming instrument and process. Basically, it sounds like nothing else.
Enigmatic as that is, over the course of an hour or so on our video call, Tibbetts himself proved to be anything but. Speaking from his wood-paneled Minnesota studio, where he’s made much of his music since 1985, he revealed his process and the philosophy behind it—a methodology deeply tied to his own experience of the world.
For Tibbetts, creation starts simply. “You have to sit down and put your hands on the instrument,” he explains. And it’s all about vibe. “Sometimes, it's a matter of getting the guitar warmed up. Hoping for the right humidity in the room.”
In order to keep things moving, his studio is always ready to go—his mics in position and DAW loaded up. “The process is to come to the studio, make a cup of coffee, begin to play, and see if we get to that point,” he says. He starts solo, bringing in other players further down the line. “Nobody cares how loud I get here. I’ve got a couple of Marshall JCM 800s, a younger Marshall, and as long as I wear adequate ear protection, I’m fine. I can get the sound that I need.”Steve Tibbetts’ GearGuitars Martin D-35 12-stringMartin DM-12 (Fishman TriplePlay pickup for acoustics)1971 Fender StratocasterAmpsMarshall JCM 800 comboMatchless Lightning 15 watt StringsJohn Pearse custom 12-string sets with double courses instead of octaves GHS Boomers (Medium)The days slowly add up. “Do you know what it’s like when you wake up in the night and your fingers are throbbing?” he asks. For him, “that usually means it’s been a good, productive day at the studio. Then you come back the next day. Is there anything worthwhile? Probably not. But after five or six years, you’ve got something—30 minutes, 40 minutes worth of pieces.”
As the music takes form, at some point, he brings in collaborators. On Close, Tibbetts is accompanied by percussionist Marc Anderson, his longest-running musical partner, and drummer JT Bates.
“It begins to sort of assemble itself,” he continues. “It is a little bit of a cliché, but at a certain point, you are in service to the music that you've created and you just need to do a good job with it.”
He quickly balances that thought with a dose of reality: “Mostly, the process is one of tedium, boredom, failure, and actually figuring out what I need to do when I've started the car and am on the way home.” “What a good thing to do, to listen and look at stuff.”
Tibbetts’ music isn’t purely an in-the-studio creation, though. The world outside his walls plays a major role. “If I just sat around and played guitar all day long, I don’t know how that would go. Maybe there are some guitar players who can do it,” he muses. “Sometimes, the process is to give up entirely and go someplace a long ways away and listen to some loops or little lines that you have as you’re walking around.”
That’s the specific method Tibbetts followed on 2018’s Life Of. He explains: “There’s an area in northern Nepal, close to Tibet, called Lhasa. Difficult to get to, but a friend of mine, a professional clown, named Marian, said, ‘We’re going to Lhasa, do you want to come?’ And I thought, I’ll go there, and I’ll make little mp3s, 60 minutes or so, to listen to while we're walking. That’s what I did. When I came back, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do to put things together.” For those who can’t travel quite so far, he recommends just getting out of your surroundings. “What a good thing to do,” he enthuses, “to listen and look at stuff. Even mixing. I’m looking at the same paneling here all the time. It doesn’t work. You can take your little laptop now and go to a coffee shop and say, ‘This song is gonna be about this couple over here, or that guy drinking coffee by himself.’ Just mess with your mind a little bit.”“If it’s not fun, I’m not interested.”
Travel has inspired Tibbetts work throughout his career, thanks especially to his early experience working for study-abroad programs in Bali and Nepal. “That was hard work,” he explains, “but I got to live in cultures where there was different music. Balinese gamelan, if I hear it in Minnesota, it’s just annoying. But over there, it sounds like it fits. The double drumming technique, I had to be in it and study it to bring it back.”
Across the globe, Tibbetts has collected the recordings to incorporate in his music. The idea goes back to his 1997 album, Chö, a collaboration with Tibetan singer Choying Drolma. “We made that record in Kathmandu, Nepal,” he says. “Her singing was incredible. I didn’t want to just strum along on guitar, I wanted to use some of the sounds of Tibetan longhorns, some of my own sounds like bowed hammered dulcimer, my wife’s wine glasses….”
Tibbetts continues, “I did that. And then we got an offer to go out on the road. Desperation takes hold. How am I gonna do this? There’s gotta be a way.”
He devised a setup to trigger samples with his guitar using a Roland MIDI pickup that “had a cable that was about as thick as a stalk of corn that went to another box that would jack into a sampler, probably with a SCSI port.” Inconvenient, but, Tibbetts says, “it did work and we did take that on the road, and then I thought, this will be a good composing tool, this will be fun.” He pauses, and adds, “If it’s not fun, I’m not interested.”
More recently, Tibbetts switched to a Fishman wireless system to trigger the samples. But the samples themselves come from an old version of MOTU’s Digital Performer, which requires him to keep his computer “probably 15 operating systems behind what’s current now.” (He jokingly explains: “I’m working with antiquated technology. I’ve got buggy whips and wooden wheels here.”)The result is otherworldly. Global sounds enmesh with Tibbetts’ strings, opening up the possibilities of his guitar—a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts experience where you might not realize what exactly is being played or where it’s coming from.Knowing the sources, however, enriches the experience. Because though some of Tibbetts’ samples are created at home in his studio, many have a story. “I can still hear the chicken in the gong,” he says, launching into a story that goes back to his time working for a study-abroad program in Candi Dasa, Bali. He took the class to visit “a guy that did two things: made sacred knives that they use for ritual activities and had a gong shop.” He explains that gongs for gamelans are all made at the same time to coordinate the orchestra’s tuning, and they visited on a day where new bronze would be poured. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We went down there and spent a day watching these guys beat the shit out of these things to get them in their own tune, which is still a good 30 or 40 cents off what we would call in tune, but together it sounds good.He continues: “I spent an extra day there sampling these gongs. I would hit the gong softly. I’d mute it. I would hit it hard.” The gong-maker was curious. “He said, ‘Let me listen to it.’ He listened to it on the headphones and said, ‘I’m sorry my chicken is squawking.’ I said, ‘It’s okay.’ And then the next thing I heard was no chicken squawking. He invited me for dinner. I declined.”On Close, focused listening reveals another sonic element—the sound from Tibbetts’ acoustic guitar. Often more polished, it’s more raw this time around than on his other records—sometimes you’ll hear buzzing, fretting, and breath sounds. It gives his playing an intimacy, a warmth that stands out. It feels close.Early in the creation process, Tibbetts wasn’t confident this was a direction he wanted to pursue. So he had Anderson listen to some takes. “People who work alone a lot tend to become a little inbred with themselves, start not understanding what direction they’re going in, or if they’re going in the right direction, or if anything is any good at all,” he muses. “Marc and I have been working together since 1979. His ears are very good. He made me understand that I already knew that this was okay. I just needed confirmation from him.”He continues, “I am going for the feeling. I guess we’re always going for the feeling, but I just didn’t want to ditch a take because I happened to make a sound, a bad fret sound, a new string sound….”With Closenow out in the world, don’t hold your breath to catch Tibbetts live—his performances are rare. When asked about this, it’s clear his days of getting in the van are long gone, adding that one-off gigs are also “not that great. It usually takes a few gigs on the road before you get your chops together, lighting, sound, loading in, loading out, your pedals, whatever you have….” But he says there are those occasional gigs that afford the travel, rehearsal time to get it together, and make a compelling enough offer. “If the gig is weird enough and far away enough,” he says, “we'll do it.”