FOXES IN FICTION
Foxes In Fiction is Warren Hildebrand, an ambient experimental musician from Canada.
FOXES IN FICTION: “All music should be free."
[interview.ak / photo.brian vu / February 2012]
You put all of your songs in Foxes in Fiction bandcamp for free downloads. It's a great thing that your music is accessible and free. Can you elaborate on that subject?
I want my music to be accessible to anybody who has internet access and is looking for new music, and from the standpoint of a relatively new public artist, it didn’t make sense to charge people for something when my main intent it to get my work out to people who are interested in listening to my stuff. Even if I did decide to charge for it, it would just end up being uploaded to Mediafire by someone else anyways. All music should be free.
You have 3 songs EP called "Songs for Ryan". Who is Ryan?
Ryan is one of my good friends from Toronto who has a recording project called Young Waves. When I was a little younger I used to record EP's and songs for people that I liked on a whim whenever I was bored. One evening he asked me if I would do the same for him, so I wrote and recorded that three song EP is the span of a couple hours. I don’t own a lot of gear and a lot of my recording hardware was really fucked up at the time so all those songs have a lot of tape hiss and electronics cracks and pops all over them. I might try and re-upload that whole EP in a little bit higher quality, if anyone expresses any interest in it, I have all the songs sitting on a big tape spool around my apartment somewhere.
Alberto and Swung From the Branches is pretty popular here with the kids in Indonesia. What's yer favourite between those two?
Because of how personal it is to me and because of the conditions I recorded it under, I tend to favour Swung from The Branches a bit more. Through, so much time has passed since I wrote and recorded that album, and so many things in my life have changed, it's hard for me to listen to either of those anymore without feeling like I'm opening up old wounds or looking into an embarrassing past self. I think other musicians sometimes tend to feel this with older work, too.
So how's the music scene on Canada these days? I heard that Broken Social Scene is breaking up?
The music scene here is really interesting, I’m really enthusiastic about a lot of the things that are happening here right now. I feel like for a really long time weirder or more experimental music wasn’t that openly embraced or promoted in a ‘mainstream’ way in Canadian scenes and that we were largely defined by stuff like Broken Social Scene and all their indie offshoots. But with the prevalence of the internet and everyone having access to whatever back catalog of culture they so desire, people are beginning to really create and listen to some extremely interesting stuff, which I think is amazing and really gives hope to weirdos like myself.
What great new Canadian bands can you recommend to us Indonesians?
Grimes, Happy Trendy, Born Gold, Memoryhouse, Thomas Gill, Jessica Jalbert, Nicholas Sean Savage, Actual Water, Braids, Purity Ring, Sugarglider, Doug Hoyer, Doldrums, Loom, Moon King, just to name a few.
Top 5 songs for breaking up with a girl.
Haha, well I don’t date girls and I’ve never had to break up with somebody before so I don’t really have a valid answer for this. Probably something really brutal like Photograph by Nickleback or Only Time by Enya. I imagine everything would be happening in slow motion.
