Name: Philipp Johann Thimm
Nationality: German
Occupation: Composer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, songwriter, producer
Current release: Philipp Johann Thimm's new album The Red Door is out via Monkeytown.
Things that I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: Honestly just my family and friends haha. Long relationships, family structures, shared history, all these invisible emotional systems between humans. I think almost all my music is secretly about that. Also I’m weirdly obsessed with archiving tiny moments. Random videos, voice notes, accidental recordings. Maybe because I’m scared of how quickly time disappears.
 
If you enjoyed this Philipp Johann Thimm interview and would like to know more about his music and upcoming performances, visit him on Instagram, Soundcloud, bandcamp, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I think most of the time my impulse comes from feelings or memories that somehow haven’t fully landed yet.

Like these moments, voices, relationships, strange emotional leftovers. And then the music becomes a way of figuring out what they actually are or a powerful medium to give a weight to a moment which passed unnoticed but I am able to give it the importance it deserved. Like a makro glass.

I’m also very influenced by my beloved ones around me. Most things in my music probably come indirectly from friends, family and collaborators. I constantly steal emotional energy from all those around me. Sorry everyone :)

I think the best example to hear this is the last track ‘Hallejulia’ (shoutout to my sister Julia!).



These are all voice messages from my friends and family, the track used to be 17 minutes long but I needed to cut it a little bit otherwise it would be maybe wear itself out over time if a new listener does not know who it is.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

Almost no planning honestly. If I know too clearly where something is going, I lose interest pretty quickly. Most tracks begin with a tiny fragment and then I just follow accidents long enough until they start feeling intentional.

A lot of my favourite moments came from things technically going wrong.

Sascha and I always joke that sometimes the transition between two ideas becomes more interesting than the ideas themselves. A lot of Apparat tracks have been written that way… The best ones in fact!

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

Yes definitely, but it probably looks more like emotional procrastination than preparation.

 I constantly collect voice messages, field recordings, unfinished sketches and random videos and sample all this together. Then years later I rediscover them and suddenly they become important.

I also need instruments physically around me. Even though I work a lot inside the computer, I still need the feeling of touching things before my brain starts overthinking everything.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I think the ritual is to have no ritual and to always try to start a track with a different approach. Nature and travelling honestly help a lot with this because both propel constant change.

Seeing some trees or any natural form and being in a moving vehicle usually resets my brain better than sitting in front of machines and plugins for twelve hours straight. I also love working at night because things feel less observed somehow. Less rational maybe.

Oh and swimming! Swimming and holding my breath underwater have become a very important part of my whole creative process. Now that there are underwater headphones you can listen back to what you’ve done in that place where your body is slowed down and therefore slow music appears faster to you if you know what I mean.

The album is still pretty fast for a swim though ;)

For The Red Door, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

The entire album basically started with a cassette tape which I rediscovered after a flood in my mothers’ basement. I had recorded my sister, my mother and me when I was around six years old and completely forgot it existed. Hearing those voices again decades later felt surreal.

I started feeding fragments of the tape into granular synthesis and extreme timestretching tools and so a huge amount of the album grew out of that material. The six year old me would never have thought that one day it would be jamming with the adult me and then even more unthinkable that people would listen to the outcome.

At some point the recordings stopped functioning as memories and became more like textures or emotional dust floating through the whole record. You can hear me singing a German song about trains in duet with KOKA on ‘Have You Ever’… (I’m that weird high voice answering her ;) …



… or on ‘On The Rocks’, that’s me joking with my Mom.



Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

The tracks were written over a pretty short period and between lots of different projects, so the album naturally became quite heterogeneous. Instead of forcing everything into one strict concept, I tried to let those different emotional states coexist.

The connection between the tracks comes less from genre and more from recurring textures, recordings and people. A lot of the same source material keeps reappearing in hidden ways throughout the album.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

Definitely following things where they lead me.

I can become super analytical while working, but usually the best moments happen when something suddenly feels emotionally undeniable and the track starts making decisions faster than you do.

Then you listen back the next morning and realize the “emotionally undeniable masterpiece” was actually just too much reverb.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

I really don’t know how to describe it, guess my brain spins out every time right before this state sets in and then comes back when it’s done.

It’s a little bit like blacking out. Maybe it feels like being on a conscience autobahn.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

Super important. I need distance constantly because otherwise I completely lose perspective.

Usually I go through phases of being convinced something is either the greatest thing ever made or completely unlistenable garbage within the same afternoon.

And again also in this state, the best thing to happen to me is my friends and family around me. At some point you just have to let them you trust step in and help you finish it. Otherwise I would probably still be automating hi hats on songs from 2019.

How do you think the meaning, or effect of an individual piece is enhanced, clarified or possibly contrasted by the EPs, or albums it is part of? Does each piece, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

Not stylistically, no. I actually like when albums feel a bit inconsistent or fragmented because people are inconsistent and fragmented too.

The connection for me is usually emotional or textural rather than genre based. I’m much more interested in creating a world than maintaining stylistic purity.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement (performance)?

For me production is composition.

I don’t really separate songwriting from sound design anymore. Especially on this album, so much emotional information lives inside the texture itself. Distortion, noise, broken recordings, stretched voices, all of that carries emotional weight.

Also, Samuel and Sascha deserve medals for surviving the mixing process of this chaotic monster.

Music and the accompanying artwork are often closely related. Can you talk about this a little bit for your current project and the relationship that images and sounds have for you in general?

Very connected for me. A lot of sounds immediately create physical spaces or visual atmospheres in my head.

The title The Red Door itself also came more from a visual feeling than from a conceptual idea. Jamal wrote the lyrics for this title track and they somehow created a vision within me which clearly evoked a certain music.

I generally like when music feels spatial and slightly cinematic without becoming too explanatory.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

No never, the hunger to make something new and the gratitude to be doing this is still there every day … it just goes on and on and on …

I am actually pretty happy once the old songblood is let out of my system and makes space for new things to come.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about or the impact it had on them – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

All the time, and I actually love it and think this is the most rewarding aspect of what I am allowed to do.

Like … I had this friend hiking in the Indian mountains and I sent him the album to listen to there and he came back and said that he had an amazingly cathartic moment with an early version of “Rhea,” which was actually less monumental, so I wanted to follow that direction and take it a little further.

Sometimes people hear things in tracks that I never consciously put there and suddenly I start understanding my own music differently too.

I think once music is released it stops belonging completely to you anyway, which is honestly kind of beautiful.