Talkback: David Torn

Talkback Photo: Peter Gannushkin

Guitarist David Torn has collaborated with greats such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Tori Amos and David Bowie, and has contributed to many iconic film soundtracks. His new album now i imagine a place not the same is his first standalone solo long‐player in over a decade — produced and mixed by former Talkback guest Randall Dunn (in SOS August 2022 - read it here), no less. "As a practising musician, I still have goals. And I am going to die without having achieved any of them, and I’m f**king good with that!" Torn says. "I play more every day now than I ever have in my life."

At the moment I can’t stop listening to

I’m particularly fond of listening to Persian and Turkish music, North African music, and flamenco. And there’s a singer from New Zealand, Aldous Harding: anything that she does is automatically on my radar. I’ve really been smitten with her as a singer‐songwriter, and I don’t play with that many singer‐songwriters any more.

The artist I’d most like to collaborate with

Well, I actually just wrote something for Sussan Deyhim, who was one of the first — and I don’t use this word negatively — Persian diva singers to use electronics in her work. Sussan was married to the electronic artist Richard Horowitz [who passed away in 2024], and they did an immense amount of work together, and Sussan and I and Richard talked about doing things together, and now I’ve written something for her that I hope she likes.

David Torn: I don’t like my monitoring to be super loud. I really want to know that we’re recording with enough detail and headroom so that anything can happen in the mixing and mastering.

The first thing I look for in a studio

I certainly look at the actual space. Is there a need for separation? Can we record as if we were a live band, all facing in the same direction? I ask these kinds of major questions. I would say "Look at all the microphones," but I’ll have done that already, in advance! And after that, it’s the control room and the monitoring. Because I don’t like my monitoring to be super loud. I really want to know that we’re recording with enough detail and headroom so that anything can happen in the mixing and mastering. Rather than the old‐school approach, you know, recording everything as hot as possible to tape, because it’s not the same now. Oh, and I’ll always ask: what coffee machine do they have? Usually, we usually go straight to the coffee machine.

The person I would consider my...