Tim Sommer: The fact that we're both Abba fans and Neu! fans -- there's some kind of weird line between them and Glenn Branca and Cluster and Harmonia and Cajun music.

Splendid: No... I can't picture that. You'd have to draw me a diagram.

Tim Sommer: But I was with Glenn before Hugo Largo.

Splendid: But after Hugo Largo, you were an MTV VJ. That must have been back when MTV was still sort of interesting.

Tim Sommer: Oh, yes, especially in the news department. I was a news VJ. This was 1989 and 1990 and then in 1991, I moved over to VH1 and ran their news division. MTV seemed like, yeah, and exciting little universe at that point. It's still... they were just... obviously, and this is a cliché to say, but it was when MTV still played videos. You know, it's hard to imagine a time when MTV played videos.

Splendid: No, I remember it. MTV was on cable TV in towns that were too small to have decent radio, and it was possible to see a lot of bands that you'd never be exposed to otherwise.

Tim Sommer: But being in the news department was really good. We were allowed a degree of freedom that I think the rest of MTV did not have. We were allowed to cover indie rock bands that were never going to get on MTV. For some reason they were allowing us to do that.

Splendid: Like who?

Tim Sommer: I can't remember anybody specifically. I wish I could think of something. It was really a fun time. I was thinking about this today. I don't know if you ever watch MSNBC, but there's a news anchor on MSNBC who was my intern at MTV.

Splendid: No way.

Tim Sommer: It was an interesting little department. I think very fondly back on that.

Splendid: How do you feel about that whole idea of combining music and movies.

Tim Sommer: We've had 20 years to think about this. Ultimately, I think it exists purely as a promotional tool and not as an artistic tool. I think there are a lot of people in the last 20 years who have thought this is a new art form, this is a new way of making music meaningful. But I think it's really something to promote music. It's not something to enrich the value of music. What's very interesting about this is how MTV and VH1 became about programming and not about videos. As people under 20 become married to their iPods, it's once again becoming just about music. I find that very, very interesting. There was a time in the mid 1980s and late 1980s when you weren't going to sell records if you had ugly people in your band, because everything, everything was related to video. Now the time has come again... If people are just going to be glued to their iPods and not seeing the covers and not seeing videos, it's once again become about music. I think that's a positive thing. I'm a great supporter of the fact that the iPod has created a new generation of intense music listeners -- people who really listen to music, as opposed to merely interacting with the 12 or 15 bands whose videos are going to get played. I know there are exceptions. I know that's probably a little bit idealistic, but I do think it's positive.

Splendid: They're amazing things. They make you feel that you should be listening to more music than you are.

Tim Sommer: Absolutely. I've only had one for about six or eight months, but it's changed my life. It creates such interesting juxtapositions. I find that I listen to music all the time. I'm listening to as much music as I did when I was 17, and that's great.

Splendid: Do you think you connect with it the way you did when you were 17?

Tim Sommer: Yes and no. Well... I'm not as prone to create fantasies about the world inside the music. The lifestyles the music implies... Young people listen to music to create a lifestyle, an alternative to what they're living. I just listen to it and really, really enjoy it. I get inside the tracks and I get inside the music. I probably did that when I was 16 or 17 years old, but when you're 16 and listening to music, music represents not just sound but the way you'd like to live your life. Right now, it's just something entertaining.

Splendid: After MTV, you went to work for a big record company, and I hear you signed Hootie and the Blowfish?

Tim Sommer: Yes, I went to work in A&R for Atlantic Records. A really good friend of mine went and sort of got a big job at Atlantic Records, a fellow named Danny Goldberg. I'd known him for many years, and during Hugo Largo, he had said to me, "You know, you would make a really good A&R person," because I always had a good sense of what bands were up and coming. So when you think you're a hipster musician and you're told that you'd make a good A&R person, that's kind of an insult. And in 1992, when I was working at VH1, Danny asked me if I wanted to come and be an A&R person. And I said, "Yeah." It seemed like an interesting opportunity and it was in Los Angeles. I'd lived in New York City my whole life. So I went to Los Angeles, and I think Danny thought he was hiring me as his "hip" A&R person -- you know, to do a lot of indie rock bands and underground stuff -- because that had been my background. But the first band I signed to Atlantic was Hootie and the Blowfish, who were just these wonderful, nice people. They were the nicest band I'd ever met. They were total 1970s-1980s college rock people, meaning that they were obsessed with REM, they were obsessed with the Replacements, and they tried to play their own kind of music that reflected music like the Replacements and REM, but it came out as Hootie and the Blowfish. I just thought they were a wonderful, nice band, and they were incredible power hitters, and they'd been together eight years when I met them in 1993. No record company was dreaming of signing them. And I just thought, you know, these are really nice people who write really good songs. They know every REM song, so they'd be fun to work with. I signed them to a very small deal and they took off very quickly. They came down very quickly, too. I also signed Duncan Sheik, which I'm proud of. And there was a band called Seven Year Bitch. And I worked with a fantastic band out of Canada called The Tea Party, who, in terms of musical quality, was probably my favorite band that I worked with during my time at Atlantic. It was a whole different thing. I didn't touch the bass guitar for ten years. I didn't play at all.

Splendid: So what happened that made you want to get back into it?

Tim Sommer: Well, I moved to New Orleans. That was definitely one of the things that made me want to make music. New Orleans is an incredibly old, grubby, slanting, shaky place. It's also fabulous. It's also very creative and daring and cheap. It's got this great tradition. When I came, I produced music for a little while. And then I recognized that for the first time in a very long time, I was hearing music in my head. I always said, and this goes back to the days of Hugo Largo, I always said that the best time to make music is when you're looking through your record collection and you say, huh, I can't find what I want to hear. And that's why Hugo Largo was invented. Hugo Largo was invented because I couldn't find the sound that I was hearing in my head. And over the last couple of years, I had started hearing music again. I was picking up different pieces of it off of about 15 records, but I couldn't have all of the things that I had in my head in one place. So I thought that was a good sign that it was time to make my own music again. I started toying with these ideas based on ambient music and traditional Cajun music. I brought in Alexandra Scott, who I'd been producing. Alexandra was making a solo record, a really good one, and I had produced her most recent solo record, which was sort of a strange, high energy, pop country record. Probably somewhere between Emmylou Harris and Beck. I had been producing her record, so I went into the studio to record three or four tracks of this sound that I had been hearing in my head, and I asked her to sing on them. The next thing I knew we were collaborators. She was bringing in all these amazing ideas and amazing songs and amazing chord changes, and what was originally just going to be a very simple experiment in ambient Cajun music ended up becoming a collaboration with Alexandra. It became Hi Fi Sky.

Splendid: You mentioned the Cajun influence. How did you get into that?

Tim Sommer: I knew very, very little about Cajun music. And what I did know, I wasn't that interested in. Cajun music, I think people have this image of people hollering with acoustic guitars and washboards and fiddles.

Splendid: And accordion.

Tim Sommer: And accordion. I started listening to this stuff. I was introduced to a woman named Anne Savoy. She's from a really prominent family of Cajun musicians. She introduced me to another side of Cajun music, which is haunting and melancholy, and I realized that there were these beautiful, haunting melodies beneath the accordion and washboards. And then I began to remove the melodies and the lyrics from the traditional context they'd always been in, and we realized that there were these extraordinary melodies that we could build music around. Also indigenous Asian or European music has been the root for a lot of ambient music. Indian music, Enya has used a lot of Celtic music, traditional music; no one ever treated Cajun music like that. In fact, very few people treated American music like that -- removed the melodies from their traditional context and tried to build something new out of it. Daniel Lanois has, certainly. Daniel has put out records where he sings traditional Acadian songs, but I just recognized that... I was amazed that no one had done this. I was amazed that no one had taken traditional Cajun melodies and seen them as a great and meaningful, beautiful, uplifting pieces that they were.

Splendid: "Belle Louisiane" is a good example of this.

Tim Sommer: Yes.

Splendid: Could you talk about how you found the song and what you had to do to it?

Tim Sommer: "Belle Louisiane" ... I don't know how many other versions of that song there are, but I had heard it about four years ago, played by a band of kids, probably eleven or twelve years old, Feufollet. Literally kids. I got a record of theirs. Most of which was kind of accordion and washboard stuff, but quite good. That song, "Belle Lousiane", was on that album, played very, very differently. I heard that song and I thought, "Wow, there are so many different places you could go with that." So I immediately started working on it. It was the first song that I recorded for this project. All of the rest of the traditional songs were found on various recordings. One of the recordings, the recording of "Ma Blonde Est Partie", that's based on a 1926 recording. "Ma Blonde Est Partie" is also known as "Jolie Blonde". It's sort of the "Johnny B. Goode" of Cajun music, probably the most recorded Cajun song of all time. Our version is based on the very, very first known recording of the song, a 1926 recording. There's also a song by this great 1930s American Cajun singer who does these great bluesy Cajun songs.

But in finding the songs, or the transcriptions of the songs, I have to really thank Anne Savoy, who has a couple of books about Cajun music and its history which includes transcribed songs. She's one of these people -- she's from Virginia originally -- but she's one of these people who came down here as a stranger and immediately fell in love with the great community of Cajun music.

Splendid: As a traditional Cajun music fan, how does she respond to what you're doing?

Tim Sommer: We played her some rough mixes. The first time Anne heard the music, she said, "That sounds like Cajun music in heaven."

Splendid: That's really nice.

Tim Sommer: I do not expect Cajun music traditionalists to like this, just because I think Cajun traditionalists can be very, very traditional. Mind you, we haven't sought them out yet. I would love to have the album better distributed, so that Cajun music fans might be able to listen to it. I do not expect them to be fans.

Splendid: You mentioned Enya just now, and said that she's done some of the same things with Celtic music as you've done with Cajun.

Tim Sommer: Enya -- and really I'm talking about her producer Nicky Ryan; her music really is a creation of her producer -- I don't think Enya gets enough credit. She's sold so many records. She's one of the biggest recording artists of the 1990s, one of the biggest in the world. She's just so low-key that you don't realize that. But I think because she's so big, people don't realize how beautiful and strange and artful and masterful those records are. I think the Enya records have some of the best production of the last 30 years, in line with Phil Spector stuff or Brian Wilson stuff. I think they're amazing experiments in layered harmonies and layered vocals and texture and feeling. But because they're so ubiquitous -- you can't walk into any Body Shop in the world without hearing them -- I think it's overlooked.

Splendid: I think people have negative notions about New Age in general.

Tim Sommer: What I'm finding, more and more, and this has been a nice thing to find out.. There are a lot of people out there who grew up on college rock in the 1980s. They grew up listening to the Clash, Replacements and REM. Now they're somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. They have Lexuses and they have families and they have kids. It's the perfect time in their lives for ambient music to come in. They need ambient music, but they want something that has a little bit of the edge that they enjoyed in music that they listened to when they were growing up. They want ambient music that has some of the same musical values -- values of tension and creativity -- of the music they listened to in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the things that I'd like to achieve with Hi Fi Sky is that I'd like to say to these people, "Okay, you grew up on the Clash and the Cure and Simple Minds and whatever. You want to listen to ambient music now, but you don't want ambient music that's anything like another generation's ambient music. You don't want ambient music with flutes and harps and waterfalls. You want ambient music that has texture and tension and density of emotion and feel." That's really the people that I would like to reach with Hi Fi Sky.

Splendid: Why do they need ambient music?

Tim Sommer: They get into their Lexus after a long day's work, and they are bedazzled and befuddled when they turn on the radio. They don't get the music that's on the radio now. They walk into record stores and they get confused, which is why they buy all their records either online or at Borders or Barnes and Noble. They want to chill out a little bit. But as I said, they don't want harps. I think there are a lot of bands out there that are experimenting with the idea of making interesting ambient music. I haven't heard it yet, but I understand it's happening. The most recent Moby CD is an ambient record. It's a great time because the original 1980s and 1990s college demographic is getting older. They never imagined that this would happen. They never imagined themselves getting older. They thought they'd be listening to cool music their whole lives. And they want to listen to cool music, but maybe they're not listening to the same kind of music they were listening to 20 years ago before they were married.

Splendid: Do you think music can be too beautiful? Can it be so pretty that it trivializes itself?

Tim Sommer: That's interesting. Possibly. Hi Fi Sky, the interesting thing about Hi Fi Sky has more in common with Glenn Branca and bands like that... Deep down, much deeper than most people would hear, with Glenn Branca and the drone composers that I love like Tony Conrad, he was a big influence on Hi Fi Sky. I think maybe my interest in tense avant guard music, like Tony Conrad, like Glenn Branca, like Neu!, like Yohannes Spirikis, like Penderecki, that sort of stuff always throws an interesting wrench into whatever it is, if you might be creating something that might be too beautiful. I always hear a strange drone in the back of my head. I think we're also really excited by some ethnic and religious drone music. I listen to a lot of Buddhist chants and so does Alexandra, and that infiltrates into a lot of the HI Fi Sky music. But I think I know what you're talking about. I'm not sure that songs can be too beautiful, but they can be boring. If something is boring, it's probably too beautiful. Something we tried to do on the CD, a lot of the tracks on the CD -- say, a seven minute song or a 14 minute song; we would sit there and listen to it in playback and we would begin to orchestrate it. If you go back and listen to the Hi Fi Sky songs, especially the longer ones, just at the point where you think that the song has gone on too long, something new happens. Every track on that record, especially the longer tracks, are very deliberately orchestrated. They're always changing. Something is happening. It settles and then immediately something new begins to happen. It may creep in very slowly but there's always this movement. If you go back and listen to it, I think you'll hear that. There's always motion going on. I think that's something hopefully that keeps things from being boring, and I'm translating "too beautiful" as being boring.

Splendid: Anything else you want to talk about?

Tim Sommer: No, but I would love for people to suggest to Alexandra and I, interesting, creative ways of disseminating this CD. I like to think of it being eternal music. When you talk about drone -- the base of Hi Fi Sky is drone and drone was the first music ever made. Drone is like reading the dictionary. In a drone, there's every song and every note and every flat and every major is in drone. I'm looking for interesting ways not just to make this music but to distribute it, get it into people's lives. We believe that this is art that belongs in people's lives. Therefore, we would love to discover ways of get it into people's lives. By making a song available on a web site or selling a CD on a website or selling it in a store, that's not really going to bring it into people's lives. I would love our music to be in supermarkets and stores and elevators. I'd love to be a part of people's lives that way. I think probably 10,000 years ago, people blowing on oxen horns, creating drones, the music was part of people's lives. I'd like to be a part of that.