Megan Hullander — Last we spoke, you said you’d maybe adopt an alias once your music got abstract enough. What brought it to that point?
Richie Culver — I think it was more for admin in my head, for keeping everything—the little details that no one really gives a shit about—separate. But of course, as the creative, those [details] are life or death.
And I can’t make noise and techno under my government name. It was time to unleash the Quiet Husband. I’ve been sat on the name for ages and it fit perfectly for this. But I’m not going to do any more aliases. I think this is it.
So what does the name mean?
Quiet Husband is based on my best friend’s stepdad when I was maybe eight or nine. It was the way he would look at you—I’d catch glances and it’d freak me out. And, of course, it bleeds into all kinds of people. It’s that figure you don’t fully trust.
That feels connected to the text that accompanies the record—which references a lost man and loneliness and melancholy. It all points to the fraught nature of masculinity now, what it’s “supposed to” be. I imagine, especially as a father, that’s something you are grappling with a lot.
I swim in those worlds constantly in recovery, and being a dad to two boys and a girl. I’ll just speak about the boys in this particular sense. There’s a lot of pressure to raise them into the world. It’s a really fine line to walk. There are things that I relate to in them and that I’m trying to harness and push and not push too much and rein back in. There’s a whole PhD topic within the name Quiet Husband, probably.
Do art and academia go hand in hand for you?
I’m in my 40s now. As an artist, I’m continuously trying to educate myself and push my work in different directions. I’m making a trap record next, for instance, pushing the spoken word into a lyrical flow kind of thing. But I’m at a stage now where I need to be teaching as well—not necessarily in a school or anything like that, but I’m aware of people looking at me. I’ve been using social media as a way of that recently, dropping little insecurities and struggles—struggles that every artist has, but not everybody wants to talk about publicly.
It feels like every exhibition is going to be my last, every record is going to be my last. So I’m not thinking, How am I going to continue to do this? There’s so much insecurity in this lifestyle that we choose as artists and creatives and writers and anything under the umbrella of art.
How do you let something go with that feeling that it might be the last thing that you put into the world? I’d imagine that feeling would have the opposite effect on most.
I realize that I am prolific and that a lot of the things that I do could just stand as one thing in a year. But it’s just my process. I don’t know what I’m working towards. I don’t know if this is all going to culminate into something—if the best is gone, if I’m declining.
I’m [working in] the music world and the visual world, and one overtakes the other sometimes. Music seems to be leading the way at the moment. But I’ve always seen the art world as five steps behind the music and sound world, so it feels normal that that would be the case. The Quiet Husband alias has managed to make the gap further apart, as in, I’ve got space now to do more and not look like I’m a workaholic.
The concept of substitution is super prevalent on the record. Listening to the album almost had that same effect: When it finishes, there’s this sort of void that you are left wanting to fill.
I was aiming to bridge noise in techno and make it one genre. The techno on the record is pretty industrial and almost undanceable, and the other parts are like segues, but quite intense ones. The text for the record, by Charles [Teyssou] and Pierre [-Alexandre Mateos]—two French curators—is an important part of it. It also kind of sits completely random within it all. I think, having just finished at the Royal College of Art and [being] in the art world, everything needs to have a concept and a “what it means,” and the “why did you do that?” I fall into that trap. It needs to be there, I guess. Even when my kids are drawing a picture, I ask, “Why did you choose the color red?”
But for this, I just wanted to make a record that has no meaning. It’s a record about nothing, that challenges how you listen to it, why you are listening to it. The titles are all extremely important, of course, the blocking and substitute element, and a concept comes—quite a heavy one—but as I was making it, I felt relatively free and almost like I was on the brink of a new genre, which, incidentally, Mary Anne Hobbs called void core. We wanted it to be an unfriendly record. Not in a pretentious sense, but I don’t want it to go around the parameters of what is acceptable for a dance floor. I can’t imagine anyone putting it in their set.
Maybe it’s more approachable because there’s no “right way” to go about it.
I think that’s always my goal, even with the spoken word stuff. What I love about the noise world is there’s kind of nowhere to go from there. As much as I love music and all its genres, as soon as you start hitting the noise territory, you’re kind of at the summit. I’ve been obsessed with how can I educate myself into listening to noise and accepting it as a texture and not necessarily a melody or anything that has any rhythmic value. I don’t think there’s a musical expression that is more academic than noise. It’s like an abstract painting. It’s people thinking not even outside the box, they’re thinking outside the planet.
