Fletcher Tucker and Chuck Johnson Make Mind-Altering Music

The collaborators talk chanting, psycho-spiritual technologies, and much more.

Fletcher Tucker is an interdisciplinary artist based in Big Sur; Chuck Johnson is a California-based composer, producer, and musician. Fletcher’s new album, Kin, will be out this Friday on Gnome Life Records. Chuck contributed pedal steel and mixed and mastered the record, so to celebrate its release, the two collaborators and friends got on a Zoom call to catch up about it. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Fletcher Tucker: Hey, buddy. How’s your morning?

Chuck Johnson: It started early with a small puppy who needed some engagement at 6 AM. Which is how every day is lately… How about you? It’s beautiful there.

Fletcher: Yeah, I decided to sit outside. It was my daughter’s first day of first grade.

Chuck: Oh, wow. That’s huge.

Fletcher: Mhm. So we had an early and exciting morning.

Chuck: How far away is the school?

Fletcher: Well, everything in Big Sur is a long drive. Because, you know, it takes 15 minutes just to get us off our mountain to the highway.

Chuck: I remember that. I remember almost sliding off your mountain in my van.

Fletcher: [Laughs.] Well, I’m glad you didn’t. 

Chuck: It’s a treacherous road up to your house in a large van.

Fletcher: Well, I know you’re working on something new, and it seems like you’re working with some new tools.

Chuck: That’s true. For people who don’t know, my last several recordings have featured the pedal steel guitar. And then before that, there were a few that featured just six-string guitar. And I’m working on music now that doesn’t have any kind of guitar on it other than other than via samples. So I’m shifting into working with samples, primarily manipulating samples, and getting back into electronic music. Which, it’s been a long time since that was my main focus, but I studied it in grad school. I spent a lot of time in that world, and it’s been something I’ve wanted to loop back to for a while. And part of it is, I still love the pedal steel and it’s a texture that I’ll continue to use, but touring with it is starting to feel not sustainable. 

Fletcher: I remember. 

Chuck: Yeah, I came back from our European tour with a shoulder injury that took me about six months to rehab. And then late last year, I actually tore my shoulder’s rotator cuff, which meant that for several months I’ve not been able to play any kind of stringed instrument. But I’ve been able to play these knobs and things here, so it seemed to be the impetus that I needed to make that shift.

Fletcher: That’s interesting. The body decides, ultimately, what we can and can’t do.

Chuck: Yeah. And my shoulder’s on the mend and everything, but I just feel like, why continue to haul around this heavy instrument that I play less and less in the live setting? I do play it, but there’s more of a focus on the processing that happens after I play a note. 

So that’s what’s been happening with me. To sort of re-enter making music after the surgery, I’ve approached it as almost like doing live mixes. So I have a series of new mixes on my SoundCloud. Some of them are kind of like DJ mixes, some of them are more mixing sounds that I’m making in real time, and some of them are a combination of both. That’s not a huge shift, because there’s been that element in my performances even when I’m playing pedal steel. But that seemed like a good way to re-enter, a new way of wrapping my head around what I want to do. So this series is called Caoineadh, which is an Irish word. I think there’s six of them that are posted now, and each one is a caoine, which is the Irish term for vocal wailing that happens in moments of grief. I’m not singing on any of it, but there are a lot of vocal samples. But there are no decipherable words, just vocal textures and sounds. It just seemed like an appropriate theme given that, for me personally, this year has involved a lot of grief and loss.

Fletcher: Yeah. And that’s certainly a timbre and texture of the world of 2025 in general. There’s a lot of loss and suffering in grief to be worked with and turned toward. But that’s beautiful. I can only imagine that a keening wail of pure, anguished grief wouldn’t include words. I haven’t personally got there yet myself, but you know, life turns for us all… [Laughs.] 

Chuck: [Laughs.] Yeah. And, I mean, the sound of the pedal steel has that quality.

Fletcher: Yes, it does. It’s a mournful, keening quality. Which, I think you’ve embraced a larger emotional spectrum than a lot of pedal steel players that I’ve encountered previous to you. I admit my woeful ignorance in terms of that world, but I feel like before I started listening to your pedal steel, I was primarily encountering the instrument as something that was with a relatively narrow spectrum of emotional expression. Does that seem fair? 

Chuck: I think it’s maybe a really narrow use. Its usage has been kind of slotted away in this very specific genre of music. And even within country music, it has this very specific role, which is as an accompaniment. And there are a lot of rules about what can be done on it in that world. But it’s a rich sounding instrument, and it has a lot of potential to be used in other contexts, so that was part of what I wanted to do. But lately, it feels like when I play it, the sound of the instrument is a little too on the nose in that keening quality of it. So part of my shift away from it is, Well, that is an appropriate response to our time, but maybe there are other ways that I have to dig a little deeper to find.

Fletcher: That makes sense to me. I mean, when I invited you to contribute pedal steel to a song on my new record, on “Great Flowering Mind,” I was looking for kind of a spectral, numinous, soaring presence that I couldn’t find on my own. I was exploring with my own instruments at home, but I was failing to dip into a certain aural plane that felt like it extended beyond this sort of earthly field into something a little more cosmic or galactic. 

Chuck: Well, I hope I got close to what you were looking for.

Fletcher: You totally did. 

Chuck: That’s the kind of prompt I’m always happy to try to answer with pedal steel.

Fletcher: Well, you for sure did. To the point that I wasn’t even certain you were playing the pedal steel. [Laughs.] I thought there were some synthesizers involved, but [it was] just strings.

Chuck: Good. I had a lot of fun working on your record. Thank you for involving me on so many different layers as an instrumentalist, and also mixing and mastering. It is really special to be part of that process over this arc of several months.

Fletcher: Thanks, Chuck. I’m so happy with the way that you lifted up the recordings that I brought to you. You are such a good listener and I respect your ear so much. You’re also so technically capable in the way that you work that it was really just a joy to bring you those recordings and sit with you and watch you fiddle away in ways that I have no understanding of whatsoever. It was just like you pushed the “sound better-er” button, and everything sounded better-er. [Laughs.] 

Chuck: Thank you. It was fun having you in the studio. But that brings to mind a question I had for you, which is that you claim to not have any knowledge of audio production. I’ve worked on two of your albums now, and the thing that always strikes me is that you capture really beautiful sounds. You capture it beautifully and skillfully, and I guess on some intuitive level, you clearly know what you’re doing. So I always wonder, Why is he always so self-deprecating about his production knowledge, and he hands over these beautiful sounds? 

Fletcher: Oh, thanks, Chuck. I mean, I’ve been just recording myself for these last 20 years. I have a little bit of experience recording. I helped record a FOUNTAINSUN record with Daniel Higgs and Fumie Ishii, and I did a couple of small projects with Little Wings. But those are the anomalous events. Really for these last 20 years, it’s just been me in some room in some house that I’ve been living in, squirreling away a little bit of time and working by myself. So I think part of that self-deprecation probably just comes from a lack of external reference, not really knowing how other people work and what goes into their work.

I came into this music making world through a DIY scene in Santa Cruz when I was going to school, and started making music as part of my own sculptural practice when I was studying sculpture. So I don’t have any formal training in playing or recording music. And I really started out using basically garbage — I mean, I think the first microphone I had was literally a $5 microphone from RadioShack, and onto a friend’s borrowed four-track cassette. That’s how I made my first record in 2005. And I still don’t have nice things. I think probably the most expensive microphone I have cost $300. I don’t have monitors. So when I could hear the music on your very professional setup — which you need because it’s part of your livelihood of mastering — it was cool and exciting and beautiful and surprising to actually hear how much clarity and depth there was in the recordings. But in terms of my own process with recording, it’s just like a continuous intuitive trial and error that comes to a resolution when I find an emotional resolution with the way that something sounds. I don’t necessarily have an outcome in mind, often, for exactly what the texture will sound like. I’m waiting to arrive at an intuitive location emotionally that feels like the right sound in my headphones. And I can kind of only do that by just moving my body and microphones around and swapping out between the four microphones that I own and seeing what feels and works best. 

Chuck: I actually wondered how much trial and error is involved, because your music, each piece is usually about capturing a specific moment and describing it. And it seems to me like it would be too much stopping and moving a microphone 10 centimeters, and restarting a take over and over would be really hard for your process and for what your work sounds like.

Fletcher: That would completely defeat my process if that were the foundation of a recording. I can do that when I’m making overdubs and I’m adding to the larger psycho-spiritual terrain of a recording. But you’re right in that the beginning of every recording just kind of begins, and then I work with what that was. And sometimes I listen back and think, I wish I could have done that a little bit differently, but I wouldn’t jeopardize the ephemeral, un-plan-able agency of that foundational recording by saying, OK, well, I gotta redo it. For instance, on Kin, I have Swedish bagpipes on every single track, the säckpipa. I made those recordings first, and they’re just tape manipulated versions of the same recording of the säckpipa on every track. I didn’t rerecord the bagpipes for each track, I just got one long capture on tape that had exactly the right energy. And then I decided, I’m just going to speed up and slow down this tape to change the pitch on every song so that it would fit. Because I tried to put more säckpipa as overdubs on different tracks and it was just I didn’t have the spirit. I don’t know what it was in that moment…

Chuck: I relate to that, capturing something and then finding ways to repurpose it.

Fletcher: Well, it’s funny that you’re doing all this sampling, because now that I think about it, that’s basically sampling, what I did, even though I was doing it on a tape.

Chuck: Yeah. And I like that you record to tape. I think that adds to the character of your recordings.

Fletcher: It’s also such a forgiving medium. And, not to continue down that self-deprecating rabbit hole, but if I’m playing more towards feeling than precision, if the recording is going on to tape then I don’t have to worry as much about something blowing out. Because analog distortion sounds beautiful. Digital distortion, as far as I’m aware, still sounds pretty horrendous. I don’t know if that’s improved at all.

Chuck: It’s pretty unforgiving, yeah.

Fletcher: Exactly. So I always start with a tape foundation, and then I’ll do some digital overdubs here and there. I’m not a purist or a total primitivist. But I like having that tape to begin with. 

We just spent a ton of time together in a car, driving a minivan across Europe, but I feel like we talked mostly about shamanistic practices, and sort of bemoaning the difficulties of middle aged touring. [Laughs.] But not actually talking that much about process. And I feel like your recordings are so fluid and so beautiful and don’t always have an apparent center to me. They move with a kind of organic elegance. I know you don’t have words to begin with — you don’t have lyrics as a foundation to rely on — and I’m curious to know with these new tools and this new record where it all begins, how you start a recording a song, and what that iteration process is like.

Chuck: It’s premature to call it a record that’s coming together; it’s more like a new approach that I’m experimenting with. And sometimes I sit down and I am like, I have other people’s music and I’m going to make a mix, and I’ll weave in some of my own sounds. Or I’ll do things that a DJ might do, where I’ll take the high frequencies from one song and mix it with the lows from another song and spontaneously try to figure out, OK, do these match tonally? Are these in the same key, or close enough that they’ll work like that? So then when I sit down and work with my own sound sources, it’s sort of a similar process. You know, Do these things work together? But I don’t sit down and look at it on paper or really try to map it out too much. It’s just, I have all this stuff set up and it’s like a big palette and I just start throwing things in and, Are these working together? Great. I’ll hit record, and then this will be the start of something that I could return to.

Late last year, I took the songwriting workshop with Brian Eno — which is a really, really great thing that he did. Each session was a lot of him telling stories, and not talking very much about songwriting. And then when he did talk about writing songs, he was very disparaging of the practice of writing songs. [Laughs.] But one thing that he kept coming back to was our attention, and how our attention doesn’t belong to us very much in our waking hours anymore, mostly because of technology and smartphones. He encouraged everyone to, in the morning before you’ve ingested any data, before you’ve looked at your phone, before you’ve even had any kind of input — caffeine, food — just sit down with an actual pen and paper and start writing down what comes up. It’s kind of like a journaling practice. But the idea is that, as someone who is involved in creative practices, what comes out from inside of you, that’s the kernel of everything. And if you don’t allow space for that, then you’re only responding to this barrage of input that you’re getting every day. So last winter I started doing that. I also have pretty bad Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I really have a hard time with not getting enough sunlight in the winter — even though, I mean, we live in California. The winters here are chill.

Fletcher: I have reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder. Too hot, too sunny summers. I want foggy, rainy weather. [Laughs.] 

Chuck: [Laughs.] Yeah, it’s hot. But anyway, in the morning, I would get up, turn on my SAD lamp, and pull out my notebook. The stuff that was coming up was ideas about sounds and process, and a lot of it was really abstract and not things I’ve been able to really approach or capture in any way. But I’m still looking through those ideas, and when I sit down, I’m like, OK, how can I get that? I had this idea about a certain kind of voice shaped into the sound of a bell, or something like that — do I have the materials in front of me to do that? Then I’ll figure that out and start working on it. 

So I guess that’s a roundabout way of answering your question. The non-musical influences include my Seasonal Affective Disorder, and this newer practice of just creating a little space in the morning for ideas.

Fletcher: I love that. It’s beautiful. I’d like to see that notebook sometime.

Chuck: One thing that seemed to change about your process on the new album — and this struck me the first time I heard it, because like you mentioned, we toured together. I’ve heard you perform your older material, I’ve heard your other records, and you definitely change the way you deliver vocals on this album. 

Fletcher: Yeah. 

Chuck: It’s really dramatic and I think very effective and very compelling. I wanted to know how you came across that technique. I hear it as more like chanting than singing. Knowing what I know about you, I know that it must be informed by ceremony and ritual. And there’s something about the tone of the human voice when it’s delivered that way — especially, you were layering your voices at times, so there’s a higher one and a lower one. And that timbral quality, as well as the rhythmic, percussive way of delivering it like a chant, instantly puts me in this state of, OK, I’m experiencing music right now. It puts me into a very ritualistic space. Which I’m familiar with, and I know that you are, too, so I’d like to know more about that.

Fletcher: It is chanting. That’s the right word for it. I feel like the first song on the album is sort of of a bridge, in a way. It’s not completely chanting. It’s also not totally singing. I intentionally put that song first and constructed it as this sort of bridge from the other albums that I’ve made, where there’s singing proper — what people conceive of as normal singing — and then it flows into, as you say, this much more rhythmic, intentionally monotone, hypnotic voice. 

The first time I encountered monotonal chanting was at the Tassajara Zen Center, which is a Sōtō Zen Buddhist monastery that I visit a couple times a year. Since 2011, I’ve hiked there every year from the coast on a pilgrimage. It takes a few days. It’s about 30 miles of trekking through this wilderness. And then it’s this very remote monastic Zen center where monks live. They practice year round, cloistered away, a form of Zen that is sometimes called “high church” Zen, which is basically the most ritually ornate form of Zen ceremony. So there’s a lot of chanting, in English, in Pali, and in Japanese. And oftentimes [it’s] a big group, sometimes 50 people, all chanting monosyllabically. It was a very affecting psycho-spiritual technology. I was taken with it. It effectively altered my awareness, to be in this space with the chanting. I kind of fell in love with it then, and have been curious and interested in how that practice, that spiritual technology, shows up in other traditions. And it’s pretty much a universal human tradition. It’s all over the place. People have learned that these kinds of rhythmic repetitive vocalizations can subtly and not so subtly shift our awareness, our consciousness.

My own ancestral lineage — there’s a Finnish tradition called Runo song, which are these super long chanted songs that, in their original form, people would chant for days throughout the winter. You would literally sit and listen to a chant for days on end. So I became enamored with it there, and for years have been exploring it on my own, just attempting to write my own chants that were not in the Buddhist tradition, but more in my own earth-reverent, pagan animistic traditions and perspectives. This practice unfolded on its own, and then really came into ascendancy for me a couple of years ago, in particular noticing that the rhythmic pattern of the chanting worked really well for writing while walking. And so I wrote all of these chants while I was backpacking in the backcountry here, literally while I was walking and keeping time with my own steps.

Chuck: Interesting. That makes a lot of sense.

Fletcher: Yeah. And I’m really interested in what music can do that other forms of communication don’t necessarily do that well. I think that with music, we can expand and tweak awareness, consciousness. So I wanted to lean right into that. I feel like it’s something I’ve been playing with for these last 20 years in general, the potential of music as a mind-altering, spirit-altering force. But I thought I’d just go straight at it this time. Literally the goal, or the thesis statement of the album, is this kind of intention to re-enchant the living world. So if I’m going to re-enchant, I should chant. I mean, they share the same linguistic root, because they are related in their practice, and also our human relationship to ritual and ceremony and its effect on the world around us and our perception of the world.

Chuck: I just want people reading this to know that, as you were answering that question, the glare on your webcam became more and more psychedelic, and by the end of it I could hardly see you. [Laughs.] 

But that makes a lot of sense, especially the keeping time with your hiking and your walks. I agree, there’s something about hearing the human voice that way that is mind altering. The minimalist composer Tony Conrad had this theory — he kind of rejected the really woo views of La Monte Young about why the human mind responds to harmonic tuning systems that that both composers used. Whereas La Monte Young said that it’s because it’s where we’re getting closer to the cosmic mind, or something like that, when we hear these really esoteric intervals, Tony Conrad’s theory was that it’s because the first sound that you hear when you’re born is a human voice. Or before you’re born, you’re hearing it, and you’re hearing it filtered through various mediums inside the womb. And once you’re out, you’re hearing it filtered in a certain way through the vocal cords. And that’s all harmonics. You’re hearing the just intonation scale basically as soon as you’re aware. And I think that the way you’re delivering your vocals on the album kind of taps into that a little bit. 

Fletcher: I love that. Thank you for that reflection and insight. We only have a minute left — I don’t know how to wrap it up other than just to say thanks for chatting, and thanks for all you did to contribute to this record — the mixing and the mastering and performing on it. I’m so grateful for our friendship and our collaborations.

Chuck: Yes, likewise. It was an honor. Thanks for trusting me with it.

Fletcher Tucker is an interdisciplinary artist and practitioner of animistic, earth-reverent skills and philosophies, residing on the unceded Esselen tribal lands now known as Big Sur, California. Since 2005, Tucker has released nine full-length albums of music, under various project names, on labels based in Germany, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. Tucker’s most recent records, released under his given name, explore relationality –– aural and poetic expressions of his ever deepening relationships to place, ancestors, ceremonial practice, and kinfolk (human and more-than-human). Tucker’s new album Kin will be out August 15, 2025 on Gnome Life Records.