The alias \u201cBeno\u00eet Pioulard\u201d famously arrived in the middle of the night while you were studying French, scrawled in a bedside notebook. You\u2019ve previously said that the name chose you rather than the reverse. Twenty years on, does the pseudonym feel like a mask, a second self, or simply a signature you no longer think about? Let\u2019s flash back to Ann Arbor in the early 2000s. You were drumming and playing guitar in the post-rock band Esmae while quietly making handmade CD-Rs for friends and family under no name at all. What did the private, for-friends-only nature of those early recordings let you try that a \u201cband\u201d couldn\u2019t? Kranky, which at the time was home to Windy & Carl, Grouper, Stars of the Lid, and loscil, signed you off a demo (a route you\u2019ve noted barely exists anymore). What did it mean to a young Michigander to be welcomed into that particular lineage, and did it feel like an aesthetic mandate or a blank cheque? You\u2019ve been strikingly candid that \u201cPr\u00e9cis\u201d (2006) was, in your words on the \u201cSound Methods\u201d podcast, \u201cbasically a breakup record\u2026 just sad sack 21-year-old romantic Tom\u201d, full of a \u201cpretty sadness\u201d you were drawn to at that age. Looking back at that \u201cmorbid romantic,\u201d what do you recognise in him, and what feels like a stranger? You\u2019ve said in the past that your best collaborations all grew from pre-existing mutual admiration, and that the joy is when a listener can \u201cpick out the elements that each person brought in, yet the whole is cohesive.\u201d When a collaboration is working, what does it feel like in the room? A whole decade passed between \u201cYearling\u201d and \u201cHow to Color A Thousand Mistakes\u201d. In that gap, you and Raf both weathered enormous change. What made it finally feel right to become Orcas again rather than release the songs under your own name? Both Deck Amber and Konec close a loop within your wider community: Raf mastered both records, and Konec even features original artwork by Liz Harris, better known as Grouper (a fellow traveller from your Kranky years). The ambient world often looks from outside like a constellation of solitary figures, yet your discography suggests something closer to a village. How consciously do you cultivate that web of friendships, and what does this community give your music that solitude never could? Let\u2019s talk about how your work feeds back into the community. Your Polaroids grace album covers for Hotel Neon, Past Inside the Present artists and others, and you\u2019ve penned press notes for friends\u2019 records. How do you think about being a contributor to someone else\u2019s object rather than their music, and what responsibility does that carry? The alias \u201cBeno\u00eet Pioulard\u201d famously arrived in the middle of the night while you were studying French, scrawled in a bedside notebook. You\u2019ve previously said that the name chose you rather than the reverse. Twenty years on, does the pseudonym feel like a mask, a second self, or simply a signature you no longer think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7028524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12031],"tags":[31407,25921,4006,5727,180871],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7028523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ambient-music","tag-benoit","tag-commute","tag-headphone","tag-interview","tag-pioulard"],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/strong><\/em>At this point it\u2019s more the latter \u2013 just a familiar tag attached to these things I make.\u00a0 The original use of the name was part joke, part necessity, but then nothing ever took its place.\u00a0 The only other moniker I considered was \u201cThelma\u201d, a partial anagram of my real name, but there were already a couple folks using that pseudonym, and it didn\u2019t feel quite right anyway.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had people misremember the alias as \u201cDidier Foucault\u201d and \u201cRenoir Leotard\u201d, I\u2019ve been addressed as \u201cBen\u201d at the merch table a few times, which is all amazing.\u00a0 Some friends who\u2019ve known me since the beginning still struggle to pronounce \u201cPioulard\u201d, so I just stick to the idea that, however you say it, that\u2019s the correct way to say it.\u00a0 Like \u201cAutechre\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/strong><\/em>At the time of the CD-R albums, I was under the spell of Phil Elverum, particularly his album The Glow, Pt. 2, and I just loved the ethos and aesthetic of K Records.\u00a0 Some of that stuff gave me early cues that a single person in a bedroom could make something authentic and full-sounding, which was a revelation.\u00a0 My Leo side doesn\u2019t come out in too many ways, but that auteur ability to control all the parts and multi-track \u2013 to feel a piece coming together and kind of write itself, ideally \u2013 was just the most fun thing I could imagine, and often still is.\u00a0 There\u2019s really nothing like the feeling of finishing a song that\u2019s completely your own from front to back.\u00a0 Being in a band certainly has its own virtues and unique benefits, too, and I still make music with my long-time friend Luke Entelis (aka Viul), who was the guitarist in Esmae \u2013 it\u2019s an incredible thing when those creative bonds can transcend so many eras of life and friendship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/headphonecommute.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/tom-again-1048x590.jpg\")
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<\/strong><\/em>Yeah, it\u2019s beyond an honor to be in that kind of company \u2013 at the time I sent demos out in 2005, I adored Windy & Carl, Labradford, Godspeed, Bowery Electric, and several other Kranky artists, and really only approached them as a matter of respect, totally shooting the moon.\u00a0 No other label responded, but Mr. Kranky asked me for another set of songs, so I recorded six more that summer, which led him to offer a two-album contract, and I thought maybe I was getting Punk\u2019d.\u00a0 One of those songs ended up on a Ghostly compilation (Idol Tryouts 2), and the other five were the beginnings of Pr\u00e9cis.\u00a0 I definitely felt a mandate to cull and refine what I thought were my best ideas, to find the greatest focus I could in the midst of school, work, and band practices, and it became this kind of secret passion project that I only shared once it was done in early 2006.\u00a0 I still felt shaky about it, but conceded that it was at least an accurate representation of where I was at in my life at the time.\u00a0 Also, I think the only music I listened to during those months was The Disintegration Loops, because I was afraid of being influenced by songs and melodies that other people wrote.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/strong>A really wonderful effect of having all these very diaristic records from over the years is a sense of personal continuity \u2013 the same goes for all the notebooks I\u2019ve kept since my early teens, which I have in a box here at home.\u00a0 I can easily recall a lot of sense-memories from the era of making that album, and put myself in that place with a little mental effort, while recognizing the growth and change that\u2019s happened since.\u00a0 I think in general I\u2019ve let go of the \u2018tortured poet\u2019 ideal that I was drawn to as a teenager, and am more into the question of how to make meaning out of nothing, how to square consciousness with the scale of the universe, that kind of thing.\u00a0 Feels like, as I\u2019m getting older, I only have more questions, but I can also ease into the peace of knowing they might not ever get answered.\u00a0 And sometimes I just want to make a tape loop piece that tickles my ears, without any particular motivation otherwise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/headphonecommute.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bp-les-2005-718x897.jpeg\")
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<\/strong><\/em>The only collaboration that has consistently been done in person is Orcas, with Rafael, and in that dynamic there\u2019s always been a lot of mutual trust and respect.\u00a0 Like, we come from very different backgrounds \u2013 both culturally and musically \u2013 but we connected at first based on our respective solo work.\u00a0 As we discussed in another question, my processes and setup are very basic and uncomplicated, but since I\u2019ve known him, Raf has always had a professional setup that often blows my mind with its versatility.\u00a0 His obsessiveness also works in favor of the partnership, because my chief roles in Orcas have always been just songwriting and singing, so I\u2019ll bring a dinky little song into the studio, he\u2019ll hear a few ways it can be produced and start finding instrument sounds, we\u2019ll kind of snowball from there, and he ends up working on details during seemingly every free moment he has, sometimes for weeks afterward.\u00a0 His intuition and ears are pretty astonishing.\u00a0 Of course, we\u2019ve had a lot of dead-end variations on songs, but we are both generally good at pushing through those failures, knowing that the right version is around the corner somewhere, which to me is always an exciting and motivating prospect.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/strong>For whatever reason, Orcas never felt like something that would be the same if it were a remote project, so the hiatus was initially a default because Raf moved to New York in 2014.\u00a0 My first visit out here was in early 2016, which is when we made the Seventeen Words record as Gailes, during a weekend blizzard.\u00a0 The earliest material for the third Orcas album came about in spring 2018, when I was on a day job hiatus and had just finished Sylva \u2013 Once again we started with no goals in mind, but pretty quickly put together a version of what became \u201cHeavens Despite\u201d.\u00a0 Another year goes by, I write a couple of vocal songs and decide I\u2019m moving to Brooklyn, and the album feels like it\u2019s starting up, then lockdown delayed us by probably another two years\u2026 We did a few things over the wires or live on the phone during that time, but really the bulk of that album came together in 2022 and 2023, by which point time itself felt like a meaningless, elastic mystery.\u00a0 The project hasn\u2019t been without its challenges, but ultimately everything that has resulted is a true mark of our friendship and the ways our aesthetics can mutate and reform into something very different, but just as honest every time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/headphonecommute.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/orcas2-1048x698.jpg\")
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<\/em><\/strong>I give a lot of credit for that community to kranky, because once I was part of that stable, at least in terms of public-facing perception, I was in league with some of my heroes and had a certain amount of built-in credibility, which is still a trip to consider.\u00a0 The relationships that have come together in that sphere have felt pretty organic, and I have generally approached things with the mindset that \u201cit can\u2019t hurt to ask\u201d if someone wants to collaborate or play a show together or something.\u00a0 And of course the answer (if there is one) isn\u2019t always yes, but that\u2019s how I ended up on tour with Eluvium, and Windy & Carl, how I ended up collaborating with The Humble Bee (who is half of The Remote Viewer, one of my Top 5 ever), and so on.\u00a0 Solo work is always a default, but I have generally found it incredibly heartening just how genuine, warm, and supportive the ambient experimental community is.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of camaraderie and mutual understanding of the joys and the drawbacks of operating on the fringes, and genuine drive to make things that get at something crucial about existence.<\/p>\n
<\/strong><\/em>As both a former film student and English major, it\u2019s a natural compulsion to involve writing and visual imagery in what I share with the world as much as I can.\u00a0 I defaulted to my own photos for album covers, even when they were just CD-Rs of my 4-track recordings, and at a certain point I started getting the odd request for an original image for someone else\u2019s record, which was of course very flattering.\u00a0 Zach from PITP and I have become very good friends over the years, and we share a deep love for grainy images and sounds, so especially with his label\u2019s releases, it\u2019s a great pairing.\u00a0 I think about the fact that I\u2019ve bought a lot of records over the years based on their covers and aesthetics, so when I\u2019m trying to select an image with the LP bins in mind, that feeling of innate appeal is really important, even though that\u2019s obviously a fully subjective thing.\u00a0 As far as writing, I used to do the press bios and related verbiage for Ghostly International when I worked for them a lifetime ago, and it came back up as an option when Zach was looking to create a little more cohesive narrative in his label story, and treat his releases as the fully formed worlds that they are.\u00a0 Anyone can record and post an album on Bandcamp with no context or liner notes or anything \u2013 which is a good thing for sure, the democratization \u2013 but we both believe these things can be meaningful events and experiences for the listener, and context and a good backstory can really heighten an already-good album.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"