HECQ, a.k.a. Ben Lukas

Musician and sound designer Ben Lukas Boysen, who goes by the name HECQ (a play on the word ‘heck’), is well known in European electronic music circles for his multilayered and often dark and deftly-constructed experimental sound.

As a commercial composer, the 28-year-old Berlin resident has crafted subtle, sonic panoramas for title sequences for creative tech and design festival OFFF, as well as spots and interactive work for German agency Scholz & Friends, Stink Digital and Digital Kitchen.

A regular collaborator of London-based director Rob Chiu since 2006, the two recently completed spots for Else Mobile (“Something Else”) and Commonwealth Games (“Glasgow 2014”), in which foreboding, slow-building synths, layered vocal tones and even synthetic bagpipe sounds accentuate the tension between urban landscapes, typography and human bodies.

He describes his relationship with Chiu as largely intuitive. Once they get a brief, they whittle it down to a few core ideas or feelings. “The less key words you have in a brief, the more clear the outcome,” he says. “Simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve.”

That penchant for simplicity is not just apparent in Boysen’s music, but also his process: he’s continually “deconstructing” his recording studio by ridding it of unnecessary and gimmicky gear.

“I started making music when I was 16 and I only had one very bad and not very useful keyboard. I had to make the most out of it because there was no other option,” says Boysen. “You won’t discover the possibilities of a piece of gear or a specific program if you have 10 different things running at the same time.” Q

www.hecq.de