REVIEW: TIM HECKER - "SUFFOCATION RAGA FOR JOHN CALE"

Tim Hecker - "Suffocation Raga for John Cale" off Extra Playful: Transitions EP
Double Six, 2012

It's no secret that Tim Hecker is a big favourite of mine. Though he's yet to put out a bad album--seriously, his hit to miss ratio is astonishing--last year did feel like something of a halcyon days for his fans, with both Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos offering some of his most rewarding, and challenging, music yet (to say nothing of this excellent concert set from Moogfest 2011 that NPR put up). This remix for Cale's Record Store Day release (Actress and Leyland Kirby have remixes on it as well) is a bit of a departure from most of the material on Ravedeath (outside of maybe "In the Fog"), though it fits comfortably alongside earlier works like "Atlas One" and "Atlas Two," or the noisier parts of Harmony in Ultraviolet. His usual signifiers--grainy distortion, clouds of static, submerged harmonic progressions--are all present, and in just the right amounts. If you were being uncharitable, you could say it's Hecker-by-the-numbers, but it's such a gorgeous piece of music that I'm inclined to give him a pass for not exactly moving outside his comfort zone here. In something of a strange twist, actually, "Suffocation Raga" sounds closer to Christian Fennesz's work than has been the case in some time, and the overtly pretty second half is not a million miles away from the likes of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis.

Opening with a metallic, buzzing drone--sounding a little like stretched out piano chords--before the layers of static and distortion shift the sound into slightly darker territory, the first half of the song is a feast of textures. Indeed, nothing here is nebulous or gossamer; Hecker gets so much of his effect from the physicality of his music, and this is no exception. There is weight and mass here, and it feels like you can reach out and touch what's coming out of your speakers. A little over halfway through, the track seems poised to drop into "Whitecaps of White Noise"-levels of distortion and static, but Hecker pulls back and allows everything to blossom in near-symphonic fashion. It's a little like hearing a deconstructed horn section, the swells of sound sitting somewhere between triumphant and melancholic. Piano creeps in around the edges at the close of the track, a trick used to great effect on Ravedeath, and the most obvious reference to Hecker's recent work to be found.

In an interview for The Quietus, Hecker describes his method in the studio as:

a mix of dull, bludgeoning, plodding, getting-nowhere feelings of hitting your head against the well, mixed with these amazingly crystallized moments of epiphany and revelation and vision. . . . [I]t's something that really comes with hard work and labour and time and patience, and being open to your music spiraling off on different tangents and going with it, and not being sentimental about music that's not quite there. Just destroying it.

At this point, reference to the sound of this process in Hecker's work is perhaps the most pervasive cliche in writing on his music, so I will gloss over how well this description of his methods matches with the experience of listening to that work (it really does!) and suggest that if there's been a development in Hecker's career, it has been a continued refinement and honing in on those moments of epiphany, revelation, and vision he describes. Aesthetically, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do it Again is not a million miles away from "Suffocation Raga," but the payoff, for lack of a better term, is consistently higher these days. This is not to say that his earlier releases suffer by comparison--they remain compelling listens even in light of his recent triumphs--so much as to point out that the richness of the material, the depth of his compositions, has grown without Hecker having to abandon what's brought him to this point. "Suffocation Raga," then, is more consolidation than evolution, a revisiting of gains made through the application of those very gains.

In that same piece from The Quietus quoted above, the interviewer describes a preview of some of Hecker's most recent recording sessions, noting that it's "more rhythmic than I was anticipating, but blossoms with the unmistakable flourishes of dense and percolating distortion that have become his hallmark." This description might be applied to last year's "The Piano Drop" (or even Harmony in Ultraviolet's "Chimeras"), and I can't help but wonder if an increased engagement with his minimal techno past (under the Jetone moniker) might be in the cards. I don't know, obviously, and if Hecker's career to date offers any hints, it suggests that what comes next will be more slow refinement, rather than scorched-earth reinvention. Regardless of what's to come, Hecker remains one of the greats in contemporary experimental music and any forthcoming projects will, I'm sure, be worthy of exploration and immersion. For right now, "Suffocation Raga for John Cale" is another piece of typically excellent work from a musician who, like Burial or the Caretaker, has excelled by becoming ever more like himself.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #5 TIM HECKER RAVEDEATH, 1972

Albums of the Year 2011: #5

 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos

Ah, it's nice to kick off the top five with a Canadian (not that I'm biased or anything). Back in October, I said that "I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country." I would like to revise and correct that statement: Ravedeath, 1972 is every bit as interesting as either of those albums. It might even be better than them. Hearing his set at Moogfest 2011 (when "Chimeras" appears about 2/3 of the way through the set it feels as lighters-in-the-air as the appearance of any artist's hit song in concert) definitely helped change my mind*--as did the release of his excellent set of sketches for the album, Dropped Pianos--but what really won me over was just sustained, concentrated listening. More than that of any other artist on this list, I think, Tim Hecker's music demands deliberate and conscious engagement in order to achieve a kind of immersion. The meaning of his work seems to hang forever just beyond the limits of perception, by design: "I've always been interested in that threshold of being between, of hiding, obfuscating. It's so suggestive." This is not to say that his music is cold and cerebral: one of the best things about Hecker's work is how thrillingly physical it is--this is sound that moves you and that gains significant emotional impact from its very physicality. The album's opener, "The Piano Drop," has real weight and depth in its shimmering waves, but it's the rest of the album's foregrounding of the tension between the organic, material process of Hecker's piano and organ playing and the digital process of editing and treating those recordings that presents this physicality par excellence.

At the same time, though, and perhaps even more importantly, Ravedeath, 1972 is an example of how far Hecker has come as a composer. As reliant on multi-part suites as anything since his debut, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again, this album's "In the Fog," "Hatred of Music I"/"Hatred of Music II," and "In the Air" all take advantage of their extended length to work through several movements. In interviews, Hecker has consistently mentioned church music when describing his own work--he's described himself as "a guy who does things on the borderline between church music and new age" and his music "as something like fake church music"--and, in their immensity, these suites represent Hucker's most fully realized version yet of a kind of secular church music, what Hecker calls "intense saturated musical expression." Though he's been criticized in the past for being slightly too academic, his concern with "digital garbage" and "imploding and rebuilding from the fragments of things that have been kind of pummeled" takes on a new, visceral edge here, as the organ and piano are attacked by digital noise and treatments throughout "In the Fog" and "In the Air" (and attacked is the appropriate verb, as one listen to "In the Fog III" will make clear), exposing the violence of his composition process. Indeed, "Hatred of Music I" is probably the harshest thing he's released since "Whitecaps of White Noise I"--the power of the organ, even without his treatments is a thing to behold. Of course, as in the first few seconds of "In the Fog III" and "In the Air I" or the last few minutes of "In the Air III," his approach also makes for moments of breathtaking beauty. The standalone tracks are not to be outdone in that sense, and their patient, mournful melodies are heartbreakingly pretty, pushing the sounds and techniques of his last few albums to new levels. A decade on from his debut under his own name, Ravedeath, 1972 confirms that Tim Hecker's music is sui generis and, just like Burial's, keeps getting better by becoming ever more his own. 

*Go that link and listen to/download that performance. It's an amazing document of Hecker live and better than any of his officially released live stuff.