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.

DROPPED PIANOS AND STRETCHED VOICES: TIM HECKER AND JAMES BLAKE

Up at Altered Zones you can stream Tim Hecker's forthcoming Dropped Pianos, his collection of piano sketches recorded during the same sessions that produced this year's Ravedeath, 1972. I strongly recommend checking out the stream: it's just absolutely gorgeous music from someone who, when he decides to make pretty music, is extremely good at it. The music itself is very evocative, and while not settled enough to be ambient music (has anything he's released ever really been ambient--I think his "power ambient" term might be closer to the truth...), it does a fantastic job of building a new environment for you out of its sound.

I was complaining about this on Twitter, but I guess I'm not through with this topic yet: I don't understand the fawning adoration that James Blake receives from so many critics. I think that his music, for all its supposed forward-looking trappings, is oftentimes boring piano music with some gimmicky electronic flourishes. The vocals that have been pulled and stretched are a neat trick the first time, and are interesting the second, but are tired by the third listen, for me at any rate (this is precisely why, no matter how hard I try, I find Burial's "vocal" tracks much less affecting than the tracks on which he buries those disembodied, androgynous moans like wraiths in the depths).

I know that cross-genre comparisons can be tricky, and I know that this isn't some teenage pissing contest (my favourite band could beat up your favourite band or whatever), but I find Hecker's music infinitely more interesting than Blake's releases so far. I'll acknowledge that I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country, but it's still a work that excites on a visceral, emotional level and also inspires me to ask "How'd he do that?!" Even knowing that the bulk of this album came from improvisations on an old organ in a church in Reykjavik does not always reveal how a sound is coming into being. Hecker's pushed the suites he's constructed on his albums since Harmony in Ultraviolet to impressive levels here: "Hatred of Music I" and "Hatred of Music II" really do seem to use their drones to suffocate the melancholy pianos underneath; "In the Air I-III" is twelve of the most engrossing minutes of music to emerge this year; and if neither suite (or the opening trio of "In the Fog I-III") quite matches the heights of "Harmony in Blue I-IV," they also cover more ground and expand Hecker's sound in often thrilling ways.

With Blake, I'm only ever inspired to wonder how he accomplished something--for all the supposed "soul" imbued in his music, I find it largely mechanical and stilted. That trope, too, Blake's soulful vocals, is disturbing: as Mark Pytlik pointed out in his interview with Blake earlier this year, "when people say 'soulful,' it feels like they're saying, 'Oh, it's a white person who can sing like they're black.'" The fact that Blake is an attractive, articulate, young white male seems to be of great comfort to a lot of critics. I don't think that Geoff Barrow's question--"Will this decade be remembered as the Dubstep meets pub singer years?"--is necessarily "a defense of dubstep--the gesture . . . [of] a purist, an elitist, or both;" I think it's a valid aesthetic question. Of course, Blake himself seems like something of a purist and elitist: speaking of contemporary artists gaining mainstream recognition for their take on dubstep he said "Those melodic basslines are insultingly simple and aggressive and annoying. That is now a valid genre, but it certainly isn't dubstep. It's turned into something else. That's cool, I'm happy about it. . . . It's just something different now." Blake is clearly interested in patrolling and defending the borders of dubstep at least as much as Barrow.

If, as Simon Reynolds recently suggested, "generalizing a bit wildly, black music seems to be what pushes the major structural aspects of music forward," does the mating of the largely white coffeehouse singer-songwriter tradition and dubstep really represent a move forward for either genre? Or is this a retreat, dubstep brought within safe critical parameters for which aesthetic criteria are already firmly established? Is it a coincidence that Blake's noteworthy covers--of Feist and Joni Mitchell--are of artists working very much in that singer-songwriter tradition, and that his biggest collaboration to date is with another singer-songwriter, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon? For all the talk of Darkstar's North being a sideways move for a genre that's been known as particularly restless and forward-looking, Blake's entire output feels equally sideways (if not retrograde). Now, I'm not suggesting that Hecker's Dropped Pianos is the future of music (it isn't), nor am I suggesting that his body of work is so singular that it represents some kind of vanguard (it's well situated within any number of genres and artists, like Fennesz for a start, and Eno to a certain extent), but it certainly feels more exciting to me than James Blake, and I'd have to agree with Altered Zones that Hecker is "truly one of the greats."


Incidentally, given Reynolds' recent comment that "the eighties is proving to be to this-time (i.e. 2000s + 2010/2011) what the sixties was to the actual eighties, i.e. near-inexhaustible resource" and the spectre of nineties revivalism looming ever larger, I was surprised to hear during my first listen to Bjork's new album, Biophilia, an explosion of drum programming that wouldn't have sounded out of place on something like Black Secret Technology and several beats that seemed to have been copied/pasted in from Homogenic ("All Neon Like" and "5 Years" seeming to be particular touchstones). I'm not sure how I feel about these things yet, but I will say that Biophilia is the first album she's released since Vespertine (back in 2001!!!) that I've actually enjoyed without having to force myself to like it because it's Bjork.