Hardcore for Nerds

Tim Hecker @ the Unitarian - pt. 1

On Friday May 18th, 2012

The Unitarian Church on St. Stephen’s Green doesn’t look much different from any Anglican church I’ve been in (although my local parish church was built around the same time, in the 1860s and in the Gothic revival style of the time) - full of carved wood and stone, the stone a polished white and the wood as dark as the ages, a verse from scripture inscribed onto the pulpit. The pews filled with ranks of (mostly) bearded and spectacled men, nearly as identical - if shabbier - than the male part of the congregation probably would have been back in its Victorian heyday. 

It was into this ambiance, with the lights still up, that the Irish warm-up act zvuku entered, with a rather good set of ambient and textured, indeed rather Tim Hecker-esque (it put me in mind of the more open sounds of An Imaginary Country) music. You can get a pristine recording of his set and some Instagrammed pictures of the church here. It did a great job of setting the tone, at a tasteful volume - rare among Dublin support acts, obviously dictated somewhat by the setting but also a necessary contrast with the overload of Hecker’s set. What pointed out out the buzzsaw-to-the-soul possibility of electronic music only hinted at the greater potencies to follow.

For Hecker’s set, the main lighting of the church was turned off, to be replaced by a lone pair of flickering candles perched on a lectern, and the illumination of the great stained glass windows (what was illuminating them, I’m not sure - I was facing the windows which must back onto a courtyard at the rear, and although I could see the last twilight leaking through a clear window in the eaves, the stained glass reminded brighter throughout than I’ve seen before in a church at night-time; it usually taking on a rather sinister appearance - but then, in the centre of the city it never gets that dark). According to Hecker, by having “low-to-no lighting” he aims to “have the primacy of aurality in the experience of that evening. I try to deny the visual aspect as much as possible.”

And true, the experience is incredibly aurally immersive, to the point where closing your eyes is almost not even a choice, but at least in a church the setting remains. It’s equally as difficult not to hold on to the remaining flickers of light - at one point one of the candles was obscured from my field of vision, and I felt that if it were to be completely extinguished the psychic pain would have been immense. What’s more, the fear that is inherent in his latest album takes on a life of its own when experienced in a darkened and still (apart from the movement of the sound in the air) church - at least for me, with relatively strong memories of wooden pews and towering architecture as a place for a ritually prescribed sense of hope, lightness of being, and love. 

Ravedeath is heavy, oppressive even - insistent without drums (as indeed one of the track titles simply notes) that its presence be recognised, even if as a partially ambient album it can melt away just as quickly. Those who refer to it as ghostly or ethereal are either missing the physicality of the bass register, or else highlighting that the power of such imaginary fears often lies in their felt presence, their psychological reality. Live with it at high volume for a suitable duration, in such a potent environment, and it becomes something else altogether. I can say that while you can expect to be moved by any sort of music played loudly and in the dark, I’ve never before had the level of physical reaction to a performance as I did sitting there listening to Tim Hecker.

to be continued

Tim Hecker, Hatred of Churches I-III

So the Tim Hecker gig in the Unitarian Church on Friday night was really amazing. I don’t know how to put the intensity of the experience into words, although I really want to try. In the meantime, here are some texts that contain some ideas, that are bouncing around my head…

Ravedeath, 1863:

“It is interesting to note that in 1856, John Henry Newman’s Catholic University Church was completed just around the corner on the south side of St Stephen’s Green in a very different style, that of an ancient Italian basilica. Both Gothic Revival and Greek Revival styles were popular among architects in this period, when there was a spiritual revival in both Catholicism and Protestantism and a reaction to 300 years of obeying a set book of classicial rules. George McCaw, an architect and member of the Dublin Unitarian congregation, has written that Darwinism played a large part in the swing to this Gothic style. Churches had to meet the challenge of science and this led to a desire to return to a style that was seen as uncorrupted by modern civilisation. Gothic art and architecture were seen as the expression of the Church, not as it had been secularised, “but having the true faith with its emotional appeal and air of mystery.””

Our Church Building - Dublin Unitarian Church

Ravedeath, 1972:

“If you buy into the concept of Ravedeath, 1972 as an examination of music threatened by technology, there are pretty clear threads that pop up over the course of the record to support that. For one, it seems that the organ sounds Hecker captured back in that Rejkjavik church represent a certain purity of sound and that the digital noise battering it throughout act as the enemy, the corrosive effect. There’s an ongoing struggle between the two that’s mirrored in the menacing song titles and gripping cover art. It’s important, then, that the album closes with “In the Air III”, a track that features almost no interference whatsoever, just the plinking organ by itself. If I’m reading it right, it feels like Hecker’s point is that music, in its purest form, survives no matter what you throw at it.”

Pitchfork - Album Review

“If Ravedeath, 1972 is, in the creator’s term, an attempt at secular church music, it is a reminder that such church music was always an attempt to transcend the profane, and the mundane, ad majorem […] gloriam.”

HFN 2011 - 3: Tim Hecker - ‘Hatred of Music I’ 

Ravedeath?, 2012

“What do you dig about playing in churches?

TH: It’s a mixed bag, because it’s a chance to play a great space that people associate with spiritual or transcendental states. But I’m not really someone that attempts to promise that kind of same mindframe, as in, you take the religion out of the music and you can still achieve that kind of promise of deities or whatever. I think that it’s often used as a… Sometimes it’s a fraught, kind of laden world of performance that I think can be really dubious, but it’s also super fun to almost desecrate an instrument that for 500 years has been associated with God. But prior to that, it was not at all. It was a deeply secular musical instrument.

Does ‘rave’ have anything to do with religious rapture?

TH: I’m not sure. The title itself was written late at night in an iTunes information panel when I was doing demo mp3s, and it was almost like a Ouija board form of automatic writing that just happened in the field. The title I just wrote down as a joke almost, and it kind of stuck. I think it started from some imagery I’d seen of a rave disaster in L.A. where 30,000 people crashed a fence, and there were candy ravers with blood all over their faces. Something like that. It’s not at all related to the imagery of the album, but there’s some sort of collusion that didn’t make sense and made perfect sense at the same time.”

The Quietus - In Darkness More Than Anything: Tim Hecker Interviewed

“Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” Man, I really want to go to Dublin.

The first time I remember that line (or the second half of it at least) being quoted to me was in the police station in Dalkey, by a Garda Sergeant whom I can now only think of as Sergeant Pluck from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (or his rewrite Sergeant Fottrell, in The Dalkey Archive). Myself and some friends (in our mid-to-late teens) were there for some jovial reassurance/counselling - which somehow got round to swimming in the locality - after coming across the body of someone who had died by suicide in the woods on Killiney Hill, which makes it a much less funny story; but one which I find difficult to dissociate. 

So yeah, come to Dublin! (If you want to swim though, which I don’t remember ever having the courage to do, best to do it in the later summer or autumn, after the sea has had time to heat up somewhat)