Hardcore for Nerds

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Tim Hecker - ‘No Drums’ from Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky, 2011)

Although ‘Hatred of Music I’ is probably the most powerful track on Ravedeath, I think this preceding one best encapsulates the intensity of the live show. Partly because it’s so simple, yet so enveloping, and because it carries with it that distinctively sinister beauty which marks the album as a whole; but also since ‘Hatred of Music’, on ordinary speakers, now sounds like overkill by comparison - there no longer need be grand crescendos to signify the transmutation of sound into spirit.

(Incidentally, the very end of the mp3 track is already the ‘beginning’ of ‘Hatred of Music’, bleeding in, so it’s inescapable - but it also gives the digital version of ‘Hatred of Music I’ its sharp, cut-off start.)

tim hecker electro

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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 live dublin electro

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» Tim Hecker is playing the Unitarian Church in St. Stephen's Green, Dublin

This should be good. I’ve only been there once, for a funeral service, but they’ve been hosting a lot of gigs over the last year or so - I’m guessing probably because they need the money to restore their organ*, which makes this doubly appropriate.

(*and because it’s a great space and they’re awesome people, of course.)

tim hecker live electro dublin

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“ For me, it’s some form of intellectually satisfying ecstatic music that I keep failing at achieving. I wish it was more ecstatic, I wish it was more brain-explodingly robust, and each time I finish a record it’s kind of a failure to get to those points.

—

Tim Hecker interview at Resident Advisor

This is really good - he says some very intelligent stuff without sounding too esoteric or bandwagon-jumping; e.g., on Ravedeath

“The record is not about the technology. In some ways it isn’t about anything at all, like an expression of bare composition. […] Record titles or track titles are a chance to cloak the work with a kind of poetic garb. That isn’t glib in any way, I take it very seriously—and that’s not saying that the titles are about nothing—but often people run with that stuff so far that you need a meaning structure around it to interpret a work.”

and how it developed:

“I actually began to write them with piano in mind and I used a lot of piano pieces to kind of play with motifs. I actually recorded all that early stuff and released it as Dropped Pianos, but the more I worked on it in the studio the more it became these sort of suffocating, internal, mixing desk only-type of pieces with digital reverbs.

I felt it lacked a kind of three-dimensionality that I’ve never been really good at getting with my music—almost a fake kind of liveness. So I took it at that point to an actual physical space and, with really good microphones and recording techniques, we got a pretty fantastic way to contrast that sterile nature of the pieces I was working with.”

He even says, giving an excellent quote to finish off an interview, that

“interviews are one of the rare occasions that a musician like me gets to really think about their work and discuss and bring words to things that aren’t often spoken.”

which might well have something to do with his music being instrumental in nature, that it successfully avoids a lot of the linguistic meaning that gets piled on to most halfway interesting bands in the current era, while enabling such discussion to be both rare enough and accessible to the listener.

tim hecker electro

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HFN 2011 - 3: Tim Hecker - ‘Hatred of Music I’ from Ravedeath, 1972

The most hateful music - by which I mean a bizarre negation of quality, an odd erasure of aesthetic pleasure - I know from the past few years has been the queer pop of Animal Collective/Panda Bear. I just find it unlistenable, not because any part of is identifiably bad or even particularly annoying, if at times it does seem repetitive - but because it barely seems like music; again not because it is discordant or particularly non-conformist to some platonic structure of ‘music’, instead simply because it is a pointillist, pointless muddle of sound. Much like much of my own writing, I suppose, and it was the highest honour to be eloquently rickrolled by Karl in my guest post for his blog with AnCo’s ‘My Girls’, which I hated to have to listen to over and over again. Yet most of the people I interact with about music often seem to be fans of that band, even if I’ve never worked out why.

Possibly the answer is contained here, in this further discussion on hypnagogic pop (continuing from this post)

“… I think it’s true in a sociological sense that all music and art has the primary function of being aesthetically appealing, communicating ideas, making human bonds, etc. — innovation is a by-process that only recently seems to have attained its stand-alone value to where (and I catch myself doing this a lot) we can praise stuff that is admittedly not that good, not that emotionally or intellectually resonant, because it shakes things up. This kind of thing does seem a lot more prevalent in materially affluent societies with modern/post-modernist cultures. So, yeah, i think we’d do well to remember the original point of music and art from a sociological stance (e.g. ‘i just wanna rock out, man.’)”

Tim Hecker’s ambient distortion is in some ways the antithesis of cheerful indie or hypnagogic retro-pop: it creates a gloomy yet crystalline weight out of an abstract wall of sound - even if his previous album created a more obvious, if unreal, psychogeography, the associations remain subconscious and without open cultural referents. 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. But in the end it always circles back to a humanist perspective in terms of the audience and the collective appreciation of music as a popular art, animistically worshipped as providing the spirit of life and other such slogans of entertainment politics. Arms folded or headphones on, music in the modern age has become yet another flashpoint between the individual and the group: hatred of music is hatred of both the self and other people. Which explains why I initially found this album most useful in blocking out the drunken yelpings of teenagers heading to the Wes disco of a Friday night, at the back of the bus into town; but also a pleasantly immersive soundtrack to a solitary walk in the park on a mild winter’s day, as the sun hid behind the low clouds.

animal collective electro tim hecker HFN 2011

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Si Schroeder - ‘The Reluctant Aviator’ from Coping Mechanisms (Trust Me I’m A Thief Records, 2006)

You should really read, if you haven’t already, Tom Ewing’s Pitchfork piece on pop music and depression, and the selection of anonymized comments from the preparation of the article. The one that I most identify with is the one which partially refutes the idea of the article: that “the idea of music associated with depression is completely foreign to me” and that’s what necessary for that person is “complete, utter silence; not just no sound, but the active lack of it. Nothing sounds right when it’s on. Anything I could possibly listen to would assert itself too much or wilt into dull noise.”

For me, music (or rather the willingness to listen to it) is a good indicator of my mood. Compared to other forms of recreation - books, for example, or going to the pub - it requires very little actual effort to put on an album and the reward can be consequently often much greater: so it’s not just a function of tiredness or wanting a safe bet, there is plenty of music appropriate for those situations. Instead, the lack of desire to listen to music and the reaction to actually doing so, as described above, becomes an early warning system for anhedonia in sub-clinical depression. It’s not the only times I don’t want to listen to music - genuine tiredness or distraction does that as well - but it’s a constant factor in relation to depression.

That said, there are some things that blur the lines a little bit between the classic sympathetic art (which I don’t really understand) and the alternative extreme:

“If there was anything I’d listen to, it’d have to be something that goes nowhere, does nothing, just sits there inert. This generally doesn’t make for good music, certainly nothing I’d listen to otherwise.”

Something like the above is perhaps a happy medium - understandably so, given the title of the album - in that it’s calm but engaging, reflective but propulsive, and most of all, carefully constructed yet still offbeat and odd. This record has long been one of my favourites, and for almost as long I - and many others - have been awaiting the Irish artist’s follow-up to a debut recognised as one of the best, indeed in the eyes of Nialler9 and Foggy Notions the best, of 2006. ~~(And if you want to believe Wikipedia, “Influential Irish blog Hardcore for Nerds called Coping Mechanisms Ireland’s Spiderland.”)~~

I’ve only managed to catch him live once, on my 21st birthday, and it was my one true experience of Irish shoegaze, given that I’ve pretty much avoided going to see the My Bloody Valentine reunion shows. As well as shoegaze - the guy used to be one half of a MBV/Sonic Youth tribute act - there’s also I think an element of slowcore, something I was reminded of by Tom Ewing’s mention of Bill Callahan and Smog’s ‘To Be Of Use’: that languorous style, minus the slight American country twang, is part of what I think makes Si Schroeder so relaxing and yet affecting, seemingly inoffensive yet with a hint of menace. Or something else that I read about EMA:

“I think it has to do with the balance between anxiety and relief on the record. Every time you reach a point where it’s becoming so unimaginably sad and hopeless and overwhelming that you can’t take it, it turns into something life affirming and beautiful.”

It may sound like a bad thing, but I like when a record like that is neither one thing or the other: anxious or relieving, depressive or cheerful, but instead some ironic, aporetic mix between the two.

00s electro irish shoegaze si schroeder HFN

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I went looking to see if Skins had had any particularly good dubstep tracks lately, re: this cri de coeur from Philolzophy, but turns out I liked the witch house better - remember when Salem and Crystal Castles were THE SAME THING, rather than an argument about rap authenticity and a disappointingly vacuous duo of albums? - and this is where I wonder why.

As it happened, the latest episode’s soundtrack was pretty much all about the dubstep, in the way the wholly unrealistic but affecting story of a farmer’s son in the rural hinterlands of collegiate Bristol can be; but to me all dance music is just a succession of impressionistic, whole-environment moments and not something that works when reframed outside of its context. In that sense dubstep shares a lot with dub, which rarely works as a series of discrete, isolated tracks beyond the initial pull of how one individual dub spreads out its aural strata into the listening experience. Thus the characteristic wobble of dubstep is little different from dub’s iconic layered echo, quite apart from its direct lineage, in that it forms the momentary reference point in a wider, fog-laden atmosphere, but rarely a workable hook (exceptions, such as Horace Andy’s ‘Skylarking’, form a gateway into the sound rather than a basis for its expansion).

Witch house, at least at its more electro/synth-pop end, is also about creating such an atmosphere, but unlike true dance music, extends it into the shape of a song, primarily a vehicle for reflection, rather than a dance, primarily a vehicle for action. Neither is in itself better or worse than the other, just different. But one functions better as an extractable, coherent text; and, boiled down, as a signifier for emotion. In the preceding episode which this track - originally released as a split 7” with oOoOO, on a label named ‘Emotion’, about this time last year, though the video above dates from much earlier - featured, it follows songs by the actual Crystal Castles, Salem and, in a minor gear shift, the National, charting the acute personal collapse of the jockish, overconfident but conflicted character at the episode’s centre. It’s a pity the soundtrack commentary, from the show’s music supervisor, is so blokeish, because the scene itself is OTT drugs and sex, even in the Skins context, and this just provides the rock’n’roll overload:

“If music has ever sounded like a gigantic looping ket hole to you then it was probably this song you were listening to. White Ring are making music in the same vein as Salem but with more comparison to bands like Crystal Castles. This is the track that is playing through the stereo when Nick gets down with a mother of three, until it all goes a bit dark. A word to the wise if you ever find yourself sleeping with an older woman and she puts a track of this nature on, get out of there, she’s either gonna slip you a finger or start crying half way through. Either way your day’s fucked.”

It’s a New York track placed on a show with a very UK philosophy, but what dub(step) roots there are - this Pitchfork article does a good job of explaining the connections - can be traced back to London, before they’re mixed with the violence of the US rap influence. Witch house is several things overlaid at once, which forms its oppressive musical power, but it’s that same voracious cultural appetite which renders the simplicity of dubstep an aesthetic adrift in the Atlantic currents, a detached form of dance music looking for a meaning to attach itself to. Hence, a simulacra of a simulacra - when seeking to fold it into the -waves of -gaze, at least, rather than adapting the relatively simple technical formulations from overseas. Dubstep is real, hipsters aren’t - until you make them so.

skins dub uk tv electro salem HFN

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