Hecq
0000

"0000": an abstract title that leaves room for free interpretations. "Madonna's album" is a bit of a banal but absolutely fitting description by the undersigned; experimentation, eclectic artist, and undeniable talent are instead the foundations that allowed for the conception of one of the greatest masterpieces of the just-passed decade.

Benny Boysen's style is very atmospheric, delicate, and at the same time noisy, a German producer among the leading names of the new IDM scene; by absorbing the 'trends' of the digital millennium sound, the new frontiers of experimental electronics, and avoiding rehashing what already exists, "Hecq" creates a style with a very personal and original touch, a touch that is skillfully suspended between concrete music, industrial, neoclassical, ambient, and glitch. The result is incredible. The absorbed 'trends' are certainly the later Autechre, deploying rhythmic complexities, surgical microsounds (which sometimes do not hesitate to approach the lowercase or the turn of Gas), minimal-digital breakdowns, dark organic layers, never self-serving technicalities, and great rhythmic abstraction, for an ecstatic, alienating, inhuman yet fascinating sound. In other cases, it's the traits of certain American IDM or German power noise, those that strike with distortions and post-apocalyptic scenarios. "0000", however, unlike many records in this vein, is never repetitive, predictable, or one-directional; it knows how to traverse various territories, resulting in a multifaceted, compact, and flowing piece of work, despite talking about a brick of almost two hours (counting also the second disc, entrusted to various remixes by others – emerging and not – which, even though valid – albeit simple mannerisms – we will avoid discussing).

A multifaceted work indeed... besides the expressionist, disturbing, and convulsive sound that Boysen proposes for much of the work, it is not uncommon to encounter ambient textures worthy of the best Brian Eno (as in "0011") or radical episodes of pure noise, sick and aseptic (the hallucinogenic "0007", the nervous "0004", the unsettling "0014"), a bit in the style of early Schematic releases. Of proper melody, relegated as it is to the spectral background, there is very little; when it appears clearly and decisively ("0013", "0008"), it assumes apocalyptic or classical tones, which when overlapped with the significant noise masses remind us of the fruitful Tibet/Stapleton collaborations. It is certain that the choice to place a whole 'separate' track behind the latter (a dark and sinister track made up of dark ambient backgrounds, catacombal and paranoid drones with a parallel development, not unlike the aesthetics of Autechre's "Confield") is exploited to the fullest, even better than what the English masters did, listening to the wonders of "0005", "0009" or "0003". For the rest, "0000" is an album for those who love mental travels, a work that provides evocative images, an excursion through black-cosmic voids bordered by metallic blades, geometric constructions, Picassian edges, gray swirls, and post-industrial steam, gloomy spaces of depersonalization without soil, sky, or air. An album that sets no limits or boundaries, and the untitled tracks ("0001".. "0002" and so on) are nothing more than a clear invitation to enter the multilateral and shapeless perspective of this work, which is somewhat the same premise that the great "76.14" by Global Communication set, the only common point with a much more sparkling, more human, lighter album.

"0000" is a visionary and cinematic work, an album that - if taken in an IDM context - we can define as the exact opposite of the early Boards of Canada, where they created scenarios of nostalgia, joy, childhood, here it is the anxiety and the darkest gloom that dominate, strong from a lesson that definitely distances itself from IDM roots, to rather approach the more abstract and sepulchral industrial (Kranioklast, Coil, Zoviet France, Organum, Konstruktivist, Illusion of Safety, Premature Ejaculations to name the most artistically close..) try the combination "0015" "0017" to believe. It would not look out of place in some prestigious Staalplaat.

Majestic.