Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972

These are the albums I like!, and to anyone who knows Tim Hecker, I make a desperate appeal: tell me all the authors who combine music like this, and I'll empty my wallet and ruin myself.

Canadian, Tim Hecker lands on the icy lands of Iceland and crafts his sixth album, reprocessing and contaminating the organ liturgies of Ben Frost (Australian, transplanted in Iceland, another author with a capital A in the field of ambient/avant-garde), the result of a session of recordings made in a church in Reykjavik in July 2010: miraculous fusion between sacred and profane, we might say, but in reality, we are faced with those contemporary music masterpieces (with a capital O) that, regardless of the sacred and the profane, simply aim to outline boundless inner landscapes.

Between Fennesz and Sigur Ros, Schulze, and Eluvium, “Ravedeath, 1972”, released in the early months of 2011, is a masterpiece of abstract art, an ambient electronic that does not fear to deal with drones and dissonances, and in this, the dialectical arsenal available to Hecker does much, not only skillful behind the inevitable laptop but also able to juggle synthesizers, keyboards, piano, electric guitar, so that the result is a sound synthesis that can be at times mystical (the deconstructed organ sequences à la “Irrlicht”), at times poetic (the piano phrases that relieve tension in dreamy chamber scores), at times shaken by restless noise (the distorted arpeggios mounting just shy of the most exciting post-rock, the guitar feedback staining the celestial openings evoking the unstoppable force of nature as well as the stasis of Death).

Death. The theme of Death pervades the entire work, without relegating the operation to the low ranks of silly dark-ambient for beginners, but rather elevating to mystical and sacred a sound structure that arises from the author's deepest intimacy. The secret lies in the fusion between Self and the surrounding world, a continuity between Spirit and Nature, between moods and atmospheric elements, between Life and Death, a meeting that takes the form of a dynamic and ever-evolving melting pot that sees in a characteristic landscape like that of Iceland (the land of ice and fire) the ideal mirror to identify and extract out of its shell the vibrant and multifaceted emotional matter of Hecker: a matter icy and at the same time incandescent, fragile and impetuous, placid and restless, contemplative and equally dedicated to action. All painted with a brusque and heavy stroke, a love for contrasts, with a descriptive ability worthy of a Fennesz (although Hecker probably loses on points to the Austrian in terms of elegance and refinement in sculpting sounds): confused sounds, rough and at the same time foggy, but also powerful and incisive, as if the restlessness, the feeling from which it all stems, was overcome by a courageous determination to take the bull by the horns.

Words, the concepts they describe, after all, impoverish reality, especially since by themselves it is extremely difficult to talk about this type of music. Or perhaps too easy and too banal. Glitch, ambient, noise, cinematic music, great emotions: empty words, right?, that could describe any artist devoted to similar sounds. Perhaps it would be better to prepare a series of images, or better still, to link and refer directly to listening to this music, so hard to translate into a few lines of words.

Yet we must talk about it, even if it is not possible. One could write a sterile dissertation of technical details, which however only insiders could understand. But what about the others? And it's precisely the others who should be more interested, as Hecker's music is pure emotion and might be appreciated by those who flee from the typical cerebral nature of electronic music.

Because Hecker's music progresses through images, indeed, it is images transformed into music, in a context where sounds slowly shift like massive ice slabs adrift, in a perpetual motion made of swelling and overlapping emotions: a seesaw that sometimes takes the form of an enchanted landscape, in front of which the only attitude to assume is that of dreamy contemplation, while at other times it assails you and drags you away in whirlpools and swirling currents, dense vapors, volcanic eruptions, crescendo-not crescendo where the tension, imploded until a moment before in a boiling pot full of energy, seems finally to free itself in an ascent towards the sky.

Silence and rustles, the visionary phrases of an apocalyptic piano and the tar of the distorted guitar arpeggios, modulations and manipulations that render Hecker's art even more abstract, whose sounds stand out in the air as if they lived on their own eternity, where the beginning and the end are lost on the horizon of a cold expanse of water, rich in ripples, that slowly moves and proceeds, still conveying a sense of disorientation that gradually makes us lose the spatial and temporal connotations in which we are moving.

Like floating on a restless expanse of water, helpless, clinging to a tree trunk, with our gaze lost in an infinite gray sky, and the storm soon to upheave our existence.

5 stars. Dry.