Culture Blues

Album Review: “Ravedeath, 1972″ – Tim Hecker

Ravedeath, 1972 - Tim Hecker

Born from Dadaist and Futurist origins, ambient compositions have long been challenging both listeners and the fundamentals of Western songwriting. One of the earliest central figures within the musical movement was French composer Erik Satie, who conceived its core philosophy as “the sort of music that could be played during a dinner to create a background atmosphere for that activity, rather than serving as the focus of attention.” As the twentieth century pushed forward, and technology found its place within music creation, Satie’s doctrine of amorphism spawned numerous musical genres and sub-genres, most of which were in the drone and electronica sonic fields. It wasn't until the landmark 1978 release  of Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music For Airports, that the term ambient was actually properly used to define music. Eno even went as far as to include a manifesto in the notes of Ambient 1 that re-envisioned Satie’s philosophy and gave it a more modern coherence: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

Since Eno’s release, the number of individuals making music that (to quote him once again) exists on the “cusp between melody and texture" has grown remarkably, and Tim Hecker is among this century's brightest stars. Canadian by birth, Tim Hecker is one of the world’s most acclaimed ambient composers. A mainstay on the festival scene, Hecker has released five studio albums and numerous EPs under his own name, and three more LPs as Jetstone. His latest work of absurd greatness is Ravedeath, 1972, an album that came out earlier this year. Its review has sadly gotten bumped a few times by reviews of artists that you were more likely to be  torrenting, but now it can finally get all of the praise it deserves.

Ravedeath, 1972 is a truly magnificent record that, regardless of genre, stands out as one of this year’s finest achievements in audio. It is twelve tracks of beautiful gloom, endless resonance, and glorious sonic miasma. The main recording session for this record took place in one day, at a church in Reykjavik, Iceland. Hecker sat a large pipe organ and used its timbre and the colossal acoustics of the space as the centerpiece for the record, before adding (with the aide of Icelandic producer Ben Frost) the other textures and additional instrumentation. If this already sounds too pretentious for you, please go back to listening to the radio.

From the grainy, pulsing, beginnings of The Piano Drop, you can hear Hecker crafting an aural collage which exists in a state of constant metamorphosis, only barely alluding to the possible harmony at its heart. Once the stage has been set, we are treated to the three-part In The Fog suite; roughly 16 minutes of stretched and obscured euphony, which sounds as if it is being performed first on instruments made of metallic glass, then of ether, and, finally, of digital smoke. The lush auditory environments housed within this record are both paradoxical and endless. How can something sound both as dense and insubstantial as Hatred Of Music I and II? How can anything be as minimal, and ornate, as In The Air II and III? How can a record feel so restrained, while feeling so boundless at the same time?

This album sounds like a uniquely disorienting epiphany. If you consider yourself to be a bold and brave music explorer, by all means allow yourself to get lost in this records brume. If not, I hear Myley Cyrus is covering Smells Like Teen Spirit. Perhaps you would like to hear that?