Opening
track Prism is well named, light cuts
through clouds of aural murk, then transforms into the piercing, chaotic,
trebly piano arpeggi of Virginal I
which glisten, flicker, dim in the dark. Already the melodies (if that’s the
right word) reflect that of Ravedeath,
1972, but it’s not about the melodies, it’s a record that continues
Hecker’s exploration of texture. He reflects a kind of abstract expressionism,
Rothko blown up to an even greater, gothic scale, strip-lit and metamorphosing
before your eyes. Such verbiage may invoke a digital version of, say, Morton
Feldman but Virgins is no For Philip Guston, it’s not
self-important and it billows along at a pace, Lynch meets Argento. There are
traces of the latter’s favoured composers Goblin, as well as the former’s
forays into in sound design and composition (most particularly the industrial
soundscape of Eraserhead); Live Room is the more bombastic moments
of Suspiria both inflated and muted,
twisted, creepy, with creaking, straining, diegetic sound thrown in too – you’re
in the horror film with the score deafening
you as you desperately scramble away from your assailant.
If that all
sounds over-the-top then the empurpled prose is at fault, not the music which -
while demanding to be played at considerable volume - is never anything other
than well measured. For all its BIG moments, Virgins also has plenty of quieter ones too, as with Live Room Out,
the ghostly, more minimal sibling of its similarly named predecessor, or Black Refraction’s repeating piano
motifs, fragments of a depressed Satie heard through a stretched tape loop at a
séance, clattering medium’s table and all. The use of ‘real’ or ‘room’ (read
non-instrumental) sound in some ways disrupts the engagement of the listener,
but it also draws the listener further in – what noise is in the room or
environment that you occupy, and what is on the record?
This is one
of the more readily identifiable markers of what makes Hecker such a peerless
composer-producer; while the use of digital instruments and manipulation is
overt, its collision with the acoustic, the analogue and the ‘real’ often
leaves one unclear as to where one element ends and the other finishes; this
miasma never feels forced (although it does sometimes feel like there are
elements being pushed together with great force), it is always purposeful.
Virgins may not be a work that seems terribly subtle
on first approach, but it is in fact nuanced, intriguing, entrancing,
disquieting. Just as Francis Bacon’s art sought to “Return the onlooker to life
more violently”, Virgins finds Hecker
approaching a return of the listener to life more spectrally (in both sense of
the word). There is a deep, dark undertow to this record, but light pierces the
void in continually surprising ways, in a kind of inverted chiaroscuro; Hecker
ably demonstrates that light is essential to render the darkness all the more appealing.
Tim Hecker’s ‘Virgins’
available worldwide on Kranky (except for Canada where it is available on Paper
Bag Records).
Andrew R. Hill
