TIM HECKER - Ravedeath, 1972

If we'd last left Tim Hecker in search of an imaginary country, populated by astral trails and luminous electronic pulsations, we can now assume that, in the two years since the ambitious “An Imaginary Country” (with only the long track “Apondalifa” in between), the Canadian artist has actually found that dreamland.

As for so many others in the recent past – from Jimmy LaValle's “In A Safe Place” to Will Oldham's “The Letting Go” – that imaginary country has a precise geographical location on the globe, sitting in the North Atlantic, roughly between the 64th and 66th parallel.

So Tim Hecker too has fallen under Iceland's magnetic spell, to the point of building his sixth solo album out of live, semi-improvised recordings made on the majestic pipe organ of a church in Reykjavík, captured over the course of a very long day in July 2010 by “adopted Icelander” Ben Frost and subsequently subjected to heavy studio reworking.

Drawing on his Icelandic experience the most epic and ancestral traits of that land, Hecker forges in the twelve tracks of “Ravedeath, 1972” a primordial magma in which dark, noisy turbulence blends with extraordinary ease into harmonic abstractions, synthetic gusts and teeming ambient saturations.

“Ravedeath, 1972” can be considered conceptually a noise work, though it only rarely actually sounds like one, and not just because of the heavy presence of processed sounds and swirling drones, which nonetheless let the distinct perception of distortions, piano notes and, above all, the ever-present keyboards shine through surprisingly clearly. The result is a dazzling palette of synthetic-orchestral trance, whose only partially rounded contours evoke an imagery made of rough ripples, faithfully summed up in the album's title and in those of much of its tracklist, which depict powerful images such as hatred, suicide, paralysis and a spectral fog that dulls the senses in a solemn symphony, like the one found in the first of the two meaningful trilogies inspired by atmospheric elements (the dazzling “In The Fog”).

From the dense but vivid blanket that wraps the work in a cocoon of unease and excitement, simulacra of noise and crackling samples emerge, but also surprising fragments of pianistic serenity and deep ambient immersions, which combine in a masterful synthesis souls often kept separate by artists working in similar territory (think of the romantic textures and droning amplifications of Eluvium).

The pulsations that ripple the surface of the mountain-lake mirror of “The Piano Drop” are a clear example of the new sonic synthesis achieved, between icy gusts and mysterious tensions. The enchanting triptych of “In The Fog” is followed by a vignette of pure sonic isolationism – “No Drums” – worthy of Thomas Koner's finest moments. And after the silence come the impetuous walls of the two episodes of “Hatred Of Music”, passages of pure musical romanticism: the drones unfurl like the wings of the Phoenix flying toward the sun, while a sense of ecstatic warmth envelops the atmosphere. Between the boundless sea of “Studio Suicide, 1980”, reminiscent of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and the misty leanings of Sigur Rós from the “Von” era (“Analog Paralysis, 1978”), the record's harsh-ambient skein opens up to piano in the closing triptych “In The Air”, moving through melancholy notes and dispersing celestial trails that stretch their sound waves in a motion beyond time and space.

Tim Hecker may well have built his masterpiece here. A dense, multifaceted work that embraces different styles and touches hard-to-reach depths. The Canadian artist hits the mark fully, shaping ambient material with a touch that is rough yet steeped in romanticism. This is music for shutting down and opening back up, for freeing mind and heart to contemplate the infinite.

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28/02/2011