“Hatred Of Music I,” our first taste of Tim Hecker‘s new album, Ravedeath 1972 (Kranky), is a pensive, shape-shifting composition recorded on pipe organ, then manipulated into a menacing experimental wonder. As the title suggests, it’s also a reflection on those rare moments in history when music has been seen as a vice more than virtue. Consider the album’s cover, which sees a group of MIT students atop a building in the process of hurling a piano to its death on the ground below. (Hecker elaborates on this inspiration in a recent interview with Pitchfork.) And while the narrative behind Ravedeath is worth meditating on, our real fascination with the album is more informed by the immensity of the music itself. It was tracked almost entirely in one day with the assistance of Ben Frost in July 2010, and Hecker made use of a church in Reykavik, Iceland, to lay the foundation for his signature sound-molding that was to come. The result is yet another in a long line of collections from Hecker that are both thoughtful and transcendent, meditative and freeing. Here, Hecker encourages us to think, to be sure, but more importantly to feel, no matter the consequences.
“Hatred Of Music I” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/HatredOfMusicI.mp3
