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Hecq, "Night Falls"
Detached from the goofy Renaissance Faire quality themes of post-industrial neo-classical music, the prolific producer marks a drastic, though lackluster, departure from his typically rhythmic past. Devoid of danceability, its transuding caliginosity faux-menaces like a murky slime creeping towards an unsuspecting idyll at sundown.
For over ten years, Hymen has made its stubborn mark on the landscape of electronic music. Initially a rough riding offshoot for Ant-Zen's more accessible acts, it morphed from moody malcontent into a more diverse champion of IDM's late bloomers, such as Kattoo, Keef Baker, and Tonikom. Another of these belated upstarts, Ben Lukas Boysen, has previously recorded three such albums for the self-proclaimed technoid imprint since 2004, all under the moniker Hecq. With this, his fourth for Hymen and sixth overall, the producer tossed his drum machines overboard and set a course for dark waters tread (and retread) by the Cold Meat Industry roster.
Boysen has evidently taken pains to craft a bleak soundtrack to a nonexistent drama, yet as with so many actual film scores, detachment from visual cues and pivotal plot points leaves the unfamiliar listener to judge the music on its own. In the case of Night Falls, such analysis is to its detriment. Unlike labelmate Lusine Icl's surreptiously melancholic Language Barrier, which ought to have resuscitated people's interest in purified ambient music, Night Falls is understated to a fault, its bland latter half rampant with elongated tone worship that neither shatters templates nor effectively challenges today's dominant dronesmiths. Practically seamless transitions between tracks frequently fail to excite. The unimaginative vocal surges on "Red Sky" that break up the preceding, pervasive monotony pale in comparison to Attila Csihar's fiendish guttural collaborations with Stephen O'Malley.
Despite its wishful beginnings and triumphant closer, the bombastic tearjerking "I Am You," Night Falls suffers from such an inexplicably prolonged slump that no ham-fisted orchestration can save this pretentious mess. Had Boysen sought simply to write background music for downtrodden goths and other such mopes to passively absorb while sulking through Second Life, this album might be considered a success. Yet it is clear that he sought more from this venture, a new direction for Hecq or a possible ascendancy to the rank of "composer." While this weak first attempt shouldn't entirely dissuade Boysen from pursuing further beatless journeys, he is no Graeme Revell.
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