This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
On Don’t Look Away, Tucker contrasts traditional song structure with experimental collage and rich orchestral arrangements. Featuring guest appearances from Nik Void (Carter Tutti Void, Factory Floor) on vocals and Daniel O’Sullivan on viola, the album emerged during a particularly prolific creative period for Tucker that saw him composing for the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland, and establishing UNDIMENSIONED, his own independent publishing imprint.
Following the release of Don't Look Away, Tucker will be heading out on a European tour, including a special album release show at the Shacklewell Arms in London on 5th September. Special guests include Paper Dollhouse and a DJ sets from the crew behind new archival imprint Disciples.
As the pairing of drummer/percussionist Marshall Trammell and Zachary James Watkins on guitars and electronics, Black Spirituals has had a short, but overwhelmingly brilliant run of experimental albums. Black Access/Black Axes represents the final release in this arrangement (Watkins will be continuing to use the name, however, but with different collaborators), and also a band at the their peak. Drawing from the worlds of noise, jazz, and rock—but never easily settling in to any of those more limiting genres—the album instead encompasses everything, and makes for one of the most multifaceted, and amazing, albums so far this year.
There are distinct themes of reappropriation and decolonialization throughout the record, which are all clearly aligned with the roughly defined styles that make up Black Access/Black Axes.First, the jazz influences in Trammell’s drumming and the subtle rock and roll elements in Watkins’ guitar work echo two styles of music that were initially Black creations, but later co-opted (and in many cases diluted) by White artists who profited on their imitations.Here those signifiers are presented in a unique, fresh context that neither fully sound like their original forms, nor their distilled modern interpretations, but instead something entirely new and unique.
More subtle, in my opinion, would be that these jazz and rock tendencies are recast in an overall more avant garde and experimental context.The former has too often been within the purview of snooty academia, limiting both race and social class among its earliest practitioners.The world of noise, however, ends up being the most damning, with its use of provocative themes that have too often embraced fascism, bigotry, and misogyny.Either way, both styles have never been anything close to inclusive, but Black Spirituals' work sonically fits into both, but also transcends such a label.
It may seem like a minor detail, but it is an important distinction:Black Spirituals is not a duo, but a duet of two soloists working together.Meaning that, any one of the ten pieces spread across the two records could be either just Trammell or Watkins' work absent the other, and would still make for a powerful record.This fact is made apparent towards the middle of the album, with "Want" being largely understated electronics and field recordings (Watkins' specialty), before immediately transitioning into the rapid, amazingly complex solo drumming of Trammell on "Anti Up".
When the two are performing together, however, the final product is even more marvelous.The noisy opening and feedback squall of "Inference" heralds Trammell’s hyperkinetic drumming, a tight, dynamic pairing of dissonant elements that are soon melded together by Watkins’ guitar, which drifts between aggressive squeal and melodic motifs.Surging electronics and lighter rhythms open "Treatment" on a more calm, meditative note, but the two dial things up in time, with the drums becoming faster and more intense, and electronics and guitar getting grittier and rawer with each passing moment, reaching a pinnacle of organized chaos before then rolling back.
The calmer moments on Black Access/Black Axes are no less essential either."Condition" may open with an aggressive electronic buzz, but Watkins keeps some shimmering lighter tones deep in the mix.Trammell’s drumming is a bit more restrained tempo-wise and it makes for a greater sense of tranquility throughout.The first half of "Dissension" is also somewhat peaceful, with a well-controlled electronic drone and sparse, intricate drumming throughout.Afterwards, however, it starts to build, with the rhythms becoming gradually louder and more forceful, and soaring improvised guitar leads.
While I am sad to hear that this will be the final Black Spirituals record in this configured, it cannot be argued that in this duet form, Marshall Trammell and Zachary James Watkins are going out at the top of their game as performers and collaborators.Black Access/Black Axes is a wonderfully multilayered record that covers everything, from meditative complexity to the undeniable joy that loud, distorted electric guitars can bring.Which is another defining facet of this record:the spirituals part of the project’s name is quite descriptive, because even among the noise, distortion, and pounding rhythms, every song here is imbued with a sense of joy and celebration.Even within the ever-declining American social climate that Black Spirituals draws from here, there is an undeniable sense of positivity, strength, and joy.Black Access/Black Axes is a massive record, and one that is easy among the best I have heard in years.
This is Westberg's first solo album as a non-Swan, an occasion he chose to celebrate by radically transforming his working methods: After Vacation abandons his characteristic single-take/no-overdubbing purist high-wire act for a far more expansive, composed, and produced aesthetic. The latter bit is especially significant, as Westberg credits producer Lawrence English as something of a collaborator and After Vacation quite fits comfortably among Room40's more ambient-drone releases. Admittedly, that approach dilutes Westberg's magic a bit, as his home-recorded releases are a bit more distinctive than this one. After Vacation is a fine release in its own right, however, as Westberg makes the most of his expanded palette, crafting a superb (if understated) headphone album that reveals vibrant layers of depth, nuance, and buried melody with attentive listening.
The old adage "necessity is the mother of invention" goes a long way towards explaining the niche that Norman Westberg has quietly carved out for himself with his home recordings over the last few years.So many great and groundbreaking albums over the last several decades have been directly or indirectly birthed by hurdles like primitive recording equipment, cheap gear, or pure technical ineptitude.In Westberg's case, the challenging constraint was admittedly a self-imposed one, yet it was no less effective in steering him into a compellingly unique style.Given that he has had such success with his brand of loop-based, performative minimalism, it was something of a bold choice to open himself up to a potentially paralyzing world of infinite possibilities with this latest outing.Then again, maybe it was not: Westberg's previous work could be interpreted as an intimate and understated counterbalance to his work in Swans–now that Swans are no more, his solo albums have become his primary canvas.In any case, it is interesting to see the various directions that he uses his newfound freedom to explore on After Vacation.Of the album's many threads, the opening "Soothe the String" perhaps takes the most predictable and instantly gratifying path, embellishing Westberg's characteristic drones and swells with a melodic motif that feels like a hauntingly Lynchian take on Morricone-influenced noir.The closing title piece has roughly the same idea, but heads in a far more sun-dappled and meditative direction, as Westberg languorously explores an acoustic guitar melody over a serene backdrop of warmly shimmering drones and a chorus of crickets.
Both are fine pieces, but the more I listen to After Vacation, the more I find myself increasingly drawn to the more subtle work that lies between them.In particular, the 12-minute epic "Levitation" stands as the album’s understated centerpiece, lazily unfolding as a rippling dreamscape of shimmering guitar drones over a wobbly submerged pulse.Elsewhere, "Sliding Sledding" dabbles in elegantly blurred slow-motion psychedelia a la Expo '70, while "Drops in a Bucket" approximates a guitar-based twist on the hallucinatory "sci-fi tribal" aesthetic pioneered by Zoviet France and Rapoon.The latter is one of the most deceptively sophisticated and immersive pieces on the entire album, as its warbling organ-like motif slowly winds its way through a shuddering, throbbing sea of brooding loops.My other favorite piece is "Norman Seen As An Infant," which delves into similarly haunting territory, as Westberg weaves a subtly vibrant and shimmering web of ghostly feedback, murky layering, and a billowing fog of darkly impressionistic overtones.
Contextualizing After Vacation within the existing arc of Westberg’s solo discography is a bit of a tricky puzzle, as it simultaneously feels like a leap forward and a partial erosion of what made his work great in the first place.That is more of a testament to exquisite pleasures of hearing a master work in real-time than a legitimate shortcoming here though–I have no reservations at all about calling After Vacation another fine album.However, there is a bit an uneven/transitional feel that muddies the waters a bit, as though Westberg is trying out several new directions at once with varying degrees of success.I suspect a lot of that feeling unavoidably comes from my personal expectations for what a Norman Westberg album should sound like, however, so someone with less of a history with his work would probably not be plagued with any such doubts at all.More importantly, After Vacation is easily the most accessible of Westberg's releases, so it is the most likely to lure in such listeners.They will not be disappointed, as there is quite a lot to love here regardless of whether the album is viewed on its own merits or within the context of Norman's evolution as an artist–his hit rate remains as impressive as ever.And frankly, an aesthetic jailbreak like this had to come along eventually, as there was no way that Westberg could continue within his narrow constraints forever without starting to repeat himself.I did not quite expect it to happen this soon, but it is certainly a pleasant surprise that he was able to manage the transformation so seamlessly and unveil a few fresh classics to boot.
Launching their Lower Floor imprint in 2017 has turned out to be one of the best ideas that Wolf Eyes have ever had, establishing a new outlet that thus far has a near-perfect track record of only releasing the band's strongest and most coherent material. This latest installment, a reissue of an early masterwork from the Aaron Dilloway years, continues that hot streak beautifully. Dread is a murderers' row of grimy, shambling, and ruined delights, featuring two absolute monster bookends with no filler or half-baked experiments in between. This album is broken, thuggish, and ugly in all the best ways–I cannot think of any other Wolf Eyes album quite as simultaneously focused and inspired as this one.
There is truly no better way to open a Wolf Eyes album than a piece like "Burn Your House Down," in which Nate Young repeated howls that he is going to do exactly that over a shuddering and heaving mechanized nightmare held together by an obsessively swooping and plunging bass snarl.As brutal as it is, "Burn Your House Down" is perversely elegant in its simplicity: there is one strong motif and one (very) strong lyrical sentiment that relentlessly move forward through a howling chaos of broken beats, sputtering electronics, strangled feedback, and mangled samples.Also, it is a remarkably concise piece, as is the later "Let the Smoke Rise."On more recent albums, the band's best material tends to take the shape of longer pieces, but Wolf Eyes had some of the lingering intuitions of a rock band at this stage and it suited them well: Dread is ostensibly a noise album, but it does not exactly feel like one, as there are skeletons of hooks, rhythms, and songs within its burning wreckage.Also, Young's world-weary, stream-of-consciousness vocals give Wolf Eyes a humanity and charisma that is lacking in most other noise artists' work (even if it is arguably an anti-charisma).There are certainly moments of brute force here, but Young, Dilloway, and John Olson generally worked quite hard to be menacing through mood and texture rather than raw power.
Even the longer pieces on Dread feel like ingeniously crafted "songs" rather than sprawling experiments–they just take a more slow-burning approach in which several broken and meandering threads unexpectedly converge into something of real power.The 14-minute "Desert of Glue/Wretched Hog" is an especially deft example of that, as it initially sounds like someone just dicking around with a thudding, go-nowhere drum machine pattern amidst some random electronic squiggles.Once Young's vocals appear, however, it coheres into an endearingly lurching, sparse, and fitful pulse embellished by a surreal miasma of tape-based lunacy (elephant noises are an especially delightful recurring theme).At some point, it all seemingly dissolves into indulgent chaos, yet a stomping new beat soon reforms to resurgently bulldoze its way through a cacophony of splattering electronics and distressed-sounding didgeridoo.When Young reappears to announce that he is "coming on like a wretched mess," he fucking means it and he is entirely correct.I had a much harder time warming to the 11-minute "Half Animal, Half Insane" because it takes such a long time (roughly 8 minutes) to build up to its gloriously dumb and pummeling crescendo, but it is actually a dark horse candidate for the album's coolest song.Once it catches fire, it feels like a compellingly grotesque caricature of meat-headed, "angry guy" rock–like Phil Anselmo bravely soldiering though Pantera's final song at a gig where all the instruments are broken and on fire and a chittering swarm of robotic insects has engulfed the audience.
The album closes with its second brilliant "single," the 4-minute "Let the Smoke Rise."It shares the deceptively elegant (if slime-coated) simplicity of the album's opener, but lowers the intensity to a bubbling simmer: the piece is little more than Young's sneering and nihilistic anti-poetry over an erratic and heaving groove that sounds like a poorly built machine on its last legs.Also, one of the lines sounds a lot like "Baby, I'm Oedipal," which is very amusing.In any case, it is the fourth great song in a row on Dread: all killer, no filler.I dearly wish I had heard this album sooner.Like many people, I first encountered Wolf Eyes with 2004's Burned Mind.I liked it, but it definitely did not motivate me to try to track down the bands' earlier releases, as I would never have guessed that Wolf Eyes were much better a few years earlier (for one or two albums, at least).I love some of their recent albums too, so it is debatable whether Dread is Wolf Eyes' absolute zenith, but I have no doubts about whether it is essential (it is).Dread is a perfect and improbable confluence of disparate aesthetics that no one else could ever replicate: a potent and visceral collision of high-brow and low-brow that deftly avoids the weaknesses of either.There is nothing else quite like Wolf Eyes at their peak, an experience akin to being stomped by a violent biker gang over a disagreement about their views on musique concrète or Jacques Derrida's indirect influence on underground rock.
Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us.
Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. Gave In Rest echoes that emotional state of solitude and ephemerality, reaching towards familiar musical landscapes but from oblique perspectives.
"I've always been a pretty solitary person, but that summer I discovered quiet moments to be increasingly valuable," says Davachi. "I became engaged in private practices of rest and rumination, almost to the point of ritual." Though not religious, she sought ecclesiastic environments, compelled by "the quietude, the air of reverence, the openness of the physical space, the stillness of the altars." She sat for hours in muted spaces and listened to how church instruments augmented them – their pipe organs, their bells, their choral voices – and resolved to, "tap into that way of listening." She set a goal to musically embody this secular mysticism, and Gave In Rest is the result.
Out September 14th, 2018. More information can be found here and here.
Prior to focusing his efforts on running Recital and publishing gorgeous works by the likes of Ian William Craig, Loren Connors, Roger Eno, Sarah Davachi and many more, not to mention working on his own ambitious recording projects like Music for Public Ensemble, Sean McCann was one of the most prolific artists within the whole experimental cassette underground, issuing upwards of 40 releases within the span of 2008 to 2011.
I caught on to McCann’s music during this time period as a contributor to the late Foxy Digitalis experimental music blog. I received a copy of his early Jasmine tape in my first massive box of promos and would go on to acquire a surprising number of his titles in the ensuing years. As anyone who actively follows this area of music can attest, though, it can be rather challenging keeping up with everything that comes out and inevitably certain releases go out of print before you catch wind of them.
Fountains, initially a double CD-R on the short-lived Roll Over Rover imprint, was one of those releases that slipped by me at the time. It was only within this past year while corresponding with Sean about some of his unreleased material that I was guided back to Fountains, and I'm so very grateful for that. Within McCann’s vast back catalog, Fountains is arguably his strongest and most cohesive ambient statement. There is an undeniable depth, beauty, and expansiveness to the layers of sound that spill forth from this release, possessing the same time blurring and cranium clearing qualities that would wet the weepers of Budd, Bryers, Chalk, and even Eno himself. In the program notes that Sean penned for this reissue, he writes that after his move from San Francisco to Los Angeles he was "hell-bent on recording an ambient 'masterwork' album." He goes on to state, "I tried for months and could not make it work. It was going to be a double-LP that would have been the first Recital edition. Ultimately I gave up and moved onto the Music for Private Ensemble project." Perhaps it was the proverbial 'can't see the forest for the trees' scenario, but I’m convinced that the passage of time will shed new light on Fountains and many more people, maybe even Sean, will come to view it as the ambient masterpiece that it is.
Round Bale Recordings is pleased to present an expanded edition of the already expansive Fountains that includes five unpublished tracks from roughly the same time period, adding up to a total running time of 2 hours and 16 minutes. This double cassette edition is housed in an oversized poly-trim case with an insert and liner notes written by Sean McCann. Download codes are included in each set.
Blue Chemise documents the hermetic soundworld of Australia's Mark Gomes. Daughters of Time follows 2017's brilliant full-length Influence on Dusk, released in micro-edition on Gomes' own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. For me these pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor's evocative Airs, conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable."
Highly synergistic split from ELEH/Caterina Barbieri featuring two sides of similar audio dimensions. These two electronic sound poems slowly unfurl rich timbre and harmonics with an austere stillness that is, somehow, ever-changing. It hardly matters whose side is whose.
"One of electronic music's most interesting new voices." FACT
Born Again In The Voltage is an astonishing collection of electro-acoustic pieces for Buchla 200 system, cello and voice composed and produced by Caterina Barbieri at Elektronmusikstudion (SE) between 2014 and 2015.
Cello by Antonello Manzo. Images by Giovanni Brunetto. Photography by Angelo Jaroszuk Bogasz. Layout by IMPREC. Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Music produced by Caterina Barbieri between August 2014 and August 2015.
Recorded and mixed at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm (SE).
First released on Play It Again Sam back in 1987 and newly reissued on Metropolis, Any Day Now is one of the jewels of The Legendary Pink Dots' '80s discography. Sadly, I was far too busy scouring Circus for Guns N' Roses news to notice it when it first surfaced and only started to delve into the Dots' catalog in the mid-'90s. As a result, Any Day Now was already 25 years old by the time I eventually heard it as part of the Dots' ambitious remastering campaign a few years back. In some respects, I suppose Any Day Now felt a bit dated in places when I finally heard it, but I was far more struck by how vibrant and fleshed-out the band sounded as a six-piece (the violin of Patrick Wright is especially delightful). I am hesitant to say that The Legendary Pink Dots once "rocked," but the full-band aesthetic of that era was certainly quite a different experience than the more distilled and Ka-Spel-centric fare of recent years. Both eras have their share of highlights, certainly, but Any Day Now captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most lively, playful, and hook-minded, largely excising all of their most indulgent tendencies to craft an incredibly endearing suite of psych-pop gems. This is a legitimate classic.
The overall aesthetic of Any Day Now is quite a fascinating and unusual one, resembling a cross between an ambitious prog rock concept album and an unnervingly creepy children’s book, evoking a wide range of characters and scenes that seem to weave a strange and elusive narrative.I have no idea what it all means or if any of the individual pieces are intended parts of larger story, but it is certainly feels like colorful, dramatic, and surreal journey regardless.For example, the violin-driven waltz "The Gallery" feels like a charmingly foppish bit of cabaret with amusingly wobbly fretless bass, while the brief "The Peculiar Funfair" resembles a glimpse of a manic and nightmarish circus.Elsewhere, the album's most tender and nakedly lovely piece, "Laguna Beach," is a delicately twinkling bit of chamber pop balladry that sounds plucked from a fairytale.Lurking among all of those anachronistic divergences are a number of songs that are very much of their time, however, embodying a particularly eccentric blend of the era's pervading art-pop tropes: big electronic drums, sliding fretless bass, saxophone solos, and proggy instrumental breaks.There is even a brief and amusing flourish of slapping and popping funk bass at one point.On pieces like "Strychnine Kiss" and "True Love" that aesthetic can certainly feel dated, but it at least feels dated in a very charming way: it still sounds unmistakably like The Legendary Pink Dots, but it feels like The Legendary Pink Dots crashing some '80s pop gig and doing an impromptu set on borrowed instruments.Also, several of the more '80s-sounding pieces are more than strong enough to transcend such quirks.In particular, "Neon Mariner" stands as an especially striking highlight, balancing out its booming drums and awkwardly funky bass with wonderfully moody keyboards, lovely violin countermelodies, tight songcraft, and an impressively strong chorus.
Notably, Play It Again Sam's 1988 CD reissue of Any Day Now appended the Under Glass EP, which has remained attached to the album ever since (to some fans’ chagrin).I think those fans can be safely dismissed as absolute lunatics though, as the three songs from Under Glass definitely make the album significantly better and more substantial.Normally, I too tend to be hostile to the idea of expanding a classic album with bonus tracks, as most bonus tracks generally fall into that category precisely because they were not good enough to make the album.While I could give or take the driving rocker "The Plasma Twins," the thumping and pulsing electro-pop of "Under Glass" is one of the single most perfect pop songs on the entire album.More importantly, "The Light In My Little Girl's Eyes" is one of the most gloriously weird and creepily erotic songs in the entire LPD canon.I cannot think of anything else quite like it, as it combines some of Ka-Spel’s finest and most unnervingly perverse lyrics ("Are you feeling dirty?Yes, but also very pleased") with an unexpectedly propulsive and wild instrumental backdrop.There is even some light cannibalism at the end (something for everyone, really).I never expected to write that the Dots had a killer rhythm section, but the band was legitimately firing on all cylinders in this case and bassist Jason Salmon and drummer Tony Copier deserve a hell of a lot of the credit for that.Even the guitar and violin solos are great.Rarely have I heard the Dots tear it up quite like they do here.In a perfect world, the album probably would end there, but Any Day Now is further augmented by one final song, "Gladiators (Version Apocalypse)," which comes from Stone Circles but was recorded during the same sessions as this album.As such, its inclusion makes sense, but its proggy jamming does not hit nearly the same heights as "Little Girl’s Eyes."
It is kind of amusing and fascinating to travel back to a time when Ka-Spel and The Silverman still had identifiable influences, as they have long since transcended that and seem far more like a (super)natural phenomenon that is only influenced by itself these days.I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as the duo have plunged so deeply into their lysergic rabbit hole at this point that Ka-Spel seems more like an impossibly wise psychedelic shaman than an unusually literate frontman of a cool rock band.I certainly have room in my heart for both.My only real caveat with Any Day Now is that it captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most catchy, accessible, and (comparatively) straightforward, which is a contrast to the deeper, more intense, and more experimental fare that the band is generally known for.That has caused some fans to view it is one of LPD's more lightweight releases, but it does not feel that way to me at all.While Any Day Now is certainly not heavy psychedelia by any means, it is far from a watered-down or toothless version of the band.Instead, it feels like they just had an unusually great batch of songs and executed them with atypically sharp focus, resulting in quite a bright, vibrant, listenable, and (again, comparatively) fun album.As such, Any Day Now is easily one of the most essential releases in the band’s entire overwhelming discography and an ideal point of entry for the curious.
Newly reissued on Kranky, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was Tim Hecker's remarkably fine debut album under his own name (he had previously been releasing techno as Jetone). Revisiting it now as a long-time Hecker fan, I find it still stands up as a great album, yet there is surprisingly little about it that presages the visionary career that would follow in its wake. At the time of their release, both Haunt Me (2001) and its follow-up (Radio Amor) merely felt like a couple of the better albums to emerge from a thriving generation of glitch-inspired, laptop-wielding artists centered roughly around Mille Plateaux. As such, Haunt Me was very much an album of its time, but that time was truly a golden age of experimental music: this debut was just one of many enduring gems from a period where it seemed like the flood of crucial albums from Fennesz, Colleen, Jim O'Rourke, Oval, Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, and others was never going to end.
It was interesting to go back and read about how Haunt Me was initially received upon its release, as it feels quite bizarre in hindsight to view Tim Hecker as a techno producer or an experimental guitarist.Nevertheless, he was both of those things and there are some overt shades of each swimming around Hecker's warmly stuttering and skipping drone bliss.The opening three-part "Music for Tundra," for example, sounds very much like the dreamily indistinct thrum of E-bow drones.While Hecker's background as a guitarist is certainly responsible for the enveloping, soft-focus heaven of languorously sustained chords at the album’s core, the true magic of the album lies in how he disrupts and manipulates that idyll with an ingenious arsenal of hisses, crackles, crystalline bubbles of synth-like tones, and a host of more aggressive and gnarled intrusions.There is also a very free-wheeling and kaleidoscopic sense of experimentation that runs throughout the album, as if Hecker had a rough idea of how he wanted to sound, but was still testing the boundaries of that vision.For example, the third part of "Arctic Loner's Rock" sounds like an ephemeral radio transmission of a pop song that that has been stretched and reversed by mysterious atmospheric forces.Elsewhere, "Border Lines (Part Two)" resembles a time-stretched fire alarm that gradually gets consumed by a chorus of alien insects.On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hecker nods to his techno roots with an understated beat in both "Boreal Kiss" and "Night Flight To Your Heart."Notably, it is the same beat each time, which illustrates another curious feature of Haunt Me: extremely unusual sequencing.There are multiple song suites that seamlessly segue into one another and motifs from one piece often resurface again elsewhere.That sense of looping familiarity adds nicely to the album's fever dream atmosphere.
Most of Haunt Me's highlights come in the middle of the album, the best of which is the sole piece that is not part of a song suite: "The Work of Art in The Age of Cultural Overproduction."Clocking in at over seven minutes, Hecker's wry Walter Benjamin homage is the album's heart and centerpiece in both duration and inspiration, transforming the album’s usual drones into something more viscerally churning, roiling, and machine-like.Rather than feeling like another gently lysergic meditation, it instead resembles a rumbling and lumbering juggernaut that keeps relentlessly moving forward despite its individual components constantly splintering, skipping, and dropping out.Hecker continues that hot streak with the gorgeous two-part "October" that follows, in which a lovely, shimmering, and submerged-sounding loop slowly wends its way through a sea of tape hiss.The following "Ghost Writing" is similarly beautiful, as warbling and indistinct snatch of melody lazily drifts like smoke until it gets transformed and obliterated by something resembling an electromagnetic storm (albeit one featuring an unexpected cameo from Regis Philbin).While those pieces are the most memorable ones to my ears, Haunt Me does not feel like a series of discrete pieces so much as a sustained, flickering, and dreamlike spell.Moments of sublime beauty continue to surface throughout the entire album–the aforementioned handful of pieces just happen to stand out because the album's hallucinatory flow reaches a crest around the halfway point.
While the broad strokes of Haunt Me's aesthetic have lingered throughout Hecker’s career and make it instantly recognizable as his work, it is quite a bit less distinctive than his later fare.The reason for that has a lot to do with scale and heft, as the understated Haunt Me aesthetic of gently skipping ambient warmth resembles an established milieu far more than the blown-out, sensory overload onslaught of his more recent work.There is nothing remotely as harrowing as Virgins or as rapturous as Love Streams on Haunt Me–just the quiet pleasures of sublimely shimmering and ephemeral dronescapes.As such, Haunt Me is kind of a curious entry in Tim Hecker’s discography, as it is classic of a genre and is frequently hailed as a Tim Hecker classic as well (primarily because it was most people's first exposure to his work), but it is arguably a mere shadow of the more staggering albums that came further down the line.Or maybe not, as plenty of people prefer this more vaporous and haunted side of Hecker's work and miss its lightness of touch (art is subjective as hell, it seems).In any case, Haunt Me is a stellar album and I am genuinely thrilled to see it back in print.While Hecker's ambitions were considerably more modest back in 2001, his intuitive genius for harmony, texture, mood, emotional depth, and craftsmanship were present right from the start.