Anticipating Tim Hecker's Virgins

http://www.spin.com/articles/tim-hecker-virginal-ii-stream-new-album-virgins/

i'm anticipating this btw but i dunno what to say

It has leaked and I am curious as to what people think of it.

i've heard a couple of the tracks streamed online and it sounded like business as usual? which is fine by me.

Interesting album cover. Reminds me of that infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the shrouded prisoner withe wires attached to him, but also the way that thing has been assembled to suggest a ghostly human presence makes me think of the photo used on the cover of Gastr Del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife (i.e. the water exploding out of a pair of wellies one). But what with the album title and the setting being a church, is it a statue of the Virgin Mary or something?

this is pretty cool imo. for me kinda different from previous stuff, a bit more layered musically and not quite as bleak - parts of it sounding a bit more psychedelic in the trad sense too.

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/06/228840821/first-listen-tim-hecker-virgins#playlist

loving this

rules

yeah second listen through it's blowing me away - the last couple of tracks are incredible.

was excellent when I saw him last month playing in a local church, but it should have been much, much louder than it was. looking forward to hearing this one.

This is so goddamn great.

love this record. reviewed it for Crack and claimed it was "a set of rotted etchings for the HD generation" so am fully expecting to turn up in the worst music writing of all time thread very soon.

it's just so incredible. elements of so many great things. i love the way little rhythms emerge and you can detect the ghost of dance music in parts.

liked what i heard on the npr stream, i should pick this up

reminded me a li'l bit of andrew pekler. (i'm not at all an "out music" kind of dude, pekler was a chance d/l that i ended up really loving)

love this guy, love this

yeah this is tops

My favorite since Radio Amor.

sick beats

Very good article from Whiney here

http://www.spin.com/articles/tim-hecker-virgins-attack-of-the-drones-interview/

great article, yeah

Also makes me want to go back to Montreal and eat and drink.

otm

http://cherryarea.blogspot.com/2013/10/tim-heckers-high-level-low-level.html

rules

― smangerz (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, October 8, 2013 9:27 PM (1 week ago)

OTM.

whiney what did u do in mtl?

I don't think it's necessary that you've had great strife or whatever to connect with things that are not 'Shiny Happy People'-level R.E.M.

lol

Among other things: Walked up Mount Royal, went used CD shopping, walked around St. Helen's Island, ate a tasting menu at Europea, ate pig's trotter at Lawrence, ate smoked meat at Schwartz's, went to a street art exhibit, and interviewed Tim Hecker

did you not see s1ocki, he is omnipresent

here's the review with the rotted etchings line...
http://crackmagazine.net/music/tim-hecker-virgins/

Finally getting the opportunity to listen to this semi-attentively, sounds like minimalism and especially Arvo Pärt is a heavy influence on this one.

Interesting album cover. Reminds me of that infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the shrouded prisoner with the wires attached to him

Ah, I really had no idea when I wrote this that there was actually a track called Incense At Abu Ghraib - I guess that cover image is a intentional reference then?

This is boggling in its scope, just so much density to all the tracks.

great record and great spin profile

Yeah, the Spin article is great.

I'd never heard Dropped Pianos until I started exploring the back catalogue in the wake of Virgins being so good. It's totally amazing - reminds me of some of the Deaf Centre stuff, if anyone has heard them.

this is perfect music for walking around to in windy, blustery days. i heard some of this guys stuff before but it didnt make much of an impression. im loving this though. it manages to be frightening and beautiful at the same time.

i just don't know abt this dude

This is great, the most satisfied I've been with a Hecker record for ages. 'Live Room' especially is incredible.

this is a very cinematic album isn't it? think it would have worked well in 'of gods and men' for those moments where gunmen burst in to the monastery to drag praying monks down the corridors of what was their sanctuary to do unspeakable violence to them

all those pianos piled on top of each other remind me of church bells on the one hand and philip jeck on the other

TH gets so many props and respect but I've never really understood his music. I thought Ravedeath was really hard to listen to, like a recording of a piano put through mounds of software compression and distortion until it loses any dynamic range whatsoever. I couldn't chillax to it as ambient music, and neither did it feel interesting or ominous enough to make me particularly interested in coming back. Am I missing the point? Maybe there's some background to this that I'm somehow neglecting...?

He's closer in intention to noise music than he is to ambient and imo his music works best at high volumes where sound becomes more of a physical force. That said, there's so much detail and layering on the new one that I think it works at quieter levels too and the sounds on it are a lot more beautiful than Ravedeath, albeit in quite a stark way. Well worth giving it a go if you haven't heard it, very much a listening though.

try 'radio amor' from 2k3

very much a listening RECORD though (whatever that means) xp

and as nick says, think of it as a noise/glitch lp (it is on mille plateaux after all) rather than a failed ambient one

cool. i'll try it again.

Nick otm, his live shows are very loud, it's not ambient music at all

copped the vinyl today...i shouldn't complain since i had a gift certificate + it was on sale, but i'm bummed that it doesn't include a download card.

I stepped away from this album shortly after its initial release. Then, in recent months I've been spending a lot of time with Hecker's back catalog. Just in the last few days I've finally returned to Virgins and am realizing that it is best. It surpasses Ravedeath, which I previously held as my favorite.

Nothing beats Harmony In Ultraviolet for me.

Well bugger me, had no idea there was a new one, and just saw it had leaked: it's called 'Love Streams'

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/TIm%20Hecker_DIGITAL%20.jpg

well I think it was just announced yesterday

it's crazy that it's already leaked

yeah, not released until april

Everything up to and including Mirages >>>>>>>>> everything since. Sorry that's just how I feel

Bigger and more expansive != better

Still feel like the ravedeath/dropped pianos combo is my personal favourite

Nice cover! See you all in April.

Holy hell, this is crushing. Sort of like some glorious middle point for me between harmony in ultraviolet and OPN's r+7, or I guess, harmony and melody. Certainly more melody than I'd expected.

Oh, interesting description. Harmony in Ultraviolet was always my favorite and I could never fall in love with his other albums in the same way however much I wanted to.

I wish I understood more about artists like Hecker (and also Danel Lopatin). On a purely musical level, I have a hard time getting my head around them. It feels like the kind of thing which once you understand the theories and ideas behind the music, it gets a bit more interesting?

Mirages was the last thing of his I cared for

The collab with lopatin was aight

dog latin are you saying you're unmoved by it? For myself, I tend to resent the idea of needing to know the context around art to be able to appreciate it.
I listen to music of any form to feel a certain way, I wouldn't have much patience to listen so I could scratch my chin at it. At least not more than once.

This msuci is pretty much the opposite of what dog latin describes to me.

*music

too much feeling messes with my typing

God forbid we use our brains and imagination

how?

yeah this is the least opaque tim hecker release i've ever heard i think. also probably going to be my favorite release by him.

dog latin are you saying you're unmoved by it? For myself, I tend to resent the idea of needing to know the context around art to be able to appreciate it.
I listen to music of any form to feel a certain way, I wouldn't have much patience to listen so I could scratch my chin at it. At least not more than once.

― Evan, Tuesday, 12 April 2016 17:23 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Always suspicious of the idea that 'If you don't feel moved by it, it's not for you' and other things like that. There are countless examples of albums and artists I've appreciated that little bit more once I've learnt a bit more about them and the context they were released. A lot of modern jazz, for example, which I only heard as 'skronking parping' noises for the most part, had the doors flung open for me after watching a few documentaries about Miles, Coltrane, Mingus etc, with people talking about the historical contexts, what the musicians were doing, what the bandleaders were moving towards and pushing against etc...
Kind of feel that Hecker and Lopatin are similar. Like, I feel as though there's backstory to this music that I don't understand - like trying to read Ulysses with no grounding in the classics whatsoever.

Everything I've heard by Hecker so far sounds like ambient music turned up way too loud. I don't find it relaxing like I would an ambient album and yet it's too melodic/not trippy enough to really appeal to me in the way a lot of noise does. It's a frustrating balance, but ultimately I get frustrated by the lack of dynamic range. Everything's just distorting and peaking in this really unpleasant way.

With Oneohtrix's last few albums, I find myself wondering what these sound collages are supposed to 'mean', or if they're meant to mean anything?

Both these artists come across as extremely absorbed in their craft. In interviews they describe their working practices in meticulous detail. This feels like 'art' in the most fundamental way, and I want to be able to unravel what is being connoted here.

swings + roundabouts album

My feeling about Hecker is that he is trying to destroy his music. Rather, he creates source material and then attacks it through digital means.

For whatever it's worth, here's some stuff I wrote about Hecker's albums a couple years ago, when I was trying to grapple with his records based on what I was hearing, not based on tons of artist interviews etc. I don't know if I'm "right" but it's what I think Hecker is up to.

http://sctttnnnt.tumblr.com/post/76814667110/krank-102-tim-hecker-harmony-in

http://sctttnnnt.tumblr.com/post/89560708895/krank-154-tim-hecker-ravedeath-1972-2011

http://sctttnnnt.tumblr.com/post/96660556514/krank-183-tim-hecker-virgins-2013-tim-hecker

The new one, Konoyo is great. Far more focused and minimally processed synth notes while layering relatively untreated acoustic instrumentation. Very cinematic. Love the collaboration with the gagaku ensemble, it adds to the meditative and spiritual vibe.

awesome record

I was really surprised at just how good the live show for this album is.

New one coming out in May, a companion album to Konoyo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR7u5jhG82c

Anoyo is v v good

Indeed it is. It would be a good fit for the 'Follow-ups that could almost be part twos of classic albums' thread, but that assumes Konoyo is classic (which is fine by me tbh).

no one cares about this dude anymore? the new one is hitting the spot today

I bookmarked this thread in anticipation of the new one and haven't gotten to it yet!

Somehow I missed the news that he was scoring the recent Brandon Cronenberg movie and something seemed familiar about that score, although it's in a different vein than much of his other work

Ha, my review of the new one will be out on Shfl later in the week. It's quite good!

There was some interesting stuff in this interview about the film score:
https://thefilmscorer.podbean.com/e/tim-hecker-takes-a-dip-into-the-infinity-pool/

The run from Harmony in Ultraviolet to Virgins is untouchable. He started to lose me around the time of Love Streams. I will still dutifully listen to everything he does though my expectations have lowered. I have the new album bookmarked but I haven't heard it yet.

Finally saw him live last night -- wonderful performance. Also a salute to ANYONE who starts a set at 9, ends at 10 and allows me to walk home comfortably by 10:30.

The run from Harmony in Ultraviolet to Virgins is untouchable. He started to lose me around the time of Love Streams. I will still dutifully listen to everything he does though my expectations have lowered. I have the new album bookmarked but I haven't heard it yet.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Monday, April 10, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Following up on my post from 7 months ago - the new album is his best since Virgins

saw him last night for I think the third time - pulverisingly loud, like molecular disintegration level - themes & elements from the most recent album but pushed into wild new shapes and extremes - loved it