ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 14TH 2011
1YRON’S TOP 52 RECORDS OF 2011 RANKING: #3


It’s perhaps beneficial to begin by marking out what Ravedeath, 1972 is not instead of what it is, for it is many of these things and a whole lot more. Tim Hecker has been quietly mining the sonics of what has become termed ‘ambient’ for ten years, never quite achieving mainstream prominence but developing a loyal and extremely respectful core audience. It’s perhaps telling that a respectful audience requires a patient ear, and Hecker’s powerful instrumental work never seeks to mould itself around anything or anyone. Ravedeath is not a record composed of rhythm, nor is it a record with so much as a detectable trace of melody. There are no vocals present; by instrumental, one comes to understand the sheer feeling of isolation that Ravedeath evokes. There is little evidence of humanity here. That is, instruments that can be played by human beings with their hands or their feet, or with their mouths. So how is it that Ravedeath manages to be filled with emotion, so remarkably in everything that falls out over its twelve tracks?


Ravedeath was initially recorded in a church in Reykjavik using a pipe organ and this process is fundamental to its feeling of isolation. Since an organ drives pressurized air through pipes to achieve the desired effect, its process feels more removed from human action as that of say piano or guitar. Yes, the hand is producing the noises, but there’s something beyond those keys driving the air through the pipes. The organ is also literally thousands of years old, totally pre-dating our understanding of the science of sound. A day’s worth of church recordings were then taken back to Hecker’s studio where he began compiling them along with the help of Icelandic producer Ben Frost. Here the collective sounds were layered atop one another, piling in dense swathes of synth, feedback, horns and crushing reverb and then flattened to reveal a plateau, wholesome in its construction and yet deeply fragmented upon further inspection. It’s almost impossible to distinguish the process of digital interference from that of the church organ, suggesting a strict process of refinement at the hands of Hecker’s remarkable talent for editing. Ravedeath evokes a constant feeling of melancholia, of chilly, wintery, open-air abandon, and yet for an album as detached as this, what prevails is an overwhelming degree of claustrophobia and destruction. The Piano Drop opens the record with jagged synths and tumbling reverb as if gravity pulling from its centre is the only thing maintaining its momentum. As it progresses it fragments, spreading the crackly static of its first few seconds over a wider palette, building something out of nothing with Hecker allowing the circling fuzz to gradually dovetail and dissipate.


Like many others who knew little of Hecker pre-Ravedeath, I became intrigued by the idea behind it through Hecker’s fascination with “digital garbage.” The cover of the album itself along with the title of the opening track refer to the annual ritual of dropping an old piano off the top of a campus building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to signal the destruction of something beautiful. It’s once this information becomes known that the music seems to befit the atmosphere of the album to such a degree that makes this one of the profoundly moving listening experiences of the year. Hecker is obsessed with the notion of disintegration and degradation which is all the more intriguing in this age of digital downloads, of quickly forgotten genre constructs that feed an insatiable need to be current and socially ‘present’. The record’s centerpiece, Hatred Of Music, feels like an errution of anger, the instrumental commentary equivalent on the state of the music industry and how the purity of harmony and melody have been defiled, now a grotesque amalgamation of everything corrupt about the rapid consumption and excretion of ‘music’. Ravedeath is a record devoid of discernible structure and coherence leaving blurry forms across ambitious soundscapes and this two-part monolith is a towering achievement of sharp, contrasted desolation. Hatred Of Music is the gale force at the top of Ravedeath’s hill, its pinnacle all the more arresting as synths hurtle upwards like reversed lightning piercing the sky following the near absence of No Drums. Ravedeath requires a patient ear, but nowhere more so than on No Drums. Ambience here feels submerged and what we hear on this gorgeous track truly feels like the bottom layer of a sound that underpins the entire record, an entire ocean’s weight pressing down to the point where headphones crackle in response.


Ravedeath is made up of three suites of music interspersed with bridges of static noise and it’s through these that Hecker achieves his monumental ambition. In The Fog is itself composed of three parts elapsing nearly sixteen minutes as fragmented piano notes permeate its bleak introduction, bringing reverberated distortion to its second half before piano and amplified guitar shift this wandering crescendo to a gloomy conclusion. Ravedeath is cavernous from the word go, never letting up the feeling of industrial decay, of a warehouse beyond function or purpose so vast in size that it could comfortably contain some of these titanic curtains of noise. In The Air (similarly composed of three parts) closes the record and offers a respite of sorts. It feels as though Hecker has removed some of the crushing ambience that strangles most of Ravedeath, though this may be a clever illusion through which the presence of piano and white static are merely more coherent. Washes of synth are used here to resemble wind as blasts of frozen air billow through the organ’s pipes, but it never feels destructive. If anything, the muffled distortion takes a backseat to the organ in this final triptych of drone, suggesting that perhaps the death of music that Hecker projects at the listener throughout Ravedeath can be ultimately revived. As such, the purity of a single piano note could emerge as something more wholesome than the merciless treatment the record endures at the hands of its creator. Perhaps the death of music is not here, now. Perhaps it will arrive in the near future, or perhaps it has already happened and is in a process of slow, fragile recovery. The piano chimes of In The Air III would certainly hint at such rebirth, representing the warmest, most infantile aspect of the entire record.


The idea of the piano drop is something that takes precedent throughout Ravedeath, and it’s a concept that the listener can too become similarly fascinated with. In my mind, I envisage a grainy video recording of the piano being dropped from the top of the roof at the MIT campus building, and slowed down to 52 minutes and 18 seconds - the entire length of Ravedeath - with the record itself playing to the video’s completion. Perhaps the video could be reversed. What would Ravedeath sound like played backwards? Would it be ultimately the same instrumental, ambient noise? Would the same lack of coherence and musical navigation permeate its frostbitten edges? If the idea behind the piano drop symbolizes the destruction of something beautiful then it’s inviting to attach all manner of concepts to the fact that vocals are very much absent. Ultimately Ravedeath is what the listener makes of it, and it is certainly not the kind of ambient/drone record to play as background music. What’s so powerful about it is that, indeed, it can serve as background music for the first listen. It’s surprising how the feeling of restraint and release begins to preempt itself once the dark character of the pipe organ takes hold and becomes something familiar as opposed to foreign. Ravedeath not only warrants constant replays, it demands it, such becomes the curious nature and unfamiliar mood of its oddly comforting beauty. It’s not the kind of record that can be played and subsequently enjoyed without its listener’s divine attention. The singular image of a man walking into an abandoned, chilly church and playing an instrument with little or no explanation feels like a response to a world no longer listening, to a society completely obliterated at the core but evolving at a rapid rate around its frazzled edges. Ravedeath is that instinctive response and it’s worth putting everything down to hear it. If the world really does end in 2012, it may very well sound like this.