Skip to main content

Tim Hecker: Konoyo review – Japanese forms abstracted by ambient dystopias

Kranky

Having created his own particular aesthetic over nearly two decades – imagine an ambient dreamscape in the rain-soaked alley between a church and a nightclub – the Canadian composer Tim Hecker continues to hone and broaden it out. On his previous album he semi-abstracted an Icelandic choir; now he looks to Japan, collaborating with Tokyo Gakuso, a group who play traditional courtly gagaku music. Hecker takes their drums, chimes, and close, borderline discordant strings – a heady, spiritual sound – and adds his own sense of disruption, suggesting real or psychological fracture.

On the most adventurous pieces, such as This Life and Keyed Out, the instruments are made to shiver and thrash as if on a hospital gurney, struggling for equilibrium, as Hecker’s trademark plumes of static billow beneath. On the magnificent Across to Anoyo, the album’s only steady pulse is crowded out by a kind of maniacally melodic feedback, itself taken over by industrial chords and bass notes of pure dread.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OgJexJ

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...