Harmony in Ultraviolet

A friend once joked to me that Tim Hecker’s Ableton arrangement view for one of his songs is probably 500 tracks all using the same sound, and this morning I was thinking about how from above that would look like a railroad yard. You can reference the screenshot below (not of Tim’s work, just something I found online) for a reference. His music certainly carries a wide assortment of disconnected concepts into a central complex, and much of his work hides an astonishing orderliness under an aging façade of purposeful dirt and grime. Or maybe I just like trains too much. Whatever the case may be, his work has had a massive influence on me in the sense that it shifted a lot of my framework for compositional theory and album design. It pulls you into a space and keeps you there long enough for the constructed environment to have its affect, and then lets you go, and it’s easy after listening to wonder if this might be how an animal feels after its been tagged by a scientist and released back into the wild.

I think I’ve talked about him before, but given that this is a daily newsletter and that my mind moves in long loops you can expect me to occasionally be non-linear. I’m seeing Tim Hecker live today for the first time, and I’ve felt a bit like a kid right before Christmas all week. His work has always been magnetic to me, like a lighthouse whose beams rotate through the woods back beyond your house. Letting you know someone else is out there, and that the terrain between here and there changes dramatically. Ravedeath, 1972 was the first album of his I ever found, and I’ve moved in and out of his other ones since at some strange cadence. Below you can find his Spotify page and you can jump in wherever you see fit. In my experience every entry point ends at the same haunted and luminous place.