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Tim Hecker - Konoyo


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cool story, mixl2

 

Now I wanna know the story. Did he delete his comment?

 

 

 

 

why do you guys even care when you can instead not care

 

0:51 - http://www.bravotv.com/the-real-housewives-of-new-york-city/season-7/videos/dont-be-all-like-uncool

 

Can't access it from my location. Is it some adroit response to what I said?

 

 

it's a dumb quote from a Bravo tv show that had the same vibe and I couldn't find it on YT

 

here's a gif of it

 

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 Oh yes, that's the vibe ;P

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I really did sit next to Tim Hecker at a gig at the Barbican once.  I thought he might smell but he didn't.  He was wearing Flynit multicolour racers and a hat and had a young lady with him.  Similarly I was also wearing inappropriate try hard lifestyle trainers, but I had taken my hat off by the time I sat down, and was also with a young lady.  I thought this might be a humorous way in, but then thought better of it.  He seemed nice enough.  

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yo i get the fanfic but some of the comments here are legit hate-train

 

dlo i know youre half joking but, really, 'his look'?  i feel like watmm would call out such a remark in any other new and upcoming releases thread but this one.  also wtf 'pseudo academic framework' are you all on about.. he called a track up red bull creek ffs, and compared to other artists, hardly does the press/interview junket

shit like this

 

TIM%20HECKER%202018.jpeg

 

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https://twitter.com/extremecmf

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yeah this is a weird one. my opinion on the music aside (don't care for it) i find the whole lovesliescrushing element hard to ignore. for one thing, i think it's kind of obvious that whether deliberately or not tim hecker has been following in their footsteps which in and of itself is not necessarily important. but when i consider the fact that in 2010 cantu-ledesma (who's work has often been quite along the same lines as hecker) put out a record called "love is a stream" which he said was an homage to lovesliescrushing, and when i consider that hecker's album art to some extent resembles the art for lovesliescrushing's "voirshn" the whole project seems...weird. i'm not saying "omg this is a ripoff" or anything, just an uncomfortable set of coincidences i suppose. 

 

i honestly don't see the similarity. which album of theirs sounds like tim hecker? i tried listening to bloweyelashwish (flol name) and it just sounded like slowdive with some noise on top of it. if there's a precedent for tim it's fennesz or oval or any of the glitch artists from the late 90s/early 2000s, though hecker was already doing stuff at that point. feel like you honed in on some imagined similarity here, kind of like when awepittance was comparing him to zoviet france (a truly wtf comparison). if anything, loveliescrushing seem to have aped the entire dream pop/thames valley early 90s shoegaze thing in the most generic way possible then combined that sound with pleasant yet tedious noise. not getting this post at all. is this just a case of "my obscure fave band actually influenced your moderately successful fave artist"? 

ps, this album sucks. hecker peaked with harmony in ultraviolet.

 

 

 

look here hotshot. here's what's going to happen. i'm going to send you a personal message, or "PM." please open it. inside you will see an address. go there. go alone (don't worry my mom will be home, we will not be unsupervised). please bring beats by dre headphones. we will go into my basement (yeah, i know, i do have a sick cd collection) where we will listen to the complete catalogs of lovesliescushing, zoviet france, and jefre-cantu ladesma. once completed here's how it's gonna go: obviously, you'll realize i am right and you'll feel like a jackass trying to look like a cool guy on Internet at my expense (wtf did i ever do to you?). additionally, you'll feel bad for throwing awepittance under the bus, a defenseless truther with a hot sister who just released the final installment in his trilogy of films about Billy Crystal. that's just cruel. anyway, i will forgive you and soon we will be sharing some of our favorite tunes via online. eventually we'll start sharing our own music and soon after we'll officially be in a band. our band will be called lOPatiN, after our favorite contemporary experimental artist who's seminal "r+7" was our favorite record of 2013. we will grow our fanbase by releasing a series of cassettes on obscure but expertly curated and highly regarded labels. soon our albums will see the light of day on vinyls. we will go on tour but since we are intelligent artists with educational degrees we will shun the sexualization of groupies and instead do interviews where we talk about "cultural detritus," guy debord and obnoxious music no one likes but that we think is cool in the kind of way certain white people think it's cool to like weird tribal music or tattoos even though they don't really even like it tbh. our popularity will steadily grow and soon we will be a household name among the brooklyn vanguard and even though they've never even heard of lovesliescrushing or zoviet france, they will know and of course love lOPatiN. warp will notice our releases and take special notice of our boutique label "elemental illness" and ask us to do a release for them. we agree. it's called "dissonance in infrared." it comes out and sells a bunch of copies. sam from autechre says he likes it. and just as we reach the pinnacle of our success i will turn to you and pull out my newest iPhone model where i have a screen shot of your cool guy post, show it to you and whisper "pwn" in your left ear and immediately backflip out of the window of the tour bus where i will roll down a hill at the bottom of which i have a sack of clothes and a van waiting. i will take all our band money and start a Microwave company called "New Parameters" and hobnob with james dyson and the kids. you will fade into obscurity and live a humdrum life working at barnes and noble and telling all the twenty somethings about how you used to be in a cool band and pfork gave your warp album 8.6.6 "best new music." no one will fucking care. on your death bed i will come into the hospital room playing lovesliescrushing on a bluetooth speaker and i'll make you listen to the whole thing. just before delivering your final breath i'll whisper into your right ear "i was just trying to look cool by referencing a relatively obscure band in that tim hecker thread btw." your eyes will grow big and before you can fully process this, you will pass. rest in peace brother. welcome back.

 

 

you hobble out of the hospital and get in your new paramaters company van. you sigh and think about the future. in ten years you will be dead of a heart attack, your terrible children and gold digging wife will inherit your beach front property and sell your company off. is this what you wanted to do? sell microwaves? you need to escape. you rummage through the glove box for your loveliescrushing best of compilation "blowawishflutterfa: 1982-1999". you remove the cd and gaze at it lovingly(crushingly). it has been signed by the band. you look closer. there is a tiny signature, away from the others. you remember getting it signed, at amoeba in 1997. you of course remember scott and melissa signing the album, but who is this third person? in your memory there was another guitarist, a tall sardonic man, possibly from canada, strangely ageless. he possessed some technology to run a guitar through a laptop that you hadn't seen before. you had thought, this will surely influence countless artists in the future. for some reason he also carried a microwave. weird. you pull out the album's booklet and flip to the credits. there is a third member listed. "founder: timothy hecker". your eyes widen. when we first met, you forgot to ask for my name. as the conversation grew more friendly, you found it exceedingly awkward to ask. eventually we were too familiar for you to ask, so for the entire length of time we were a band you never knew my name. i handled all the financial and business deals, so you never needed to know. then it occurs to you. i handled the business deals. the initial meeting with a microwave company who possessed a groundbreaking prototype that would change the industry forever. in those final years, while you looked for an escape from the endless p4k fest appearances and npr profiles, i had brought up the idea of getting into technology. i told you there was a great company out of canada, new parameters, maybe check it out, i'll set up the meeting. you went and met a strangely familiar man who, in hindsight, looked a lot like me with a beard. and when he'd introduced himself....what was his name? tom? kim? no, that's a girl's name. tim. his name was tim. you begin to scream. why did you think it was so easy to get bnm every two years and solid 8.4s our entire career? because i had already done it. the only reason you ever cared about loveliescrushing was the man with the microwave. and then you think, our microwaves have had lots of recalls. people disappear when they use them. lots of problems. a dog got in one, vanished, and ended up in news footage of the japanese tsunami, pulling people from the waves. it wasn't easy. there was a cost. i never knew if i'd be the man in the microwave, or the man playing noise music to fifteen people in a basement in williamsburg. you run from the van back into the hospital to my room. i'm not there. in the bed is a pile of broken macbook pros. you hear a ding. you walk to the microwave. inside is a vinyl copy of abbey road. you look at the cover and see the familiar photo: george, paul, ringo, john. there is a figure down the street, in the shade of a tree, next to a black car. staring at the camera. you look closer. it's me, tim hecker, and i'm smiling.

 

 

 

for years i try to find you but always you elude me. every time i open a door expecting to see you sitting there, the room is empty. every time i rip away the covers from a bed nothing is there but a clump of warm pillows. every time i see a shadow in the shower and cast aside the curtain it's only maculey culkin with some blow up clown or a michael jordan cutout. i'm down to my last $100. my fucking wife left me for the entirely subpar and pretentious ben frost. now she lives in iceland spending all my money, hanging out with brian eno. i decide to abandon my quest and die alone out in the desert. i spend all my money on liquor and a harold budd cd and retire to my camper in the middle of nowhere. as i float along in the reverb-drench arpeggios, swallowing gulp after gulp of vodka i sense your presence. i heard the soft crunch of footsteps in the sand outside. the door opens. there you stand, partially in shadow. tim hecker. timothy fucking hecker. i offer you a drink, which you refuse but after taking a seat you pull an elegant flask from your waistcoat. "the white arcades lol. you just listen to this bc adam wiltzie cites it as an influence." i take a swig. you're right of course. it's not even one of budd's better albums, nowhere as deep as "pavilion of dreams" "the room," or his eno collaborations. even the john foxx two disc release is better than this. we sit in silence for several minutes. "tim," i say, startling you from your pensive mood. you seem nervous. "tim, just one thing i have to know." "what?" "you were tim hecker....the whole time?" "yes, of course, what do you mean?" "it's just that...well...." i take a long, deep drink and stand up, swaying slightly as the blood rushes to my head for a moment. i reach up to my face with both hands. now you look somewhat frightened and i carefully begin to remove something from my face. as you stand up the chair tumbles back behind you. "what..." you mutter. what i remove is a mask. as i step into the light you see that in fact i am tim hecker. "no, it can't be...but i...." i put my hands on your shoulders like the joker from tim burton's batman when he does that "you...are my number one guy" routine. "yes, that's right. finally i find you again! to tell you what you already know." "no! no don't do this!" "yes, i, tim hecker, do readily admit that lovesliescrushing was a distinct precursor to my music and had a clear influence on me." you wrestle away from my grip, tumbling backwards onto the floor sending empty bottles rolling to the walls. you shuffle backwards on your hands until you reach the door. you reach up for the knob and as you look back for just a brief second before running out to the desert you see two figures emerge from the back room behind me. could it be? "no" you tell yourself. but as you run through the desert to your prius carefully shaded under an awning in a nearby abandoned gas station you can't help but admit that the two figures were unmistakable. scott...melissa...

 

 

you were just a child then, the day you met brian eno. he bounced you on his knee and let you play on his dx7. he whispered in your ear: one day i'm going to make a coldplay record. he seemed old. when he touched you a buzz of radiation coursed through your body. years later, the doctors would diagnose you with stage four colorectal cancer, terminal. a gift from the master. as you lay dying, eno appears before you. "it was me all along. i was tim hecker. i was ben frost. on occasion, when i could muster up the energy to give a shit, i was even oneohtrix point never." he crawls up your deathbed like a night terror and stares into your eyes. "i control the pieces on the board. there's no such thing as influence. awepittance, in all his delusion, was right about one thing. the world is a puzzle. i am the key." you begin to whimper. "and what of my favorite obscure band? what of loveliescrushing?" eno waves his hand, dismissive. "dust in the wind. nothing more than a footnote in a loveless 33 1/3 book." you begin to accept. "what is life then, without my special band?" "oh child, life is meaningless." brian eno holds you as you drift off into oblivion, viva la vida pumping on the hospital speakers.

 

 

death. first a long and silent blackness. a nothing. but eventually shit gets cool. i arrive at the foot of a great mountain. all the gods are there: God, G-d, Yahweh, Shiva, Nietzsche, Zeus, some African shit, Native American Sun, Osiris, etc. each is distinct from the rest but they are all One. "hello Alcofribas" It says. their voice is like the Music of the Spheres spoken of by Cicero in his De republica. i'm glad to have read it so i can get the reference. "this is the afterlife where you can do anything your heart desires. for instance, here is an assortment of beautiful women interested in lusty actions with you. and there, well that's autechre's entire max/msp setup ready to go." hmm. i spend sometime thinking what would be the best way to kick off my time in eternal heaven. suddenly it dawns upon me like a flash of lightning (indeed, there was a bolt of lightning hurled from Zeus at that very moment.). "God" says i. "yeah, what's up?" "i wonder, what is the coolest obscure band you can think of?" "hmmm...well, zovie..." "besides zoviet france," i interrupt. "not zoviet france? hmm...most strange! how about...lovesliescrushing?" "never heard of them!" cries Jesus. "perfect!" i declare. "God, could you perhaps send me back in time at all?" "time? child, there is no time now. there is but an infinite eternal present containing all things past and future." "ok cool, could you send me back as scott cortez to say...1991?" "a most unusual request son, but indeed you are already there." i look around. i'm wearing an old red and black flannel, torn light blue jeans and some doc martens with laces inconsiderately untied. i set up my alesis quadraverb and record everything onto tascam 424 cassette. the music is, how do you say, obscure. i release a few albums on a small label and then...i wait. i wait until those backwards canadians catch up to me and then i bask in my glory as Alcofribas of watmm defends me (who i am) against clever charlatans like zaphod, J Swift and Rambo. that's where you come in. not realizing the time and space transcending i have been capable of always, you cannot understand that i am not only scott cortez, brian eno, tim hecker, and Alcofribas, but that i am also a lonely software engineer constantly undermining the present discussion with my autocorrecting algorithm that constantly changes "hecker" to "hacker" in order to subtly drive home the fact that since "harmony in ultraviolet" (his best album) tim hecker is, well, a hack.

 

 

ryan schreiber awakes from a dreamless sleep to a knock at his office door. it's his assistant, holding a manila folder. 
"someone mentioned them."
schreiber is confused. "who?"
"them."
schreiber looks heavenward. "i knew this day would come."
 
they walk through pitchfork offices to a giant control room. inside are banks of computer terminals manned by elite hipsters culled from the world's foremost media companies. a sixty foot screen displays a map of the internet as conversations between users. schreiber clicks a pen and one conversation appears highlighted out of the millions. "what is this?" the assistant reads from a document. "it's a couple of users on a website dedicated to irrelevant electronic music. they were discussing tim hecker's new album, love streams. things got a bit meta..." the assistant hands schreiber a transcript. schreiber looks stonefaced, then begins to shake. his lips quiver. "that was my band." he turns to his assistant, furious. "MY BAND." he walks to the front of the control room, clapping his hands. "everyone, eyes up here." the hipsters stop working and stare. schreiber puts a finger to his temple, looks down at the ground to collect his thoughts, then gazes around the room. "you all familiar with laurel canyon?" everyone says yes. someone begins to sing heart of gold. a conde nast rep has entered the room and walks toward schreiber. "maybe now isn't the time or the place to-" schreiber snaps his fingers. "shut. the fuck. up." he looks back at the room. "laurel canyon was a government operation. you all know that? jim morrison was a cia agent. neil young killed che guevara. joni mitchell? trained to kill spies from the age of eight. kept a walther ppk in her guitar. they said, if we create the hippy movement for them, we control the counter culture. they were right. this happens once, maybe twice a decade. the eagles, they were the real deal. don henley was a defector, he tried to warn people. no one would listen." the conde nast rep puts a hand on schreiber's shoulder. "ryan, please." schreiber shakes him off. "twenty five years ago i discovered a band in a basement in michigan. i wrote about them for a zine. no one listened to them. no one read my zine. that band kept making music. they still do. i fund them. they're the only indie band on earth. everyone else, sigur ros, godspeed you black empe-" one of the hipsters gasps. schreiber spits at him, hysterical. "yeeees, godspeed worked for bush! efrim is a rothschild!"  he continues. "none of these bands are authentic. but..." tears well up in his eyes, "loveliescrushing. they're the real thing." the hipsters look at each other, confused. one raises his hand. "i have never heard of that band." schreiber smiles. "they were my rosebud." he looks at the giant screen, at the display name of the poster, alcofribas, his little avatar. "and then this faggot tried to take them from me." schreiber pushes past the conde nast rep and out the door. he walks to his office, stops before a poster of belinda butcher, moves the poster aside and enters a code on a hidden keypad. a door opens. he walks down stairs to a sub level, through multiple doors until he reaches an antechamber. "initiate sequence: grimes." a hologram appears in the center of the chamber. it has pink hair and a unibrow. the floor opens and a katana hovers into schreiber's hands. the hologram speaks in a high pitched lolita voice.
"so, the thousand year war begins."

 

 

 

just before the war began a properly mustached man sat drinking a craft ipa on his back porch, my bloody valentine's "loveless" playing behind him inside the house at a volume respectful to his family. "such a masterpiece" he thinks as he sips his cool brew. he indolently swipes his iPad with no purpose in mind and eventually he opens his bookmarks and holds his finger just above the surface of the screen. he knows he'll drop his finger down onto the icon. but he knows he shouldn't. this happens when he drinks and he's ashamed. but so it goes. as the page loads his eyes dark quickly and guiltily about, as though anyone would see him or even care. he gazes down at his device as though in a trance and his visage slowly transforms to a twisted gaze, brow furrowed with a gray shadow over his eyes. his mustache is littered with the dew of his beverage. "ten out of fucking 10. un fucking believable." he scrolls through the page, shaking his head and letting out incredulous sighs and even a disdainful guffaw. "wha...i can't..." eventually he drops his iPad carelessly on the side table and gulps down the last of the beer. just then his attention is drawn back to the screen door which creaks familiarly as his wife peeks her had around to check in on him. "hi honey, everything o..." her voice pitches down as she says with a disapproving look "you weren't looking at the 'disinitegration loops' review again, honey, were you?" "it's just that fucking mark richardson! i mean, come on, ten out of fucking ten! that's like, a perfect score!" "chris, seriously, you really shouldn't..." "i mean, basinski isn't even that obscure or cool imo! i used to make loop music back in the day before it was even cool. and i actually like the real, authentic stuff like when daniel lopatin pitched down that new kids on the block song and it totally made me leaf through that jean paul sartre book i still had from college. it's really unbelievable!" chris ott stands up and storms past his wife into the house and after getting another beer from the refrigerator he heads straight for his office/studio/man cave. he sits down at his roland synth and holds down a chord, thinking faintly "now that is a real drone." but his heart isn't in it, he can't even bring himself to press the "HOLD" button. he reaches toward his desk and removes something from his table; a handful of darts. he throws them lazily at the board, one hits the photo in basinski's right eye, the other misses the board entirely. he is truly dejected. "how can i prove to the world that william basinski is just a new york loft loser and that i know the real obscure and experimental stuff?" he paces slowly around his room, arms crossed, gaze fixed to the floor. "if only lopatin hadn't become such a pitchfork darling, then i could show the world how refined my taste is." in a half-baked, ironic gesture he pulls out his iPhone and speaks into it: "Siri, what is the coolest, most obscure band that literally has no influence on any one whatsoever except for idiotic fanboys trying to look cool on internet forums?" with barely a pause the soothing voice from the phone says "lovesliescrushing." "gibberish" he says and throws the phone down on his bean bag chair, purchased in an auction of items from kevin shields' personal collection. he falls heavily back into his desk chair and after a few bored lackadaisical drinks from his glass he falls asleep. when he wakes it is still night. he wakes up his iMac and clicks on huffingtonpost. his eyes nearly leap from his head when he sees the headline: "SCHREIBER HOLOGRAM REAL. HAVOCK IN PORTLAND, NYC, SXSW. ALCOFRIBAS MURDERED OVER LOVELIESCRUSHING. INTERNET MORNS, IS CONFUSED." he clicks over to gawker: "OBAMA COMMITS TROOPS TO ALL MAJOR CITIES, SCHREIBER MISSING." salon: "MARK RICHARDSON SLAIN. BUSH DID IRAQ" he sits back in his chair, mouth gaping, stupefied. he now knows his task. soon he would climb through the ranks of the uprising, clutching his familiarity and well-aged admiration for the world's most authentic and obscure band. he had discovered his purposed, so what if it was all lies. "lies?...loves...crushing." soon these words would become the slogan for the first revolutionary movement in the bloodiest war in history. 

 

 

"sir, our mecha are all destroyed. she's broken through the second wall." 

chris ott wipes his scarred brow. he adjusts the eyepatch. 

"how long until we can hit it with our nukes?"

"they're in orbit. it will take minutes."

"do it."

ott turns and walks to his terminal. he logs in to the deep web. he points the webcam at himself, adjusting it so his bloated, tired, mustachioed face fills the entire frame. he exhales deeply.

"this is the final episode of shallow rewards. we have lost this battle. the war, however. the war is not over. in less than five minutes grimes and the schreibertrons will breach our walls. chicago will fall. do not lose hope in this time of need. i have a plan." ott looks at the unassuming members of loveliescrushing. 

"strip down. i don't have time to explain." 

the compound shakes. 

"sir they- they're right outside." the faint sounds of neutral milk hotel can be heard somewhere above them. ott flies into a rage. "so fucking dumb. i was there at those shows, NOBODY CARED. olivia tremor control. that was the band. NOT THEM." 

"sir maybe now is not the time."

"yes. begin the process."

a sphere opens. the members of loveliescrushing, melissa and scott, step in, naked. ott points the webcam at them. 

"you are our only hope now. go back, back to 1994."

"what will we do?"

ott stammers. "i... i need... i need you to kill me. it's the only way to stop this."

ott hands them a blueprint for a boss hm-2 heavy metal pedal. "those are instructions for a bomb. when you press your foot down, it sets a timer. i'll be at your show. you opened for my favorite band, the swirlies. in the encore, use it. many will die. but this madness will stop."

scott puts up his hands. "whoa man. i don't wanna kill my fans. we only have ten."

"THIS IS FOR THE FUTURE OF THE UNDERGROUND MUSIC SCENE!!!" spittle flies from ott's mouth. his demeanor calms.

"memorize this. right now. you can't take anything through."

scott shakes his head. "aw c'mon i can't remember that, man."

ott puts his hands on scott's shoulders. "you must. for the children."

scott bites his lip. he nods, closes his eyes, and attempts to commit the blueprint to memory.

the roof begins to cave in. the band members step into the sphere which levitates, then disappears. ott salutes, tears running down his cheeks. 

 

they appear naked in a field somewhere in the suburbs. scott and melissa run to a house, break in, grab clothing. melissa looks at scott. "do you remember the blueprint." 

scott panics. "i fuckin' forgot man. i forgot. oh shit." 

melissa walks through the house to a closet. she opens it, reaches in, and retrieves a shotgun. 

"new plan."

 

they walk through neighborhoods. 

"this doesn't look like the east coast. too green."

"these houses are fuckin' nice man."

they hear familiar sounds emanating from a greenhouse near one of the more secluded homes. 

"is that?"

as they move closer, they realize it is. them. someone is listening to loveliescrushing. they see a blonde man sitting on a sofa, drinking tea. he waves for them to join him. 

"oh wow. i love this record man. you guys are great."

scott and melissa look at each other, amazed. "kurt. we never knew you were a fan."

"yeah. this record has helped me come to terms with my depression. it's actually what helped me kick heroin."

scott starts laughing. "that's so good to hear. you know we-"  as he places the shotgun on a table, there is an explosive concussion. kurt cobain's head is ripped clean off from the blast. 

"oh shit."

 

 

after 1994 scott tried to forget the blueprint, forget everything ott told him. 

"it's back in 1994 anyway, man. that shit's not gonna happen for years."

still, the memory of the future haunted him. he and melissa tried to rebuild the boss pedal but all the tests proved that it wouldn't explode. instead, it covered all of his carefully composed tracks in pleasant yet tedious noise. 

"what the fuck are we gonna do melissa? i love you btw."

melissa was too distraught over the cobain murder. she couldn't explain it but every time she tried to sing it just sounded ethereal and reverb-drenched. and now that scott kept making tape after tape of blurred, distorted guitar tracks she didn't see any future with the band. or perhaps the future was the only thing she could see. so she decided to leave scott, leave the band, everything all behind. 

scott continued to use the backlog of her vox tapes to create more albums. always the same template for each one. ethereal, emotional vox hovering over guitar beds, sometimes serene and often explosive. he cried during every single take. 

melissa made her way through the 90s, wondering if there would come a time when angelic feminine vocals would matter, would matter to anyone who mattered. and how could anything matter when she new it was just a matter of time before she caught up with chris ott again, repeating the whole cycle and one of these times scott would actually remember the blueprints. and then, well, she couldn't think too hard on what then. 

one night she was alone in her room when she was visited by female vocalists juliana barwick (8.5 bnm) and angel olsen (8.3 bnm). 

together, they said in harmony (with some interesting loops throughout by barwick): 

"melissa, we know about chris."

"what? but how?"

"melissa, what he wanted you to do...well, it's already happened?"

"but how can that be?"

"melissa, look, he tried again and again to get you and scott to activate the bomb but scott just couldn't remember. you know how he is, everything just gets jumbled together in long words in his mind."

"yeah..."

"eventually chris decided he would have to be the one to go back to 1994 and do it himself."

"but how? i just spoke to scott the other day, everything is fine."

"is it? have you ever noticed that you have like no fans?"

"yeah, but we're underdogs. our time will come!"

"melissa, don't be naive! you're time will never come. that's what chris wanted the whole time. it's the only way he thinks he can win the war. to out-shreiber shrieber himself. to prove he heard of you first."

"i don't understand..."

"you see melissa, scott is dead."

"but..."

"chris killed him many years from now when he became sergeant in the war. then he went back in time posing as scott. in fact, there never was a real scott, not like you remember."

"but i made love to him..."

"melissa it is too late. the only thing left for you is to try to put out a lovesliescrushing album of just your voice alone, no guitar wankery. we suggest a pair of albums, separated by years. perhaps you might call them "chorus" and "CRWTH." in any case, YOU MUST BECOME POPULAR."

suddenly the visitors fade and all that is left is a cluster of soft, angelic voices slowly fading out. melissa weeps as she stares at the lovesliescrushing poster about her bed. then it hits her! scott...SCOTT. S. C OTT. Sergeant Chris Ott. 

 

 

she lived with the man pretending to be scott for a decade. they moved in to a house in a cul-de-sac on the east coast and raised children there. at night she had dreams of the coming war. while scott, who she now referred to as chris, was away at work at his job as a software developer, she composed ballads for guitar and reverb. on weekends she seanced with grouper, rachel goswell, the chick from mazzy star. victoria legrand's curls appeared once and played a melody on her broken rhodes piano. when chris returned home for dinner, he ate in silence and then retired to their backyard to talk to himself in front of a camera. she once overheard him saying boy george was the most important artist of the 1980s. cicadas droned away in the trees. she began driving to hotel bars after chris was asleep. in this way she met a traveling musician. "what kind of music do you make?" he shook his head. "it's like, abstract. i call it church music. i guess it's electronic." the man's name was tim. 

 

 

she continued to meet tim several nights a week. chris hardly noticed, especially once he started to get into duran duran again. she and tim would talk about music all into the night. "have you heard 'victorialand'?" "it's my favorite record of all time." it seemed a romance was inevitable and indeed they began to spend nights together in tim's hotel room, making love, listening to music and talking until dawn. his music began to be influenced by the tapes of her compositions to the point where she felt obliged to mention it. "ha, you're right. i guess when you're in love everything just becomes one big cosmic whole with nothing left out." but one day when they were having drinks together at a trendy whisky bar with overnight lodgings a handsome, dark young man came through. his name was jefre. "jeffrey, hi i'm tim." "it's jefre." by the end of the night, after he plaid them some of his own cassettes, tim was furious that jefre's work, so similar to his own, was so much better. and melissa, well, the dame was in love. she and jefre began having an affair (two levels deep in fact) and it was easy for tim to notice. his visa was running up and he had to return to canada to record some organ jams that he could eventually run through audio mulch and distortion pedals. as the months went by he tried to forget about melissa and it almost seemed possible to get over her. but then, jefre released a new record. "love is a stream." it couldn't be more obvious. an homage, even by name, to melissa's obscure band that only he, jefre and chris-scott had ever heard of. he was livid. he put out a confessional album called "virgin" and went to play at pitchfork. he tried collaborating with daniel lopatin. but he couldn't get her out of his mind. as the years passed he couldn't even get her to answer his calls. he had one last recourse. he released "love streams" hoping she would catch the reference. he made it emotional but kept the pretensions of a serious composer. it was his masterpiece. or so he thought. but melissa never noticed. and it finally broke his heart. he tried to forget. his friends did their best to shield him from reading any reviews or internet commentary. even his bff zaphod came out of nowhere to deny the obvious. but there was one outspoken voice amidst the chorus of mild respect for the record: alcofribas of watmm. he could not be stopped, or so it seemed. but tim knew he had to be stopped at all costs. he wanted to erase melissa forever from his mind. he had purchased all 177 copies of lovesliescrushing cds for $.01 on amazon with free shipping. he crumpled up their hand-made show flyers (all 4). he deleted her number. and for a while it seemed like he had permanently erased all knowledge of her and her shitty obscure band from the planet. but then there was alcofribas. tim went into hiding. to prepare. to nourish his taste for blood. to mess about with pretty piano tracks and masses of distortion. and soon he found the strength to act.

 

 

the pitchfork staff writer sat at the cafe and stared at the memo. it said: next the pitch. the new ambient. focus on hecker, frost, et al. he spat out his lemon shandy and wiped his mouth on a napkin. he glared at the waiter. "i'd like a ginger beer this time. local." he had considered quitting many times in the last year. the direction of the company was not to his liking. focusing on legacy records, hyping acts with the best pr teams, payola for extra points and bnm. in his decade in music journalism, he'd seen everything. but this. "the new ambient". this was an attack on his soul. he knew what tim hecker was. at parties women and normies would remark that they were "really into electronic music" and then list three artists, always the same. burial, daft punk. they would pause at the last one. "it's a little weird, kind of experimental." maybe they will surprise me and say zoviet france thought the writer. "ok, have you heard of...tim hecker?". and the writer would roll his eyes. "hecker is a journeyman. an ambient charlatan. you have to go back at least a decade to understand how much he's stealing from better acts." nobody understood anything. sometimes black people would express an interest in hip hop and the writer, the gatekeeper, would tell them about footwork and detroit techno. he would explain that they didn't understand "their own culture" and that hip hop was a corporate construction designed by white people to co-opt black culture and turn its lowest common denominator into a minstrel show. the black people would slowly leave the conversation. ignorance always prevailed. at night he wrote on forums about obscure shoegaze records, house singles, "amazing" hi-nrg tracks. "the worst part is kids have no idea what they're listening to. we're at the end of history folks." he'd post things like this and then retire to bed, hands clasped over his chest while he stared at the ceiling. i am fighting a war, he thought. in the morning he went to work and wrote copy about whatever his conde nast bosses told him to write. one week the focus was on grimes. a think piece on blood orange. queer brooklyn immigrant electro pop. an endless stream of updates on kanye. he didn't care about any of this. he would take the worrying moral aspects of his work and absorb it so purity could still exist in the world in the form of early 90s dream pop records. but this. "focus on ambient." no. hecker was not ambient. the writer had a well defined notion of what ambient music was and hecker's "film music" was not it. the writer took a bite of his vegan waffle. inspiration struck. he began to write. "reconsidering temple of the dog." it was perfect. a forgotten 90s act, a one hit wonder with two superstars as members. an objectively terrible band, but no one would be able to question it if he wrote with authority. the hipsters would actually buy "hunger strike" on itunes or do whatever you do to play music on tidal. these little shits don't know what they want, so i'll give them a sandwich full of cum, he thought. fuck ben frost. fuck stars of the lid. fuck oneohtrix point never. fuck keith fullerton whitman. fuck belong. fuck emeralds. the writer was laughing and people stared at him. he grabbed his laptop and shouted "fuck juliana barwick. fuck grouper. fuck leyland kirby." he ran into the street. "fuck the haxan cloak. fuck fennesz. fuck william basinski. fuck prurient." a car swerved and hit the writer. he cracked his head on the asphalt. as life left his body, he reached out and pressed publish on his laptop. someone leaned over him. "an ambulance is on the way." the writer smiled. "fuck tim hecker." then he died.

 

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idk i like this track.   i love his early works but this is still a really good listen.  saw him speak once and he really seems super non-pretentious.  he's all out of the box.  he was at moogfest shitting on the hype of hardware and it was great to see all these people who just threw a couple k down to get some moog thing and then go to a talk with newly purchased synth at the side of their chair, just to hear some dude shit on hardware....  whatever i like virgins and harmony the most but i always super enjoy his output

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  • 3 weeks later...

got my promotional copy for reviewing purposes.

it's good. refreshingly different from the hecker canon. often goes for unsettling rather than beautiful (though there are some gorgeous passages, especially the beginning of "in mother earth phase"), it's loose, it sound kinda like a live recording of an improv performance, long tracks instead of suites. virgins had this sound to some degree but it's way more prominent here. few hooks, dirty raw sound, lots of fleeting melodies and all kinds of synth leads that fuck about, mutate, never settle or resolve into anything then switch to something else entirely (see oversteps), but it kinda makes sense in the context of the album, actually that's what makes the album. the most familiar heckery thing about it is that it's very albumy: recurring motifs, samples, moves and that general sense of restlessness that permeates most tracks.

 

already played it more than love streams.

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got my promotional copy for reviewing purposes.

it's good. refreshingly different from the hecker canon. often goes for unsettling rather than beautiful (though there are some gorgeous passages, especially the beginning of "in mother earth phase"), it's loose, it sound kinda like a live recording of an improv performance, long tracks instead of suites. virgins had this sound to some degree but it's way more prominent here. few hooks, dirty raw sound, lots of fleeting melodies and all kinds of synth leads that fuck about, mutate, never settle or resolve into anything then switch to something else entirely (see oversteps), but it kinda makes sense in the context of the album, actually that's what makes the album. the most familiar heckery thing about it is that it's very albumy: recurring motifs, samples, moves and that general sense of restlessness that permeates most tracks.

 

already played it more than love streams.

Why do you get a promotional copy for reviewing? Where do you review stuff usually? Any link? Are you one of these YouTubers that get sent free stuff early to promote products?

Or are you taking the piss? So many possibilities

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just got the CD of this from Amazon. There's some good moments but way too much noodling. My opinion of Hecker hasn't changed much over the years. He's okay but nothing really special. He's also a strange choice of signing for Kranky. Just my opinion, of course.

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"This self-awareness is timely, of a piece with the social tides that rightfully demand the voices of white men need not be the only or loudest ones in the room. Konoyo’s other musicians are either Japanese gagaku experts or classically trained women with their own compelling experimental visions, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Mariel Roberts. For this Konoyo receives additional 0.6 points in the final score."

 

-bnm.com

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