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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Hecker Album: Neu CD Label: Editions Mego Review date: Aug. 6, 2010 |
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Many reviews of Florian Hecker’s last album, Acid in the Style of David Tudor, lingered on the title and the 12-page essay by philosopher Robin Mackay that started just below it on the cover. The resulting positions nicely outline the major responses to Hecker’s extremely demanding kind of non-music. Sean Schuster-Craig saw the title as a red herring, "a way of grabbing onto the most apt referent in a music that doesn’t sound all that much like anything." He’s clearly overwhelmed by the visceral experience of the music, although he doesn’t offer a clear aesthetic judgment, leaving us to wonder whether he’s won over or just impressed. Writing for Resident Advisor, Ian Mathers said he couldn’t imagine anyone listening to the album for pleasure, and argued that the concept, as explicated in the essay and through Hecker’s synth-analog computer setup, squashed any sense of musicality. Its only value, for him, was that it inspired thinking.
Most of these reviews were positive in a general way, and some were negative in a specific way. Listening to Hecker is a lot to take in — the sounds and their arrangement bypass the usual pleasure centers and seem to exist simply as an auditory phenomenon rather than a meaningful, coherent experience. Sitting still for a Hecker album requires serious application. It’s the first hurdle in a music riddled with them. Whether you’re a good candidate for appreciating it might be gauged by your reaction to the following description, taken from the press release of his latest release, Neu CD: "the repetition of rhythmic patterns slowly densify the emission of events, further rupturing the sonic affect into a new re-structured gestalt."
Annoying-sounding, formally austere electronic music is quite at home on Peter Rehberg’s Mego label, which has released most of Hecker’s music, but Hecker is also known for his collaborations with Aphex Twin and has a release on Richard D. James’s Rephlex label. On the one hand, Hecker’s music demands a kind of fine-art appreciation by taking the guise of Serious Research into Perception, and on the other, he clearly enjoys dicking around, making indigestible robot music that, it seems, people either try too hard to "get" or are easily offended by. Neu CD is a collection of pieces produced for shows at Berlin’s Galerie Neu and Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne. Like another recent release, Alva Noto’s For 2, this collection of commissioned pieces holds its own next to the artist’s main albums because, even without being explicitly tied together by an album’s overarching theme, they relate to each other through the artist’s rigorous conceptuality.
Hecker, like Alva Noto, typically uses a conceptual/theoretical framework to pare down his music to its most basic elements — alone, neither makes music that could be mistaken for anything other than solo work. Neu CD does away with the concept, too, and what’s left is a more varied presentation of Hecker’s visceral and undoubtedly very complex approach to sound synthesis. So Neu‘s biggest surprise — the nearly ambient 17 minutes of "Yin Pitch Detection Synthesis Kissing" that convincingly recreate the sound of cicadas in a garden — while boring and predictable, is a track you can actually chill out to (the other three here being shorter, piercing logarithmic workouts).
If you don’t already have a taste for the kind of brutal math that makes Silver Apples of the Moon sound like Wagner, Neu CD won’t warm you up to it. It’s simply a good snapshot of a unique artist whose newness doesn’t quite belong in academia, the gallery world, or at a Polish rave, but nevertheless exists in all these places at once.
By Brandon Bussolini
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