The mineshafts and buildings that stood like tousled trees must have served as an ideal backdrop for Canadian-based sound artist Tim Hecker’s delicate and highly personal digital meltdown. Originally a part of the Norberg Festival in Sweden, the work creates a dialectical spectrum between slowly evolving melody and crashing tone-clusters, all anchored by the resonating possibilities of the sub-bass.
Without falling into complete abstraction, the chiming xylophones that open the twenty-minute piece are swallowed by a gaping maw swarming with white noise and gnarly bass rumbles. At the nine-minute mark, after the piece has evolved into a large, vigorous composition with aggregates of pitches set adrift in a rippling pool of sound, an unexpected and positively delightful organ melody surfaces and dances amidst the decay like a light flickering out in the darkness.
It’s a sad, fleeting moment and it serves as a keystone in the distinctive mood which the rest of the recording works to establish. The diamond clarity and bruising edge of Norberg thereby brings about another expansion of terms in the aesthetics of noise – indeed, it’s an endearing and thoroughly rewarding piece in every regard.
Max Schaefer
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