Out of the Box #11
Tim Hecker (2010)
Out of the Box is an irregular series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.
OUT OF THE BOX #11
Tim Hecker ~ Apondalifa (2010)
For this installment, we’re listening to Tim Hecker’s Apondalifa seven-inch, a two-part reworking of “Pond Life” from his 2009 LP An Imaginary Country. This record was released on limited edition 45 rpm 7” by Room40, but basically sold out immediately. Luckily, I had recently moved to Montreal at the time and scooped up a copy at L’Oblique, my favorite neighbourhood record shop where I also copped that Colin Stetson record I previously wrote about. (Or maybe I’m misremembering and I ordered from Jeremy Bible’s late great and dearly missed Experimedia?) The reworked composition was later repackaged as one long track on an LP alongside Norberg, a 21-minute live recording of a performance in a mine during Sweden's Norberg festival on July 30th, 2005, previously released as a CD on Room40.
An Imaginary Country ranks very high on my personal ranking of Tim Hecker’s discography. I moved to Montreal in 2009 for grad school, so as I mentioned above the timing was right. Of course, I deeply love many of Tim Hecker’s records: Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (2001), radio amor (2003), and Harmony in Ultraviolet (2003) are all perfect records to these ears, records that warrant repeat listening as albums and which have stood the test of time. Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) and Virgins (2013) came out while I was living in Montreal, after I’d met Tim personally, and both records saw him push his sound in new directions rather than rest on his distortion-soaked laurels, while also finding even more critical and commercial acclaim. And while I think my opinion of Love Streams (2016) may be more positive than some of my ACL comrades, I think that is also a phenomenal record that sounds not quite like anything else, and is perhaps the greatest synthesis of Tim’s earlier work with his post-Ravedeath experiments with pulse, repetition, and counterpoint. And I’ve written at length about my admiration for the gagaku records, including a review of a live performance at UNSOUND in 2018.
But something about An Imaginary Country hits different. Partly again this may stem from my personal connection with the record, but in retrospect it also feels like an important turning point in Tim Hecker’s oeuvre. Here he’s building upon his previous work while staking out a new direction, attempting to translate Reichean pulse-based compositions into his practice, something that would reach fuller expression on Virgins.
Like many, Tim Hecker really popped on my radar following the praise he received for Harmony in Ultraviolet, which was among Pitchfork’s Top 50 of 2006. I recognized his name due to a remix he did for “Carry” off ISIS’s OCEANIC in 2004 (I really should write about that record at some point; what a revelation that was as a 20 year-old hardcore fan, alongside tracks from Fennesz, Thomas Koner, Venetian Snares, and JK Broadrick) but I didn’t really dig in to his catalogue until after Harmony. An Imaginary Country was thus the first Tim Hecker record that I excitedly listened to upon release, and it went on to become The Site Before ACL’s album of the year for 2009.
I was already plugged into the Montreal scene prior to living there, through following Constellation and Alien8 and similar labels and taking occasional trips to visit to see shows, but of course living there changed my relationship to the city. From the outside the Montreal scene may seem to be self-serious and even pretentious, but on the contrary I found most artists to be humble, down to earth, and often funny. By coincidence I ended up doing my MA in the department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill, where Tim was completing his doctorate under the supervision of Jonathan Sterne at the time. His dissertation, The Era of Megaphonics: On The Productivity of Loud Sound, 1880-1930 (2014), is a cultural history of “loud sound,” but instead of focusing on the usual suspects (Luigi Russolo, noise, machines, electrical amplification) he instead considers the development of the pipe organ and the use of fog horns on America’s coastlines. In interviews, he always downplays the connection between his scholarly research and his artistic work, but the emphasis on pipe organs is of course something directly relevant to Ravedeath. (I also have fond memories of being seated on the floor of concert venues stoned in a fog machine haze thinking, “really there’s no connection here, Tim?”) I also ended up sharing a group office with Tim for some time, and he played defense on our departmental hockey team (“Ten Left Wingers”) in our university’s just-for-fun league. (Of course it was Canada, so everyone aside from me an Austrian colleague seemed to have near-professional puck-handling skills. From what I can recall, Tim was a beast of a defensemen, this may have somehow influenced how I hear his music.
An Imaginary Country thus holds a special place for me in the Tim Hecker discography. I love the flow of the album, the way the opening “100 Years Ago” returns at the end as “200 Years Ago,” Radwan Ghazi Moumneh of Jerusalem in my Heart’s rework, encouraging the listener to conceive of and listen to the album as a loop. Each track feels like moving along a tour of some imaginary country [title drop], a feeling also captured by the album art, a detail taken from Canadian painter David B. Milne's Montreal Crater, Vimy Ridge, 27 May 1919, which despite being nearly a century old at the time felt out of step in a way not unlike the album it adorns.
“Pond Life” is a short track, at only 1:25, mostly consisting of a few overlapping loops of indistinct distorted sound. While it comes fourth on the CD and digital versions, it is the first song on the B side of the double LP, and so its brevity serves a purpose, sandwiching the two longer tracks “Borderlands” and “A Stop at the Chord Cascades” between it and the minute-long “Utropics.” Which brings us to another things I appreciate about An Imaginary Country; its sequencing works equally well digitally as on vinyl. And I love comparing listening experiences across different media, not least because vinyl allows listeners to experiment with listening at different speeds. Try Apondalifa at 33 rpm, for instance. So, to finally turn to Apondalifa, whose title is itself lengthened by playful transformation, the brevity of “Pond Life” makes it a particularly good candidate for an extended rework.
Unlike any other other records I’ve profiled for this series, Apondalifa is actually one composition split over two sides. Seven-inch records would seem less than ideal for such a presentation, but since I’m writing about the seven-inch version and not the digital or LP version, I think it’s important we consider the effect of breaking the piece in two. Perhaps partly to accommodate side-flipping, both sides begin suddenly, with no preamble or fade-in. The relation to “Pond Life” is there, but one might miss it if it weren’t for the context clues. That is to say, Apondalifa is a distinct work.
The more recognizable peaks of feedback build slowly, as if Hecker has zoomed in and stretched out the short loops that make up the album cut. The texture of guitar strings are also more identifiable, as they are so transformed on the album that they might be synthesizers or samples or of some other provenance, but here they are more clearly recognizable. Perhaps it was wrong these sessions that the elements that make up “Pond Life” were drawn, rather than the other way around. “Side One” ends as abruptly as it began, and so of course “Side Two” picks right up. The seemingly aimless noodling of the guitar settles into a more predictable groove, whose morphology seems to mirror the feedback loop at the core of “Pond Life.” While not as essential as An Imaginary Country or other full-lengths, or even less heralded works such as the Atlas EP, Apondalifa is worth revisiting, just perhaps better appreciated in digital form.