The first sound on Tim Hecker’s powerful new record, Konoyo, is keening. Electronic and inhuman, but hard to hear as anything but an expression of grief. It grows in intensity and becomes a chorus, a digital memory of the Trojan women. As in life, the only proper response is silence; what we get instead is chintzy keyboards, halfheartedly plinking out melodic fragments. It’s bathetic but fitting, for again, as in life, everything that follows in the wake of such shattering anguish feels incomplete, unserious, and devoid of meaning. The sense that the pieces don’t fit together anymore, and that it is only in the gaps between them that meaning can be found, is at the heart of Konoyo.
Once again, Hecker has built an electronic edifice on an analog cornerstone. Konoyo’s foundation is gagaku, the music of the Imperial Japanese court. Hecker collaborated with gagaku outfit Tokyo Gakuso, but his treatment of their music is so rough that a casual listener may not recognize them. Hecker is not trying to replicate gagaku music; gagaku is austere while Konoyo is characteristically lush. That said, if you go back and listen to unadulterated gagaku, it’s clear just how faithful to its spirit, at least to the Western ear, Hecker has been.
Besides the reedy dissonance and clattering percussion, which fit easily into Hecker’s music, what Konoyo draws from gagaku is tension engendered by unreconciled dualities. Gagaku’s high drones and lack of obvious meter feel weightless, while its thundering percussion and tonal density give it mass. Gagaku is sharp, precise music, its palpable sense of control implying powerful emotions barely contained. Weightless/heavy; stoic/emotional — to these dualities, Hecker introduces the tensions between digital and analog, ensemble and individual, human and machine. These dualities never resolve, but the lack of resolution is what gives Konoyo cathartic force.
If there is a musical and emotional center on Konoyo, where these dualities find temporary balance, it’s the sliding tones that open it, close it, and surface throughout. Whether issuing from electronics or, as on the standout “In Mother Earth Phase,” bowed instruments, these tones underlie nearly all of Konoyo. They evoke loss, distance and disappearance, but they also evoke and mimic the human voice. Konoyo, unlike Hecker’s last record, Love Streams, contains no human voices, but feels more achingly, chaotically human than Hecker ever has. Like grief and its ghostly aftermath, Konoyo is enveloping, disorienting, even voluptuous, resistant to narrative and rich in sensation, and is one of 2018’s most vital records.
