Ambient Against Ambience: "Virginal II" by Tim Hecker

Drumming Upstream 12

Jun 13, 2022

Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about it. At the time of this letter’s publication my snare drum is out of commission. While I wait for its replacement I am working through the songs I’ve Liked that have no drum parts to learn. This week our subject is the song “Virginal II” by ambient artist Tim Hecker.

With “Virginal II” this newsletter has a crossed a new threshold. Following Ekkehard Ehlers and Julianna Barwick, Hecker is the third ambient artist to grace this project. This puts ambient music at 25% of the music that we’ve covered in Drumming Upstream. No other genre, unless you’re casting a net of cartoonish width, comes close to capitalizing on that much of the Leaderboard. It doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that so much ambient music would crop up in a project about streaming, and I’ll spend part of this letter explaining why that’s the case. To be fair, grouping together the conceptually minded Ekkehard, the new-ish age Barwick, and Hecker takes a sizably wide net in itself. As you’ll soon hear, Hecker’s music has little to do with the idyllic bliss of Barwick’s vocal loops, and yet Spotify has no problem plopping both of them in their “Ambient Essentials” playlist. It might be helpful then to look at how, in the case of “Virginal II”, Hecker clashes with the category.

But before I get to any of that I’ll first have to return to statement I made two weeks ago and never followed up on. In my letter about the song “Carry” by Isis I claimed that “few other bands have had as big an impact on my artistic practice as Isis”. While I went on to explain in likely too great detail why I love their music, I never got around to explaining how they’ve directly influenced my work. I don’t have the time or space to get too deep tissued in my evidence, and frankly the results might border on self-incrimination, but here’s an example relevant to today’s topic.

After releasing Oceanic to underground acclaim, Isis followed the album with a series of EPs they’d later bundle into Oceanic: Remixes/Reinterpretations. As the title implies this collection turned Oceanic’s keys and project files over to a host of ambient artists, hip-hop producers, and IDM weirdos and let them run wild. Isis were hardly the first metal band to commission a remix album, but they might have had the best rolodex in the genre, calling in tracks from Venetian Snares, Fennesz, Justin Broadrick, Mike Patton, and, of course, Tim Hecker, who contributed two different remixes of “Carry”.

When I say that Isis are a foundational influence on me, I’m referring not just to how they sound but how they move through the world of music. Isis showed me that forward-thinking heavy music didn’t live in a closed off circle from the rest of music. On the contrary Isis liberally rubbed shoulders with other genres. Isis presented a vision of heavy metal where collaborating with indie rock singers and jamming live with laptop wizards like Hecker made all the sense in the world. No surprise then that I’d go on to have my DIY buddies sing on my records and commission an ambient-heavy remix album of my own.

Oceanic: Remixes/Reinterpretations was my first introduction to Hecker, but I didn’t get hooked until he released Ravedeath, 1972 in 2011. By then I had developed a wide enough pallet to listen to ambient music even without a tangential connection to my beloved heavy metal. Not that Hecker didn’t have plenty to offer the adventurous headbanger. Up through Ravedeath, 1972 Hecker built his reputation on punishing density both in person and on record. Though his pieces often start on instruments like piano or organ, good lucking making out what Hecker originally played through the fog of static and distortion that he sends the keys through. What emerges on the other side of Hecker’s process might not even register as music to the casual listener, but the results are too immense to dismiss as mere background noise.

Hecker offered an inverted version of the same sonic pummeling that I sought from my favorite metal bands. Instead of pushing guitars and drums until they melded into a cacophonous whole, Hecker provided thunder with no lightning, the roar of an amp with no amplifier. Sound so thick you could sink into it, but with none of the exhausting attack of percussion. It was some of the first music that I ever consciously learned to hear monophonically, not as a collection of instruments working in tandem but as a single undulating sonic entity. But just as I was getting a taste for this method, Hecker was ready to move onto something new. Which brings us to “Virginal II”.

Side A

“Virginal II”

By Tim Hecker

Virgins

October 14th, 2013

Liked on December 4th, 2015

“I’ve really tried to reign back on the bloated, heavy-handed Lars von Trier styled mood bludgeoning.” Tim Hecker told Interview Magazine in an article published just under a month after the release of Virgins. “I went as far as I wanted to go as far as the dense, bloated, kind of crescendo-as-expression”. As loud and weighty as Hecker’s older material was, it was so totalizing that an enterprising listener could let it wash over them like a sound bath. Virgins promised to be something more like a scalding hot shower. Where once he favored continuity and the illusion of monophony, now Hecker was going for disjunction and jagged polyphony. Hecker pieced Virgins together from recording sessions in Reykjavik (with the ambient collective The Bedroom Community), Montreal, and Seattle1, expanding on his usual digital instrumentation to include live piano, analog synthesizers and a handful of woodwinds. “I’ve been increasingly interested in false starts and fraudulent beginnings, and things that don’t reach their implied conclusions.” Hecker said in the same Interview interview. “It kind of becomes this disfigured collage.”

Whether he knew it or not, this shift towards the incomplete and the disjointed put Hecker’s work in direct opposition with the way that ambient music would be consumed for the following decade. You’re undoubtably familiar with the old saw that musicians make way less money on streaming than they did with physical albums or even digital sales. This criticism is largely true, but it is not universally true. For rhetorical reasons the artists that benefit from streaming rarely get brought up in arguments against the format. Naming names would reek of haterism and be bad for solidarity. However a look at the success stories helps explain streaming’s deeper structural problems. Take Benn Jordan, aka The Flashbulb. As he explains in a level-headed video about his Spotify income, Jordan is uniquely equipped to benefit from streaming. He owns all of his masters, meaning that he doesn’t need to split his streaming income with a label. By the time Spotify made it to the US he already had an extensive back catalog and a fanbase eager to run the numbers up.

What Jordan does not mention is that his music, short, mostly instrumental electronic tunes, is a perfect fit for Spotify’s playlist ecosystem. As I covered in the letter about Maurice Ravel, Spotify’s playlists use music to serve a mood or act as audio wallpaper for a separate activity. Acute attention paid is by no means a pre-requisite for a song’s popularity on Spotify. Far better to be inconspicuously ever-present on an editorial playlist. Ambient music, either by its author’s intentions or the genre’s social conventions, is a perfect fit for this model. It is the backbone of Spotify’s relaxation, focus, and sleep playlists. It can serve as the soundtrack to nearly any kind of mood or curated vibe. And for the ambient artist lucky enough to have a track plugged into Spotify’s playlist circuit, serving this purpose can net them dough disproportionate to the income generated by the rest of their catalog. The problem, as detailed in a recent Pitchfork article, is that these playlist placements are fickle, unpredictable, and don’t payout in a sustainable fashion even in the best of cases. And if this state of precarity is what can be expected from even streaming’s beneficiaries, the rest of us can’t expect much better. Ambient music in the age of streaming is a zoological miracle. It is both the elephant that blended into the room and the canary that mines the coal.

“Virginal II” aspires to be more. I mean shit, look at that album cover. No one who wants to fade into the background puts a recreation of Abu Ghraib in a church on the cover of their album. Even if he isn’t trying to bludgeon you any more, Hecker certainly isn’t trying to help you relax. If anything “Virginal II” sounds like a provocation. The track begins with three pianos clattering against each other, the percussive attack of hammers on strings amplified to discomforting clarity. The pianos clang away on a short anxious patterns in the upper register. This alarm bell of a motif loops for two and a half minutes until Hecker rips the track’s fabric apart. Hecker disentangles the attack from the note itself, the former reworked into ripples of noise over the tidal roar of the latter. The tension of the first half is never resolved, only washed away by its own wake.

Any pleasure derived from such a distressing set of sounds, the kind of pleasure that would lead someone to Like the track on Spotify for example, is unlikely to come from treating “Virginal II” as a means to an end. Instead, to be enjoyed Virgins must be heard on its own terms as an end unto itself. Treating a record that so openly invokes torture and the intersection of imperialism and religion in its artwork as nothing more than mood lighting boarders on the grotesque. “It requires deeper listening, it requires concentration,” Joel Leoschke said of Hecker’s music to Spin in 2013 “it requires you to pay attention to what’s happening.” This would make “Virginal II” anything but ambient. Not a stocking stuffer in streaming’s gift bag, not a number on a playlist but a free standing work of art.

And yet, I’ve had “Virginal II” on loop in the background for the last 800 words. Unless I’ve deliberately stopped to look at Spotify I’ve hardly noticed the song at all. For all of Hecker’s efforts to deconstruct his wall of sound into disjointed collage, the only discontinuity I heard came from the song looping from its amorphous end back to its percussive beginning. Even the feeling of discomfort can be curated. Even futility needs a soundtrack.

DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD

Take nothing I said above as a criticism of Hecker. I think the guy is a genius, and from the interviews I read while researching this tune he also seems like a surprisingly goofy and unpretentious dude. The point I’m making is that even ambient music that bucks the conventions of the genre can still be bent back into conformity by the technology that we use to consume it. However, with the deep listening that it deserves, “Virginal II” is brilliant piece of sound design. Not necessarily a personal favorite, but an undeniable accomplishment and an inspiration for anyone interested in expanding the capabilities of sound as music. That puts it just below the middle of the Leaderboard for now.

Thank you for reading. Next week our detour through the world of ambient music continues with a less caustic track. See you then.

Randall Dunn is credited as an engineer on Virgins and I have to assume that he was involved in the Seattle sessions. Interestingly, this makes Dunn the first producer to appear multiple times in Drumming Upstream, as he previously sat behind the boards for Marissa Nadler’s “Was It A Dream” (DU#8).

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