Album Reviews: Oneohtrix Point Never- R Plus Seven and Tim Hecker- Virgins
It seems like a bad idea to have the first track on your
album include the word “boring.”
Daniel Loptain has done just that—R Plus Seven, the new LP under his Oneohtrix Point Never
moniker, beings with the song “Boring Angel.” Towards the end, there’s a song
called “Problem Areas”—an accurate descriptor for what much of this album is
plagued by.
On the flip side of this, slightly like-minded
experimentalist Tim Hecker’s Virgins
is nothing short of a revelation. It’s oppressive, harsh, and terrifying.
The reason I’ve chosen to talk about both of these albums
within the context of one review is not that they are so similar—they aren’t.
Last year, Lopatin and Hecker collaborated on Instrumental Tourist, a mostly improvised, kind of uneven, though
compelling album that blended Hecker’s love of straight up noise with Lopatin’s
affinity towards vintage and dated sounding keyboards and other beeps and
boops.
Loptain first showed up on my radar thanks in part to his
2011 concept album Replica—a collection
of songs built entirely out of manipulated sound clips from a bootleg DVD set
of 1980s television commercials. The title track was seriously like nothing I
had ever heard before—incredibly claustrophobic yet shockingly reassuring and
calming.
Also in 2011, Hecker was riding on the victory lap from his
widely acclaimed Ravedeath, 1972.
Replica proved to
be a departure for Lopatin’s solo output—his pre-Replica material is very much in line with R Plus Seven—a lot of silly noises, faux-rainforest chirps, organs
that sound like they belong at a baseball game, or as depicted later on, in a
church, and just a lot of unfocused dicking around.
In April of this year, I saw Lopatin open for Sigur Ros in
St. Paul. Hidden behind the band’s scrim, he sauntered out on stage and stood
in front of a waist-high cabinet, occasionally shifting his weight quickly
between one foot to the other, occasionally drinking what presumably was a
Summit Pale Ale, and occasionally fiddling with a knob, or a button, here or
there.
Since the scrim blocked him from being seen completely, he
could have been just standing on stage for 30 minutes faking it, while an iPod
played someplace. The material of his set was comprised of sounds heard now on R Plus Seven—I certainly didn’t like it
in April. I certainly don’t like it now.
There are some listenable moments on the record—at the half,
a substantial portion of “Zebra” skitters along like a disjointed, minimalistic
club banger, but yet because of the overall theme of “unfocused dicking
around,” there are brief pauses that slow the vibe down to a crawl. Sure the
different sounds are pretty to hear, or whatever, but the constant switch up
and juxtaposition becomes a little intolerable when it’s in a song that started
out with some promise.
But by all means, stick around to the end of “Zebra” for
some sexy saxophone.
Hecker’s Virgins
begins with an uneasy drone, and as awful sounds blast off over the top of it,
that unease never lets up.
“Live Room” sounds like it was taken from the soundtrack to
a horror movie, and even when the dread is not as obvious, Virgins is the kind of music you could use to score any situation
where something bad could possibly happen.
An album like Virgins
is exponentially more enjoyable than R
Plus Seven simply based on the fact that it is not irritating as fuck to
listen to. The downside to Hecker’s LP is that rarely is there a “good” time to
put it on, because it is so downright Lynchian in how terrifying and
unrelenting it is. It’s like when your favorite movie is a real downer—there’s
never a time when you REALLY want to sit down and watch it and feel horrible
about yourself.
Hecker shows a real handle on this whole “how to make an
ambient/experimental/drone record” thing, as the pieces seamlessly weave in and
out of one another—especial on “Stigmata I” and “Stigmata II,” as well as the
earlier “Incense at Abu Ghraib” and “Amps, Drugs, Harmonium.” Those two also
win the award for “Best Song Titles,” showing that even while Virgins is super serious, Hecker,
somewhere, has a sense of humor.
Lopatin closes his album with a synthesized voice driven
piece called “Chrome Country,” capping off a weird and disjointed album with
the penultimate weird and disjointed track—parts of it are lush, sure, but the
album’s whole aesthetic is similar to bumper cars: you go along one way, crash
into something, and abruptly change course. Hecker, on the other hand,
intensely closes with “Stab Variations, a lengthy drone full of sharp noise
blasts that slowly fades into the distance.
For these two to have put out a collaborative joint isn’t
that much of a stretch—I’m guessing most “major” experimental musicians tend to
run in the same social circles, and that Instrumental
Tourist just kind of happened. Now, back on that solo tip, Lopatin’s
meditation on restlessness shows an astounding and possibly intentional lack of
focus and concentration. On Virgins,
Hecker plays to his strengths, pulls out all of the stops on crafting legit
compositions out of the most dissonant sounds.
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