Virgins

Tim Hecker2013Reykjavik, Montreal and SeattleSOUND / Album or recording

Live players in small rooms, taken apart and rebuilt until the room you hear never quite holds still.

A tall figure or object shrouded in grey cloth hangs above a plinth inside a dark church with a patterned marble floor, a stepladder and railings to one side. — Virgins, cover.
PHOTOGRAPH Cover: kranky / timhecker.bandcamp.comReferenced from its source. Rights not established by SIMULACRA.

Plates 2

Overview

The seventh album by Tim Hecker, a Canadian composer who grew up near Vancouver and worked from a studio in Old Montreal. It was released by kranky in October 2013 and recorded the year before in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle.

It was his first record made with live players and something like a score. The label's notes describe woodwinds, piano and synthesizers recorded live, mainly in intimate studio rooms, and an aim of making music that is “out of time, out of tune and out of phase” (album notes, Bandcamp).

Credits

Artist: Tim Hecker
Mixing: Valgeir Sigurðsson and Tim Hecker
Additional assistance: Randall Dunn
Additional assistance: Ben Frost
Mastering: Mandy Parnell, Black Saloon Studios, London
Label: kranky

What to notice

01Real players, unreal roomWoodwinds and piano were played live, then processed. Listen for the point where a clearly acoustic sound loses its edges and stops belonging to any room you could stand in.
02Live Room, Live Room OutTracks four and five are named as a pair: Live Room (7:01) and Live Room Out (2:37). The titles point at the recording space itself.
03The covered figureThe cover shows something wrapped in cloth hanging in a church, with a ladder beside it as if work stopped mid-job. SPIN describes the photograph as sober and as hinting at Abu Ghraib, and track eight is titled Incense at Abu Ghraib.
04Pairs and variationsVirginal I and II, and a closing track called Stab Variation. The record keeps returning to material in altered form, which fits the report of tracks reworked up to 30 times.

Historical context

Virgins followed Ravedeath, 1972. The album notes set it against that record's heavy distortion and cavernous sound, and describe a closer, airier and more defined palette. In SPIN, Christopher R. Weingarten reported that some tracks went through up to 30 versions, and that Hecker kept the album's cover photograph open on his computer while mixing.

The angle here, sound as unstable architectural space, is a proposed reading. The sources support the ingredients: real rooms, live ensembles, heavy reworking and a cover set in a church interior.

Connections

Formal resemblance

unstable enclosure ↔ with
Torqued Ellipses, Richard Serra
Serra's leaning steel walls make a space that seems to shift as you walk it. Virgins does the same with acoustic rooms that drift out of phase. A likeness of effect only.
rooms you hear first ↔ with
Therme Vals, Peter Zumthor
The archive files Vals as a building experienced through material, temperature and sound before sight. Virgins starts from intimate recorded rooms and makes the room the thing you hear.
opposite uses of the room ↔ with
Ryoji Ikeda, Ryoji Ikeda
Ikeda's pure tones make your own room part of the work. Hecker records real rooms and then blurs them. Same subject, opposite method.