Konoyo

Konoyo is a heavy album, emotionally speaking, in a way that is difficult to explain, yet can be expressed in a way that only someone like Tim Hecker would know. By destroying, contorting and reconfiguring these sounds, Hecker draws out the most visceral emotions in himself via soundwaves--his music being his therapy, and us, the audience, being his witness to his solemn excursion into his very soul. It's all too beautiful.

Our natural world may not need artistic representation, but there’s few better to reflect upon it than Tim Hecker.

Hecker's clever ability to shift and adapt is clearly on display with Konoyo. A dreamlike song cycle, the album is more than an extension of the grandeur of Love Streams. It's a refined, focused exploration of traditions both adhered to and transcended.

Hecker is bolder with Konoyo, but the themes he explores in that negative space are darker and more oppressive, presenting the missing link between Virgins and Love Streams. And that is what Konoyo showcases: the ability of Hecker to once more reinterpret himself.

He reaches for and finds spaces on shelves in a cupboard behind a wall separating you from a dimension you didn't know existed. Konoyo represents his farthest reach.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

As harrowing and malevolent as it occasionally is, it also serves as a feasible theory that even during one’s search for restoration and tranquility, existence isn’t symmetrical; it’s lop-sided and a belief that Hecker can unknowingly abide to--that even within the bounds of beauty, there will always be pockets of chaos.

You might also hear the elegiac rise and fall of Stars Of The Lid, an emotional Hollywood score or William Basinski's sound of decay. However, as Konoyo unspools, you may look back and realize that this all combines to sound like no one other than Hecker.

Konoyo exists as a glorious symphony that brings together the starkness of electronic experimentation and the human warmth of traditional acoustics into an astonishing whole.

On the most adventurous pieces, such as This Life and Keyed Out, the instruments are made to shiver and thrash as if on a hospital gurney, struggling for equilibrium, as Hecker’s trademark plumes of static billow beneath.

Konoyo takes several listens to fully appreciate, as do most Hecker releases, but it's another excellent example of the distinct mixture of bleakness and majesty which he excels at creating.

Hecker’s music alerts us to a kind of universalism grounded in the painfully specific. To be ambient in feeling, to be ambient in song, to be ambient in devotion--this is Hecker’s project.

Bringing a new sonic palette into his discipline of manipulated notes and overwhelming whoosh, Hecker gushes, drones and distends in ways that are both new and familiar.

It might take you a few cuts to pick up on the gagaku thing. [Oct 2018, p.54]

Konoyo draws inspiration from Tokyo Gaksu, players of gagaku, a Japaneses classical music. You can discern this in the gentle drones and fluting of the opening "This Life," but it's soon all transformed by the producer--as it is on the fizzing "Keyed Out" or the lovely "Mother Earth Phase"--to the subordinate role in Hecker's rather more epic sonic drama. [Nov 2018, p.30]

Konoyo is subtly emotive, its soundscapes cool and tranquil then swallowed up by blossoms of cryptic drama. [Dec 2018, p.93]