Gig Review - Tim Hecker

There is something fantastic about church based music events. The acoustics, the ambience, the uncomfortable pews, the stained glass windows and the religious paraphernalia all add a certain magical skew to performances - especially if the music in question is also totally incongruous to the setting and even better if the church organ comes in to play too. St Giles in the Fields has been a site of worship since 1101 with the current church built in c.1730. It was the last stop before the gallows at Tyburn where churchwardens would pay for the condemned to have a final drink in a nearby pub. It was also, at times, part of a London no go zone frequented by nobody but the lowest hardened dregs of society. These days it is surrounded by media and PR companies and tonight finds it full of bearded types to see Tim Hecker deliver a 'recital' on the church's ancient organ.

What a congregation two hundred years ago might make of a listen to Tim Hecker's mesmerising album 'Ravedeath 1972' is tricky to tell. Would they run screaming from the aisles to escape the weight of dark dissonance calling for an immediate lynching for this work of the devil or be mesmerised by the delicate beauty hidden within? Judging by tonight's performance my money is definitely on the former.

The organ at St Giles is a fantastic beast with pipework originating from the 17th Century. Tonight its bass is augmented by two speaker stacks standing at the front of the church which the packed audience face patiently awaiting the start of the gig. Through some indeterminable catalyst a silence descends and suddenly the lights are out leaving us in darkness as the distorted intro of 'The Piano Drop' opens the show.

Hecker's work is, at low volumes, quite a beautiful listen but here the brutally powerful system and organ combination takes the music into a totally new space. High frequency white noise distortion combines with pew rattling organ bass over layered digital effects. Just when you think it can't get any louder it does. Heads bowed into the waves of squalling sound, the audience brave the onslaught as Hecker builds layer upon layer to cataclysmic effect. At times the sound is nausea and headache inducing, at others beauty and melody lurk within the forbidding terror of it all. Relief comes during lulls as the noise retreats, catches breath, regroups and reforms before another thick wall of dissonance, distortion and filth is unleashed, sure to awaken the dead in the surrounding cemetery.

The various parts of 'In the Fog' rain down upon us in the darkness. There's little we can do apart from close our eyes and head to whatever strange place such an aural battering might take us. I'm really not sure whether this is entertainment or torture anymore and I must admit there is certain degree of relief when the intense sound dies away Hecker says 'thankyou' and, as the lights come up, we turn around applauding and look up at the organ to find the seat empty.

Visceral, terrifying, brutally intense yet undeniably brilliant - a gig strictly for those who don't object to occasional prolonged visits to the darkside. I'm still in a state of shock.

Review by Andy Gillham

Photo credit: Cain Ullah