10 Years Later: Ravedeath, 1972
Hecker's masterpiece considered in light of Bifo's concept of "Semiocapital."
I love the album Ravedeath, 1972. Ever since I was introduced to it I’ve been fascinated by its exploration of beauty and decay. I’ve tried writing a version of this essay multiple times for multiple different purposes, but have never been able to put it all together. This, my most recent attempt, still fails to articulate what I want it to but feels like a step in the right direction. I plan on trying to write it again sometime down the road, but for now, here’s this.
-Tony
On Valentine’s Day of 2011, Tim Hecker released Ravedeath, 1972. Hecker, by then an already well-respected figure in the electronic music scene, was coming off of the well-received An Imaginary Country from 2009 and five years out from his (then) seminal work, Harmony in Ultraviolet. For his next project, he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland where he, with the assistance of Australian-Icelandic musician Ben Frost, would record the bones for Ravedeath,1972 on the pipe organ in the historic Fríkirkjan í Reykjavík (Free Church in Reykjavik). Largely recorded in one day, Hecker then returned to his studio and spent a month molding those recordings into a masterpiece.
The album was overwhelmingly praised upon its release, with many immediately labeling it Hecker’s finest work to date. (un)Astonishingly, it seems to become more prescient by the day. So what do we learn from revisiting this album ten years later?
It's worth briefly stating what we think music can accomplish. It can bring people joy. It can provide solace. It can imagine new futures. And, just as importantly, it can tell us a lot about where we’re at.
But we should know where we’re at, right? Well, maybe, but it’s difficult. And it’s becoming increasingly more difficult. When considering the themes of technology and decay that are so central to Ravedeath, I find it helpful to consider Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s concept of “Semiocapitalism.” In Bifo’s analysis of late stage capitalism he highlights the importance of flows of information and growing technological forces. The spirit of Semiocapital is captured particularly well in this passage about cell phones:
The cellular phone is left on by the great majority of info-workers even when they are not working. It has a major function in the organization of labor as self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substantially dependent. The digital network is the sphere where the network activates an endless recombination of a myriad of fragments that produce, elaborate, distribute and decode signs and informational units of all sorts. Labor is the cellular activity where the network activates an endless recombination. Cellular phones are the instruments making this recombination possible. Every info-worker has the capacity to elaborate a specific semiotic segment that must meet and match innumerable other semiotic fragments in order to compose the frame of a combinatory entity that is info-commodity, Semiocapital.1
We all play our role in Semiocapital, but comprehending this network Bifo describes is simply beyond our capacity, to try and grasp our role as part of the larger “myriad of fragments” unthinkable. He continues:
But for this combination to become possible, a single, infinitely flexible (and constantly reactive to the calls of Semiocapital) productive segment is not enough: a device is needed, capable of connecting the single segments, constantly coordinating and localizing in real time the fragments of info production. Cellular phones, the most important article of consumption of the last decade, provide this very function at a mass level. Industrial workers had to spend eight hours daily in a specific place if they wanted to receive their wage in exchange for productive gestures performed again and again in a specific territory.2
After completing the music for Ravedeath and trying decide what the cover art should be, Hecker was inspired by images of piles of discarded CDs being pushed by bulldozers. Today we can easily imagine that image replaced with a mass graveyard of cell phones, each one having served its purpose of connecting us to the grand network of fragments but also, having had its obsolescence planned from the day it was made, dutifully taking its place among a new mountain of technological waste, replaced by its faster heir which organizes fragments all the more efficiently. The imagery in season three of The Wire of burner phones littering the streets pales in comparison. The CDs Hecker saw and the technology which drives Semiocapital create a new form of waste, one which not only clogs our planet but also our minds. What does it do to our psyche to begin to see representations of the inconceivably massive amount of information we produce every second, to see the physical piles of CDs or a garbage can full of cell phones and realize what they represent?
But the connection between Bifo’s work and Ravedeath goes well beyond imagery of technological waste. The deeper connection here is in the processes both Hecker and Bifo are contemplating. In The Soul at Work, Bifo has the very practical goal of exploring the forces which have fundamentally changed working class resistance since its most recent peak in the 60’s and 70’s. A function of Semiocapital is to limit the potential of working class movements by attacking the very soul of the individual. It employs panic, “the feeling we have when, faced with the infinity of nature, we feel overwhelmed, unable to receive in our consciousness the infinite stimulus that the world produces in us.”3 More and more, the worker is confronted with feelings of panic far more frequently than what is sustainable. The effect?
The infinite velocity of the expansion of cyberspace, the infinite velocity of exposure to signs perceived as vital to the survival of the organism produce a perceptive, cognitive and psychic stress culminating in a dangerous acceleration of all vital functions, such as breathing and heartbeat, leading to collapse.4
Semiocapital engages in a relentless attack on our souls, and, by proxy, our bodies as well. It has been “able to renew its psychic, ideological and economic energy, specifically thanks to the absorption of creativity, desire, and individualistic, libertarian drives for self-realization”5 In Ravedeath, we can see this in the violence exacted upon the pipe organ by Hecker’s technology, the naive and optimistic instrument from a simpler time being brutalized by an ever more oppressive technological apparatus—an apparatus designed to sap every bit of value it can from each and every one of us. And here the album sounds bleak, like a dire and exasperated unfolding of an irreparable situation. If you’d like, you could stop there.
But Hecker has more in mind here. He’s confronting a bleak situation, but this album is far from hopeless.
The genres deployed on Ravedeath, 1972—drone, noise, and ambient (one could add classical to the list as well)—are well-suited for exploring the chaos of the current world. But infusing those genres with the recordings from Reykjavik allows this album to explore a process of change not unlike that which Bifo is interested in. Not in the sense that they both directly engage with working class struggle, only Bifo is doing that directly, but in how they both identify a break in history. The exploration in Ravedeath centers around the conflict between the purity of the pipe organ and the violent treatment to which it’s subjected. The overlap between Hecker and Bifo is in how they both understand that certain structures which we’ve historically relied upon are crumbling beneath our feet, and that our options are either to give up or create something new from what remains.
The optimism of Ravedeath begins to come into focus.
Hecker and Bifo are not alone in this pursuit, and they find themselves among good company with some of the other most accomplished artists and theorists of recent memory in exploring these questions. They fall within the broader cultural tradition of those faced with the grim task of confronting reality as it is, as opposed to how it's presented to be, and coming up with some idea of what to do next. So that’s why Ravedeath, along with many other works of art which so aptly convey where we’re at, is also imagining new futures. It is an inherent quality of art like this. It doesn’t need to concern itself with the active pursuit of imagining new futures (though it certainly can), but by crafting something new in the face of all this chaos that seemingly aims to destroy beauty as we know it, it does so implicitly. The work itself shows the potential for emergent beauty in a dire situation.
The basis for Ravedeath, beyond all else, is form. The inquiry into decay begins here, by recording a sound as pure and traditional as a pipe organ and then placing it in the sights of a technology that wants to rip it apart. Throughout the album, the sublime compositions Hecker realizes through the pipe organ are crushed by filters and effects, occasionally overcoming them and unveiling the entirety of their traditionalist beauty, and occasionally succumbing to a point beyond recognition (perhaps one could call this a “ravedeath”). But for the most part the pipe organ is being pulled by both sides, one which tries to preserve it and the other which tries to destroy it. Here we find a fundamental tension of the album, a tension that is felt throughout, which is the constant struggle of figuring out what to do with the remnants of a past we can no longer access.
Consider the “In the Air” suite which closes the album. The first movement begins rather quietly, letting the organ have its moment to pierce through the noise until eventually the noise begins to grow, transitioning us into the second, much noisier, movement of the suite. Then, in the final movement, on the final track of the album, the organ returns and, as it fades away in the final minute, like a flickering candle letting off its last bit of light, it suggests some sort of resolution. The organ isn’t crushed by the electronics, but the two begin to work in harmony with one another. From this harmony, a new sound emerges, one which is uniquely possible because of the tension between the electronics and the organ, but also shows that tension being resolved. A sound which would have never existed if not for the very force that tries to destroy it.
A preliminary conclusion:
Byun-Chul Han, in his book The Burnout Society, also touches on the theme of exhaustion under contemporary capital. In one particularly prescient chapter, Han comes to the defense of boredom. He shows that it is a privilege to be bored, as “multitasking,” which capital places on a pedestal, is common among animals. It is instead “contemplation” which is unique to humans.
An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. At the same time, it must guard its young and keep an eye on its sexual partner. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing (Gegenüber) because it must also process background events.6
The cellphone is the background event par excellence. For many, it remains permanently attached to the body, constantly notifying, drawing attention away from the physical world and redirecting it in the service of Semiocapital. Here, the world beyond the cellphone is Hecker’s pipe organ, the cellphone the filters which distort and violate that world. In another ten years this article could likely be revised to discuss virtual reality, a threat to our relationship to the physical world even more menacing than the cellphone. But in Ravedeath, Hecker still draws beauty from this violence, suggesting that even in the wake of the most destructive fires a flower can bloom. It also creates a site for moments of “boredom,” inviting the listener to leave their cell phone in another room and lose themselves, even if only for 52 minutes, in a new world.
Someone with greater tolerance for boredom will recognize, after a while, that walking as such is what bores him. Consequently, he will be impelled to find a kind of movement that is entirely different. Running, or racing, does not yield a new gait. It is just accelerated walking. Dancing or gliding, however, represent entirely new forms of motion. Only human beings can dance. It may be that boredom seized him while walking, so that after—and through—this "attack" he would make the step from walking to dancing. Compared with linear walking, straight ahead, the convoluted movement of dancing represents a luxury; it escapes the achievement-principle entirely.7
Hecker provides us the opportunity to dance, he lays before us a collision between past and future, an uncertain present that, despite the power of big data, capital can't completely control. It’s as if Hecker put the organ into a particle collider along with a number of filters and effects and left us with the task of observing all these small collisions, to embrace uncertainty and explore new possibilities.
Maybe this doesn’t all work out. Maybe, despite our best efforts the world has already slipped from our grasp and all we have left to do is to sit and watch it crumble.
But at the end of the day, there’s something beautiful about a ravedeath, even if it's not the blueprint for a better future. Maybe a ravedeath is an act of reclaiming whatever beauty we can find in the present before there’s none left at all. Acknowledging the past is gone in a flurry of light and sound, a transmutation of bodily and auditory experience that moves us, even if just for a brief moment, into a different realm of experience wholly created by the death of the experience we used to cherish is a beautiful moment in itself. Because if this isn’t going to get better, if the seemingly inevitable materializes, we might as well go out dancing right?
An alternate conclusion:
What do we make of the image which adorns the cover of the inaugural piano drop at MIT? What’s the point of shoving a piano off of a roof, destroying something that has the potential to create beauty? What does it mean that, as a photograph and an album cover, it’s a beautiful work of art in itself? Why did Hecker take a photograph of a photograph to make the cover?
We need to imagine new methods of resistance in the age of Semiocapital. The strategies of the past will likely not be sufficient alone, and Bifo sees hope in the potential of helping people, especially those depressed and defeated by the infinity of Semiocapital, by “[giving] him/her the possibility of seeing other landscapes, to change focus, to open new paths of imagination.”8
This album is beautiful, it’s sad, it evokes an infinite range of emotion, nearly as infinite as the state of nature which instills a sense of panic in us. But it’s also gentle, thoughtful. Ravedeath doesn’t need to force the entirety of this reality on the listener with each encounter, instead it allows for the listener to focus on something new every time. Amidst all the noise, millions of points of clarity emerge, allowing new universes to be created and destroyed at the will of the beholder. Sure, it paints a dark picture of the place we’re at. But it shows that we have the potential to build something new and beautiful whenever we want. I’ll give the last word to the late, great David Graeber:
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”9
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Berardi, The Soul at Work, 89.
Ibid.
Ibid, 100.
Ibid, 101.
Ibid, 96.
Han, The Burnout Society, 12-13.
Ibid, 14.
Berardi, The Soul at Work, 216.
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 52.