TIM HECKER, PETE SWANSON + VESSEL
St John at Hackney | September 19th
It’s pretty indicative of the curatorial sagacity running throughout Moringa’s collaborative St John Sessions that this evening’s line up holds the highest appeal in a schedule also including Helm, Actress, Nils Frahm, Fennesz and William Basinksi. What’s almost as impressive is the venue for the programme: the church of St John at Hackney is a genuinely inspired choice of locale, its elegantly cavernous enclaves both visually and acoustically appropriate to the series.
Bristol’s Seb Gainsborough – he of the increasingly feted Young Echo collective, and arguably the group’s most ascendant member – kicks things off. As Vessel, he sits stylistically between Tri Angle’s well-mined vein of post-hauntological textural ambience and buried melody, and Shackleton’s collages of minimalist clatter, the latter especially evident in the percussive cracks and Middle Eastern-tinged vocal samples. Gainsborough’s set is overwhelmingly built on smeared, shifting texture. The opening drawling choral samples slowly segue into shuffling rhythm and ominous repetitions of sub bass; soulful vocals strobe through the creaking mire, but are buried in treated strings and industrial and atonally melodic samples. Whilst the set eventually reveals glimpses of an esoteric pop sensibility – albeit in brief snatches – this is a satisfyingly abstract sonic composition, Gainsborough’s construction meticulous but perhaps lacking the propulsive consistency which would have made it wholly immersive.
Pete Swanson’s set, on the other hand, is about as close to rapt intensity as we’ve ever experienced in a live setting. Given the venue, you’d be forgiven for expecting at least partial references to the warm noise of the final Yellow Swans record or the man’s dual-channel guitar exercises; but no, this is a truly punishing iteration of Swanson’s shift into noise-indebted industrial techno. The current proclivity for this style of music aside, this is timeless stuff; an unrelenting 45-minute barrage of blown-out static bluster and frequency abuse, hints of euphoric melodicism buried way below the Alberich-esque grind. The combination of a gyration-inappropriate context and the man’s way with volume means that that the appeal of Swanson’s practise here is resolutely cumulative, the sheer sonic force of the wall of sound making this body music in the most primal sense, and a breathless highpoint of any club or gig moment this year.
Tim Hecker’s concise revisiting of 2011’s late career peak Ravedeath 1972 acts as the divine flipside to Swanson’s subterranean onslaught. The attempt to stage the set in near darkness is an appropriate one, the confines of the church an overwhelmingly atmospheric setting for the reverential ambience of the music, the spectral forms of other attendees occasionally shifting in the shadows, and Hecker himself visible only by the light of his desk and a couple of candles. Like Swanson’s set, this is built around tempered and undulating walls of sound, much expanded both in melodious warmth via the use of shifting bass tones and sparse electronics – though not insubstantially indebted to the hefty PA system – and equal in power. It’s huge testament to Hecker’s skill in sound manipulation that he successfully instills such an emotional resonance in a genre often prone to disingenuous evocation. Gig of the year, by a mile.
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Words: Thomas Howells
Photo: Jara Moravec
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