Tim Hecker – Incurably Optimistic!
In ambient music, tones are affects.
In ordinary life, we feel affects. In ambient music, we hear affects.
This can be described by analogy to painting. A painting is not ‘seen’ in the same way as other visual objects. Music is likewise not ‘heard’ in the same way as other sounds. A painting is something visible, but it also makes-visible. Music makes-audible. In order for it to be possible to make-visible something that does not properly belong in the visible world (i.e., affects, forces, transitions), it must be the case that vision and visibility are not originally or ultimately closed-in on the visible world. A scene is painted: but it is not just a scene that is painted– it vibrates with a whole spectrum of ‘invisibles.’ How is this possible? The visible participates in all of the other sensible fields as well as their whole by virtue of the synaesthetic body. But when something invisible is made visible in a painting, it is not due to its being signified or represented in a ‘visual language.’ When something from one sensible field crosses into another, it is not translated from one code to another. Instead, it is immediately modulated as it passes through the modulator of the body.
In this process of modulation, the tone and the affect are related in the manner of images rather than signs, which is why the affective tone conserves a depth within itself that can never be rendered fully transparent or intelligible. The audible modulation of affects contaminates affects with the materiality of sound, and suffuses tones with an affective charge. The images that result from this operation fuse together the fields of tone and of affect to produce a bastard child – the affective tone – which remains foreign to each field viewed separately. Hence, on the one hand, the musical tones we hear immediately present themselves as affective images. On the other hand, more profoundly, the audible modulation of affects opens the affects onto the inhuman domain of forces, impersonal sensations, inferior and superior durations, “the burning heart of matter.” Such inhuman affects can be heard in Tim Hecker.
Tim Hecker – Harmony in Blue III
A whole spectrum of audible modulations can be described, ranging from the more affective to the more material. In tracks like these, Tim Hecker is situated more on the affective side – yet it is always a matter of inhuman, pre-human or superhuman affects. Where he explores the side of material forces, he is obsessed with decay, deterioration, entropy, but no less the integrative powers of dissipation (the emergence of life).
Music that is cliché exploits a signitive relationship between tones and affects – this is the happy part, here comes the sad part, etc. Music that is less cliché tries to produce new affects from new tones and rhythms. Good ambient music like Tim Hecker attempts to modulate the affects themselves by opening them onto the material duration of the world. And that this operation should be possible attests to the fact that it was the original situation – one that, however, has been covered over.
