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HECKER, TIM & DANIEL LOPATIN - Instrumental Tourist

Format: do-LP & CD
Label & Cat.Number: Software Records SSTUDIOS 01 / SFT017-6ILP
Release Year: 2012
Note: surprising (very electronic/digital) collaboration recordings based on studio improvisations, first in a new series (Software Studio Series) bringing together unusual pairings... luxurious cover, this is the European version (not numbered) which includes a bonus CD of same album
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €24.00
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"Instrumental Tourist, by Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), is the first chapter of SSTUDIOS (Software Studio Series), a new venture in the Software Recording Co.’s expanding catalog. SSTUDIOS invites artists in the field of electronic music to create collaborative works of quality and vision. With a deliberate focus on source material of a synthetic and mimetic nature, Hecker and Lopatin designed a sound palette from the acoustic resonance of digitally-sourced “Instruments of the World.” The intrepid cowboy sound-voyager was inverted, forging a synthesis with the Ecstatic Other; digested exotic instrumentation fuel the tepid journeys of a sampler tourist. Instead of leaning heavily on the proverbial Malian time signature’s sublime truth, Instrumental Tourist pictures the synthetic veneer of exoticism as pushed air captured by oscillating ribbons. The studio meetings between Hecker and Lopatin were conducted to mimic the tropes and techniques of jazz-based improvisation, with little preparation prior. In an era where electronic production can produce the totalities of symphonic effect, and solo sound composition is easier than ever, the necessity of collaborative work is questioned. Could their own respective artistic pursuits be neatly compiled and encapsulated by the very sound bank paradigm that they’ve exploited? Why work together at all? Instrumental Tourist finds two artists transcending their respective visions by agreeing to a new language, one which verbalizes their mutual infatuations and apprehensions with the systems they’ve both built and are buried by. Instrumental Tourist is available via the Software Recording Co. November 20th, 2012 in limited vinyl edition as well as CD and digital formats."

www.softwarelabel.net



"Longtime aQ favorite Tim Hecker, who might be one of THEE most referenced performers on the aQ list, who for us has set the bar for all things fuzzy and gauzy and dreamily washed out, teams up here with another aQ fave, Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the psychedelic space-synth outfit Oneohtrix Point Never, for a fantastic songsuite of smoldering cinematic ambience, and heavily textured psychedelia, the resulting collaboration one of those rare occurrences where it's nearly impossible to tell who contributed what, where Hecker's sounds end and Lopatin's begin, and vice versa. The resulting sounds seem to land more toward Hecker's side of the sonic spectrum, everything ghostly and spectral, laced with squalls of glitch and squelch, underpinned by warm swirls of chordal thrum and swoonsome stringlike shimmer, the one/two punch of the opening tracks "Uptown Psychedelia" and "Scene From A French Zoo" set the stage for the rest of the record perfectly. Opening with a swirling field of zig zagging melodies, zipping from speaker to speaker, draped over mysterious Eastern melodies, everything wreathed in a fuzzy layered haze, and peppered with constantly shifting blasts of synth buzz and fragments of strange stringed instruments, the whole thing gorgeously bleary, and seeming to slowly ooze into one pulsating and prismatic whole. It's another case, where had that opening track been 60 minutes long and filled up the whole record, we definitely would have been perfectly happy. But there's much more to discover here, as "Scene From A French Zoo" reveals, ditching much of the distorted glitchery of the opener, for something much more lush and serene, a tranquil landscape of long smooth, soft tones, undulating over a bed of crackling static, struggling to break through, but inevitably sinking back below the softly swirling surface. Much of the record plays out like variations of those two tracks, slipping easily from dark brooding moodiness, soaring, swoonsome and melodic, almost choral and symphonic in places, to blurts of gristly static, and sculpted short wave interference, noise deftly transformed into melody, often swaddled in soft focus squalls of blurred buzz, just as often nestled in a bed of dreamlike melodies, and smeared shimmer.
We do hear hints of Oneohtrix on tracks like "GRM Blue II", with Lopatin unfurling a mysterious sprawl of kosmische synth melody, but if that is indeed the work of Lopatin, Hecker seems to be crafting an alien aura in which to place Lopatin's more melodic sensibilities.
Much of the sound here is downright soundtracky. "Racist Drone" sounds like some classic Hollywood score mangled and mutated, while "Grey Geisha", sounds like it was plucked straight off some old VHS tape, and run through Hecker's mysterious bank of alien FX. The record plays out like some perfect hybrid of Lopatin's psychedelic synth melodies and Hecker's master of moody texturalism, the title track sounding almost like a Oneohtrix jam remixed by Hecker, while "Ritual For Consumption" takes some mad scientist exotica, and melds it to some heartbreakingly lovely and lilting melodic drift, and then finally, "Vaccination No. 2" finishes things off with a slow building buzz, a dreamy drift that gradually grows more and more dense and distorted, culminating in a gorgeously blown out sprawl of dreamdrone shimmer." [Aquarius Records]