Tim Hecker, Chihei Hatakeyama, Machinefabriek and Simon Scott at Cafe Oto, 18-19 May 2010

I had no idea what Tim Hecker looked like before the start of this two day residency at Cafe Oto, and given that he played in darkness by the sound desk on both nights, I could probably have walked past him in the street afterwards without batting an eyelid. But that may be the least mysterious thing about Tim Hecker. Far more difficult to comprehend is the strange power his music has, walking an unfathomable emotional path between euphoria and distress.

I thought I knew what to expect from Tuesday’s night’s support, the nascent combination of the Netherlands’ Machinefabriek with England’s Simon Scott. I had imagined Machinefabriek processing Scott’s guitar, adding sounds of his own, building up to a dense and dreamy shoegaze finale. But Scott hadn’t even packed his guitar, favouring laptop instead. The set was intense right from the off, achieving juddering helicopter-like lift-off, pulsating with feedback and static. It was interesting to watch the contrast in styles – Machinefabriek studious and patient, Scott frantically jabbing fingers at his laptop and grabbing at dials as if the whole set was on the verge of collapse. Perhaps it was: there was a lot of ideas in there, seemingly improvised, from noise textures and portentous clanking rhythms to sections of vocals fighting to emerge from the mix. It just lacked for a convincing sense of narrative or of contrast – something the two of them will work out over time, I guess.

The support on the second night was another debut – the first UK performance by the prolific Japanese artist Chihei Hatakeyama. I’ll be honest, I’ve struggled to keep pace with Chihei’s output over the last couple of years. There have been, what, about 7 albums in the last year? Yet across those that I have managed to hear (Saunter for Room40, The River for Hibernate, Ghostly Garden for Own records) he has somehow managed to keep the quality pretty consistent. Live he was similarly good, providing a meditative contrast to the huge volume that the others playing across these two nights were generating. Much in the vein of, say, Celer, this was all glass harmonics and delicate winds, slowly shifting and mutating across an extremely enjoyable half hour set. It felt like lying in a corn field on a warm day, watching a loved one sleeping, seeing their chest rise and fall, hearing them breathe.

On both nights, the start of Tim Hecker’s sets caught everyone on the hop. He set up at the opposite side of the venue to the preceding acts, and his opening drones bled unassumingly into the between-act music and chat. Some people turned to face him, some didn’t (on the first night it felt like we’d circled wagons round some poor guy in the middle of the venue); it didn’t matter – there was nothing to see, and the sound was pouring out of speakers located all round Oto. And, oh – that sound. This was loud and perfectly rendered, swirling around the room and rising to fill it. The music was an instantly recognisable Hecker collection of densely layered guitar noise, haunting melody and savage distortion. Similar themes played out on both nights, from the scratchy guitar loops than underpin superb new single “Apondalifa” to deep bass progressions. So deep that at one point a pint glass which had been positioned on one of Oto’s pianos was vibrated off the edge onto the floor, shattering and adding a new sound to the set – although I’m not sure how many people noticed. All round the venue people were slumped in their seats with eyes closed, soaking up the atmospheres, finding their own routes through the sound. No doubt they were enjoying those blissful moments when those melodies leapt momentarily from the tightly-packed collections of noise, but soon they were picked apart, scarred and ultimately destroyed. This was a ruined utopia, at once euphoric and deeply unsettling. I felt a tear well at one point, but whether it was from happiness or sadness remains a mystery to me.

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