Hecker – Sun Pand?monium

Before one can listen to a CD one must confront the CD’s cover, one has to be able to see it, to be able to pick it up, to open it and finally take out the CD and put it in the CD-player. With this new CD by Florian Hecker that was a hard thing to do as it has one of the ugliest covers I’ve ever seen.

Florian Hecker has created quite a name for himself by performing with the cr?me de la cr?me of modern composers of computer music and noise. He worked with artists like Merzbow, Farmers Manual, Russell Haswell, Zbigniew Karkowski, etc. This probably is a nice reference to the kind of music one can expect.

The music on this CD consists of 8 tracks of highly abstract and unclassifiable computer generated sounds. The sounds are very nasty and annoying and sometimes remind of old 8-bit computer games, they also make me laugh sometimes as they are very absurd and I can’t grasp what this is all about. The sounds seem to come from every direction but it is difficult to call this stuff ‘noise’. Therefore it seems likely that there is some sort of arrangement, order, composition, This seems to be the case at the start of the CD, where it reminds me of other electro-acoustic compositions, but after a while I don’t seem to be able to discover anything like this in there, the sense slowly dissapears. This makes this CD very hard to listen to, but sort of an intellectual challenge at the same time. This, I guess, leads me to classify this stuff as intellectualist electro-acoustic-noise music. If you need a serious challenge, try this.

artist: Hecker
label: Mego
details: 8 tracks. Mego 044