Title: Night Falls
Artist: Hecq
Genre: Ambient
Release Date: 18th April 2008
Label: Hymen Records
Introduction
Since his first release ‘A Dried Youth’ back in 2004, it was clear that no ordinary artist was controlling the machines and with every new album that appeared he evolved in his way of dealing with music technology and that he’s not willing to sound like anyone else. Many people will also know him from his ‘Hecq Destruxxions’ he did for the last two albums of IN STRICT CONFIDENCE and the last PSYCHOBITCH album. After releasing ‘0000’ last year, it’s now time for the next release, which indeed marks a turning point.
Members
Ben Lucas Boysen - Composition, Arrangements, Sound Design
Website
http://www.hecq.de/ / http://www.myspace.com/hecq
Track Review
01. Nightfalls - 4:52
Very quietly it starts with distant majestic string arrangements and choirs, suddenly getting closer to swell up to an orchestral intensity, just to return to the far away place they came from. You get the impression that with every-time the arrangement’s getting louder it also gets closer and much more intense. A feeling of melancholy, lost in time and space is floating through ‘Nightfalls’ and leaves you behind with your own thoughts
02. Never Leave - 5:43
Calm choirs from a seemingly limitless distance are getting louder and louder mixed with mighty strings of a quality I’ve never heard before. A throbbing electronic pulse appears like an abstract form of a beat layer. The strings are taking over the control of your soul, wraps it inside a coat of wistfulness. The orchestral strings jump form one mood to the other within seconds. Either they are dark and melancholic or uplifting. Reverberation beats sneak under them, giving the whole song an even more monumental feeling.
03. Dis - 6:08
At first I had to think of a proper way to describe this track and it would be best, if you would take it as a journey through different sound rooms filled with multi-various sounds of a kind you never even dared to imagine. The boundaries between the synthetic sound and the reality have broken and everything is floating into one another. You can hear a train passing by with all its usual sounds. Did I hear someone passing me by a second ago? Must be my imagination. Everything’s filled with ultra-wide synth layers you can drown in but never reach the ground. You will fully delve into another world and forget everything that’s happening around you. Electronic soundscapes and real sounds result in the most fascinating symbiosis so far.
04. Dis (Reverberation) - 1:52
It is like an echo from the past or from deep underground, where sounds are born to reach your ears only for a few seconds to disappear into the darkness again. In this case it must be something like a violin, which sounds so far away due to the enormous reverberation effects.
05. Bending Time - 4:56
The audience is sitting down and is now waiting for what’s to come. They’ve been invited to a very special concert, but you can’t see anything on that stage. All is black and dark, but suddenly spherical piano sounds emerge in the hall. Everyone’s focussing on the stage, but still there’s nothing to see. Where does that wonderfully played melody come from? Quiet strings appear. Barely audible to accentuate the piano and after the last sounds died away in silence, the concert already had cone to an end and even though they’re still not knew, who was playing there in the dark, they left the building with the memory of a very special concert and a melody, they’ll never forget.
06. Aback - 3:08
A rhythmical almost percussion like beat sequence is starting accompanied by this disturbing sound, which already led us from the last track to the current one, but the actual star of ‘Aback’ isn’t the beat that will slowly disappear as the time is passing by, it’s the strings that play the major part.. At first they’re just low echoes in the background but as the song goes on you’ll get aware of more details and a female voice gets audible sounding like an opera singer embedded in multi-layered strings creating an extremely intense atmosphere full of melancholy. Maybe a bit of sadness and dreariness like staring out of the window to just see a grey sky…
07. Come Home - 5:14
A distant rumbling, just like an avalanche, getting closer and closer. Then a metallic noise like the one you hear sometimes, when a train is rushing over the trails. The distant rumbling is still there, but it’s now surrounded by male and female choirs and mighty strings, so that you almost forget it’s there at all. The choirs don’t cease but suddenly you notice an electronic background, a feedback in the matrix. Glitches appear later and various samples and recordings deliver the impression of big industrial machineries.
08. Giants - 6:04
At the next stop of our journey, it feels like we’re entering an incredibly high tower. A giant fitting very well to the song title and while we’re standing down there, we can hear sounds, seemingly coming from every possible direction. We just can’t locate them exactly due to the heavy reverberation in that building, but it sounds like someone is working here. It’s a bit difficult to describe this properly, but it seems as if the electronic sounds used here are some kind of extension for the real life recordings, widening their sound spectrum ad infinitum and creating a whole new listening experience.
09. Magnetism - 6:58
A microscopically sculptured glitch functions as a small intro to the world of ‘Magnetism’. In physics, magnetism is one of the phenomena by which materials exert attractive or repulsive forces on other materials. Transferred to this track this would mean layers and layers of wide synth arrangements would attract each other until they connect and maybe fuse to form another sound or already connected sounds repel and drift apart to fall back into the original shape. The result is in any case a constantly changing atmospheric network.
10. Red Sky - 3:52
When the sun is setting and the sky isn’t covered by clouds than you can see it turning red and it’s almost like the sky is burning and it’s a neat motive for photographers I guess. This track could be the perfect accentuation for it. I will surely try it when I get the possibility to watch the Red Sky again, but enough from me; we’re here for the music, which is unquestionable very special. The pitches of the choirs are changing dynamically without any gap. AS fluently as the choirs the moods are changing too. From gloomy to hopeful within a few seconds.
11. Above - 4:48
Take a look up to the skies and listen closely, then you’ll hear spherical sounds coming down from the farthest layer of the heavens. A choir of a thousand voices is bewailing a symphony, while the distant sound of a violin spreads a breath of melancholy. Sometimes it sounds a b it mistuned, but it always fills the skies with its distinct sound.
12. I am you - 9:12
Now it’s already time to say goodbye. We’re reaching the end of our journey and what an end this is. This is by far the longest track on the album and even though I was not sure, what to expect it’s one of the most beautiful and breathtaking songs, you will get to know on ‘Night Falls’. I still can’t find words that could properly describe what I feel when listening to this song. It advances right into my soul, is touching me deep inside and brings me close to tears with every single listen The track is built up dramatically and even if you think you’ve already heard dense and atmospheric arrangements, but you haven’t heard something like this before. All the emotion the composer ,must have felt during the production must have been captured here and is unleashed every time the song is played, Strings like from an orchestra, trumpets and gentle electronic beats are culminating up to a dramatic finale of a special album.
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 10
Sound: 10
Extras: -
Total: 10
Conclusion
At first I have to say that even if this is a track by track review, the songs have been recorded as one continuous opus. A monument of sound if you like. Sometimes it just isn’t necessary to use words and lyrics, they’re just disturbing. Like in this case: The music of ‘Night Falls’ speaks for itself and creates pictures and stories in the listener’s mind. Real life sounds are mixed with electronic sound and strings of an orchestral quality. Speaking of quality, the production is on an extremely high technical al level. I would like to end this review with a translation of the German text, written on the front cover:
“I am not myself. I am the one
Walking by my side, without me seeing him,
The one I often visit and the one I often forget.
The one, who remains silent when I speak,
Who gently forgives, when I hate, who wanders
Where I’m not, who will stay upright, when I die.”
{jos_sb_discuss:19}
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