Ravedeath, 1972

Revisiting Tim Hecker's uncanny ambient masterpiece

In 1972, students of Boston’s MIT pushed a piano off its roof.

The instrument, broken beyond repair, had been sitting around one of the dorm buildings, Baker House, taking up space.

During a house meeting, a student named Charlie Bruno suggested an unusual solution to the bulk waste issue.

The MIT’s student handbook didn’t explicitly prohibit pushing things off the roof, though it did prohibit throwing things out the windows. The students decided what wasn’t prohibited could – and should – be done.

The event was prepared and executed several days later.

The spectacle turned into a strange tradition. For more than half a century, MIT students have been pushing a broken piano off the Baker House roof once a year.

A striking black-and-white photograph of that very first piano drop landed on the cover of Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker’s sixth studio album Ravedeath, 1972.

The image is an obvious but striking metaphor for the devaluation of music and the collapse of context in the digital era.

Hecker’s music is often filed under ambient, which might be technically apt, but it’s important to him to draw a line in the sand.

His 2023 studio album No Highs was dubbed “a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. This is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. (…) An escape from escapism.”

The same could be said about each of his albums, especially Ravedeath, 1972.

This is not an easy, blissful background listen. Over 12 tracks, Hecker crushes, filters, twists and compresses the sounds of pipe organs, upright pianos and electric guitars beyond recognition.

What makes this an ambient record is the emphasis of texture and mood over melody and harmony; Hecker doesn’t occupy himself much with rhythm and meter either.

The tracks have no conventional arc, and the overall record doesn’t follow any cathartic structure – there is no climax and no crescendo, as the record starts out harsh and dramatic, then turns more gentle and romantic towards its second half.

These digitally distorted acoustic frequencies aptly illustrate the interferences between the analogue and the digital sphere, and the replacement of actual experiences with mere simulacra.

Walls of noise and layers of static represent a world of permanent overstimulation and overconsumption – pushing the piano off the roof, in that context, is not so much an anti-art statement, as it might seem at first, but a desperate act of defiance.

Hecker once described himself more as a sculptor than a producer. He’s shaping recorded sounds – like analogue instruments or field recordings – by means of digital processing.

Growing up in Vancouver, Canada, and moving to Montreal in 1998, he started out as an experimental techno producer under the artist name Jetone.

By 2001’s Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again, his first album released under his birth name, he’d developed his singular style of electronic drone music. On 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet, Hecker started working with processed pipe organ sounds.

The original recording sessions for Ravedeath happened in the Fríkirkjan church in Reykjavik, Iceland, where a lively experimental music scene around producer-composers Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and their Bedroom Community label had formed at the time.

The Australian-born, Iceland-based Frost was a close collaborator of Hecker’s on this record; I remember discovering it together with Frost’s By The Throat (2009) and often listening to both records back to back.

Tim Hecker, source: Bandcamp

The album was released in February 2011, when the vaporwave scene started to gain traction. Daniel Lopatin’s Eccojams had been released the year before; producers like James Ferraro and 18 Carat Affair were shaping the culture. Floral Shoppe, the genre-defining album by Ramona Langley under her Macintosh Plus alias, would be released later that year.

Vaporwave, for those that don’t remember, was/is a highly influential internet movement of semi-anonymous DIY producers making an artform out of editing uncanny nostalgic loops from old muzak, radio jingles and smooth jazz songs, and pulling together ominous collages of roman busts, early computer graphics and Japanese letters over pink and mint green backgrounds.

The genre evolved massively throughout the 2010s – some vaporwave producers stopped working with samples altogether to create deeply immersive soundscapes that deserve to be viewed in a wider lineage of ambient music history – whether you want to hashtag their music #dreampunk, #slushwave or #brokentransmission on Bandcamp doesn’t matter too much.

My friend and fellow vaporwave enthusiast Jan Ove Hennig nailed it in a conversation we had earlier this week: The best vaporwave, he said, manages to convey a sense of familiarity with something unknown.

This statement rang true to me, and for some reason, it immediately made me think of Ravedeath, 1972.

When I first heard this music, it felt as if I’d waited for it to exist. Somehow, it had already existed within me.

Don’t get me wrong though: This is clearly not a vaporwave album.

But it was born out of the same cultural climate and inhibits a similar emotional and conceptual space for me.

Hecker wasn’t an actual part of the vaporwave scene. That canvas feels too small for his work. But some of the more ambitious producers from that scene clearly drew inspiration from his music, as well as from other ambient composers like William Basinski or Stars Of The Lid, who turned ‘worthless’ cultural (digital) artefacts and unwanted noise (tape decay, guitar feedback) into art.

Hecker has created brilliant work after Ravedeath, 1972, like the breathtaking sister albums Konoyo and Anoyo (2018/19), for which he recorded with a Japanese gagaku ensemble.

In the meantime, he’s moved into the space where electronic/ambient composers often land when they become more accomplished – score production.

Among other commissioned work, he wrote the music for the successful horror film Infinity Pool and the BBC Two series The North Water.

Earlier in 2025, he released Shards, a compilation of short pieces originally written for various film and TV projects.

I still think of Ravedeath, 1972 as the ideal entry point to Hecker’s catalogue – though I don’t think he’s ever made a single bad or boring album.