In November 1972, a group of MIT students hauled a piano to the roof of a dormitory and threw it off. No manifesto, no reason anyone can fully reconstruct; they just wanted to see a piano meet the ground. The drop became an annual tradition, and decades later, a photograph of students gathered around a doomed piano on that roof landed in the hands of a Canadian composer named Tim Hecker, who put it on the cover of the greatest album ever made about what we do to music.
Ravedeath, 1972 came out on Kranky in 2011, and here is what it is on paper: on a single day in July 2010, Hecker sat down at the pipe organ of Fríkirkjan, a wooden church in Reykjavik that his friend Ben Frost had found, and played for hours while the room was recorded. Then he took the tapes home to Montreal and spent a month burying that organ in gorgeous digital ruin: fog, distortion, static, drift. A church instrument, the oldest synthesizer humanity ever built, wrapped in everything the laptop age can do to a sound. The record lives exactly on that fault line, and fifteen years later nothing else has ever sounded like it.
Look at the tracklist and you realize the whole record is an argument. "The Piano Drop." "Hatred of Music," parts one and two. "Analog Paralysis, 1978." "Studio Suicide, 1980." Hecker has said the album grew partly out of an image he couldn't shake: mountains of pirated CDs being crushed by bulldozers in Eastern Europe, music as landfill, the sound of a civilization producing more songs than it can love. The album takes that despair seriously and then does something despair can't: it makes the most physically overwhelming beauty out of the wreckage. Played loud, and it must be played loud, the "In the Fog" suite doesn't sit in the room, it displaces the air in it, the organ's breath and the distortion's grain pressing on you like weather. This is ambient music the way an avalanche is snow.
And then there's the ending, which is the whole thesis delivered in four minutes. After nearly an hour of the organ fighting through interference, "In the Air III" closes the record with the instrument almost entirely alone, unburied, just wooden-room air and those patient chords. Every force the album threw at music, the noise, the piracy, the rooftop, the bulldozers, and the last thing standing is the oldest sound on the record. Music, in its purest form, outlives everything we do to it. I don't know a more quietly hopeful ending in this whole genre, and it's hidden inside an album with "Hatred of Music" in the tracklist.
The record won a Juno, spawned a starker companion EP, Dropped Pianos, built from its sketches, and became the summit of a catalog with several other peaks; Hecker's Bandcamp holds most of them, and the 2LP remains in print through Kranky. But this is the one. Every thread this site pulls at, decay as a record of survival, the physical outlasting the infinite, listening as an act you commit to rather than a feed you graze, was pressed into this album fifteen years ago, in one day, in a wooden church, on an instrument older than the country it sat in.
Play it front-to-back, loud, in cold weather if you can arrange it. Somewhere in minute forty, you'll understand why a piano falling off a roof made the cover: because the terrible sound of that landing and the sound of an organ in a church are both just wood, wire, and air, and both of them, this album insists, are worth keeping.
