The dark ambient god shattered eardrums at Crystal Ballroom on Wednesday, 10 May 2023.

Lyfe Indoors opens a short bill.

Sticks and stones will break your bones, and prolonged exposure to sound over 70 decibels will cause gradual hearing loss. Sound over 120 decibels will cause immediate damage. No one except the sound techs knows for sure how high the needle was climbing during the Tim Hecker set. But the pained grimaces on the faces of the Crystal Ballroom faithful spoke volumes.

There will always be a place for music that is TOO LOUD. Sometimes you have to push the boundaries of the equipment at your fingertips in order to know where those boundaries lie. The series of Neon Marshmallow music festivals in the early teens were a kind of case study in this brand of avant, electro noise fury masochism. (Though the best acts at Neon Marshmallow were always the ones who would roll in and wow you à la Oneohtrix Point Never without the plugged-in, brutalist machismo of lesser lights.) 

It’s a kind of musician’s version of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s self-appointed mission: 

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”

Maybe Canada’s Tim Hecker is the Supreme Scientist. Fans “sort of” knew what to expect, based on his discography. Listen to excerpts from recent LPs Anoyo or No Highs. The soundscapes venture into brooding and aggressive territory…

Of course, at home you can turn the volume up and down at will. At a venue, you’re at the mercy of whatever demonic conspiracy hatched between the artist and soundboard. The wise will always bring earplugs. Sure, you lose some (a lot) of the sonic nuance, but your eardrums will live to fight another day. Not even earplugs were enough on Wednesday night. Painful for the ears. Even more painful for the soul, watching all of those Tim Hecker devotees squirm in place, trying to put a good face on the night, pretending “This is fine” while the room burns to the ground and their internal organs liquify.

Friendly neighbor to the north no more!

Lyfe Indoors

Lyfe Indoors is from “here” and Seattle. A bicoastal music maker and one man band.

The electronic artist situated himself behind a small, elevated box of knobs, trading between pure digital smoke signals and a four-string bass.

His stock in trade was cool ambient pop, making liberal use of delay and looper effects to build up layers of sound into a launching pad for fuzzed-out bass solos.

Extra points for stretching the textural possibilities of the electric bass. Lye Indoors scratched, slid, slapped, strummed, and otherwise ‘s’-verbed his instrument to make the strings sing in alien keys.

A mostly laidback set proved to be the calm before the storm.

Tim Hecker

What to say about this set that hasn’t already been said in the opening statement of this live review?

Tim Hecker “melted faces,” which sounds like a cool phrase until it actually happens to you. It was Sonic Youth Silver Sessions country. If you want a silver lining, call it “a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” But is it a nice place to visit?

A set like Tim Hecker’s at Crystal Ballroom reminds you that music is a fully corporeal experience. You listen to music from the tips of your toes to the top of your head, whether you realize it or not, and that music listens to YOU. Listening to too much music via Spotify on your $300 Airpods By Dre can give a false sense of control over the soundwaves coming at you. 

The real soundscape is the one that surrounds us all the time, breaks over us like constant waves. Sometimes it’s gentle lapping waves, like the sound of a mouse quietly nibbling the peanut butter off the trap in the corner. Sometimes it rings out like thunder from the gods, a tsunami of noise, like a planet covered pole-to-pole in construction zones lorded over by jackhammer tyrants and shotgun shoguns. Pure terror; it’s when “keeping it real” goes wrong.

If Tim Hecker wanted to give us a glimpse into more hellish corners of the sonic multiverse, he gave it a good effort. Wear earplugs, if you like. You’ll miss what nuances there were to be registered in the amp-shaking night tremors of the hourlong set. But hey, if the nuances don’t care about you, why should you care about them?

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