Tim Hecker: "Atlas One"

According to Greek mythology, after the Titans lost the war to the Olympians Zeus punished Atlas by making him stand on the Western edge of the Earth to hold up the sky. In Tim Hecker’s world, you can feel Atlas beginning to collapse under its weight, the sky slowly dissolving into the sea. Solid objects become faint impressions; reflections within reflections. “Atlas One” is one of Hecker’s more even-keeled tracks, as steady and unwavering as nature itself, but even without any discernable climax, it’s still a beast. One of the rare times you can actually hear some clean guitar in the mix of static and distortion, it nevertheless seems less a product of fingers running along a fret board than some unseen force ripping through the ether and picking up a guitar in its wake. Which is Hecker’s real strength: while the harmonics of the guitar are clearly delineated from the rest of the dense noise here, it still sounds like it’s all erupting from the same source; a single, exploding sine wave rather than several tracks layered on top of each other. Rather than issuing a proper climax, Hecker instead dwells on the aftermath, ending the track in subtler ambience occasionally interrupted by fissures of noise that suggest Atlas is still struggling amid all the debris.