Jetone is a Montreal-based musician whose parents know him as Tim Hecker. Ultramarin (Force Inc.) is 12 tracks of cyclopean metrical consistency, dependable as a Timex but considerably more intense. Slight variations in tone are the result of either painstaking effort on Hecker’s part, or your brain’s attempt to make peace with the existential dread. Either way, this is a bracing listening experience, Information Age music that seems to still be caught up in the anxieties of the Industrial Revolution. The track “Octan” layers arrhythmic static atop the perambulating beats, which leaves the listener wondering which is more threatening: routine or divergence from the routine. “Phoedra II” opens with what sounds like an exasperatingly minute guitar riff — exasperating precisely because the tension, small as it is, never releases. Like much Force Inc. music, a lot of Jetone’s work is techno heard from a distance, retaining all of the throb and none of the sheen. But other tracks, like “Only Then,” with its suffocating ambience, refute such careless categorization. Highly recommended.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• Autumn, 2019: I'll have a new piece in The Wire.
• December 13, 2019: This day marks the 23rd anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2020: This day marks the 8th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.
• March 2020: A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen.Dates TBA
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell.Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).