About
Hallock Hill | Tom Lecky
“There is something wondrous about this implacable and partly untraceable album. That’s primarily because The Union is rooted in history and biography – permanent treasures of emotion, memory and reflection.” — The Quietus
“The Union becomes, eventually, like an improvised extra-linguistic tone poem, the product of both an intense period of remembrance and a sustained, forgetful self-listening. It deserves your attention.” — The Liminal
In 2011, New York City based guitarist Tom Lecky released two albums under the name Hallock Hill. The Union and There He Unforeseen drew upon an array of improvisational techniques on both electric and acoustic instruments. The nine textural pieces that comprise The Union cast an immediate yet ineffable warmth over the listener, while its electric pieces only hinted at the fragmented dissonances and “strange and fecund palette of sounds” (The Wire) that build the six-track suite of its follow-up, There He Unforeseen. Lecky explained the difference between the two albums to The Quietus:
“The shift started off more as structural: I wanted to separate the layers of voices that formed The Union and abstract them in space. But as I went further into it, I realized something was happening. The sounds of the house and of all of us in it started to appear in the recordings. Footsteps. Chairs creaking. The house became one of the participants… As for working method, it is the same: I always start off by improvising. Every part is an improvisation that gets grafted or layered. They seem composed but they aren’t.”
With these different methods of construction–and because these improvised pieces quickly compress mood, time, or idea around a variety of tunings that change each piece’s landscape–The Union and There He Unforeseen present quite divergent experiences. Linking them, though, is a tangible and dynamic engagement between both the listener’s and Lecky’s perspectives. Tracks weave and intersect, confide and disagree with one another in turns, and obliquely repeat their often bell-like pianistic tones in ways that reflect the process of thought and memory. There is an unmistakable intimacy in even the most dissonant moments. In the words of The Liminal’s Matt Poacher, “The very act of listening absolutely supports this: you don’t listen so much as explore these songs, they are tactile, thicket-like wefts of sound through which the inner listener picks and turns. And you don’t necessarily retreat with anything solid to grasp, instead each listen has the feel of something primary, the experience not exactly new but subtly altered.”
But another influence emerges in The Union and There He Unforeseen, showing that Lecky is not driven by an exploration of music alone: “I’d say that my music is rooted in language. I’ve spent most of my life working with words, and music for me has been a way to escape the preconceptions of written and spoken language and enter a different language that comes closer to thought. I tend to work fast, both inside my head and when recording, so that what the listener hears is as close to an idea as I can capture: no second-guessing, no revision.”
Ash Akhtar perhaps summarizes Lecky’s work best on The Quietus: “Tangled up in a judicious vine of reverb and intermittent delay, Lecky’s recorded acoustic guitar sounds solid – the timbre of the woods almost thick enough to chop percussively through speakers. When Lecky’s guitar is dry, it’s almost verbal; but when drenched in reverb, there is something religious contained within its generous tonality. Attempting to place The Union alongside another guitar album seems facile, as there simply seems to be little of its like in existence.”
