About
Hallock Hill | Tom Lecky
In 2011, New York City based musician Tom Lecky released two albums under the name Hallock Hill. The Union and There He Unforeseen draw upon an array of improvisational techniques on both electric and acoustic instruments. The nine textural pieces that comprise The Union cast an immediate yet abstracted 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.
Linking these two albums 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 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.”
Hallock Hill’s A Hem of Evening — along with its accompanying book of prose poems and photographs — is released in August 2012 as a double LP with The Union by MIE Music.
