Hitting Up The Heavens mostly does little other than drift and pulse gently in a kind of fragmented fluttering, fibrillating, serpentine, glassine motion pool (and it doesn’t need to, the extent of its ambition evidently thus realized).
[Release page] Approaching the Minus Pilots work, one notes an attitude that comes across so casual it would eschew any such serious descriptor being applied to it (let alone anything so pseud-y as an oeuvre!). Self-deprecation is endemic, a liner note to Hitting Up The Heavens reading: “The crackle present on our recording is due, in the main, to the use of various analogue delay pedals, old basses, our broken four-track cassette tape recorder, and most notably our incompetence.” Demystifying, downbeat, were this art rather than music, you get the feeling they would pitch it at the ‘doodle’ end of a notional cline with ‘fine art’ at the other end. Here, on the previous Superior Proof of Cinema and on the homepage more artistic self-removal is manifest in an identity mediated through cartoon creatures, the ‘who’ seemingly a mere epiphenomenon of the ‘about,’ lugubriously expressed as: “sparse bass, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, gentle crackle…” Perhaps the name conceals an ellipsis which holds the clue: aircraft minus pilots? The pilot is dead? It’s all in the craft? Post-structuralist riffing duly indulged, on to the music…
What you read is what you get: a wall (aka veil) of sound of a non-pitched nature—delay pedal and vinyl crackle, tape hiss, et al. – threaded with finger-pluck guitar manipulations. Roughly overlaid arpeggiations form harmonic parallels, wisps of recursive lead lines and trails crossing, like a spectral residue of Reichian electric counterpoint. These cameos of thriftstore sonorities are no more than audio sketches and jottings, three just breaking a minute, most under three; scratchy steel-wrung slivers stream in a lo-fi aesthetics of failure. Now and then the flat soundfield swells with something resembling intensity, though mostly we navigate a doldrums Minus Pilots—unmoored in a twitchy chime and hum, a warp and wooze of timbral shadings, prey to odd incursions from scratch-mimicking delay-clicks and reverse-tricks. In fact, only “Fall From Your Stars” and “Enter The Void” are subject to these unheimlich disrupts and ill-treatments (backspun vinyl? cassette reversals?); otherwise Hitting Up The Heavens mostly does little other than drift and pulse gently in a kind of fragmented fluttering, fibrillating, serpentine, glassine motion pool (and it doesn’t need to, the extent of its ambition evidently thus realized).
Ultimately the small and slender, humble and unpolished, nature of Hitting Up The Heavens contributes significantly to its character and hence its appeal. What would strike as inconsequential cumulatively absorbs over the whole. The low light nature of their production brings a low-affect effect—veiled emotional leylines like their remote influences (Labradford, FSA, et al). More—perhaps less—than this, though, it’s the soundtracking of a peaceful, distracted or meditative gaze into space, a pleasant reverie tracing dust motes hanging in the filtered light rays of a shaded room. “All of our recordings are designed for listening through headphones while gazing at the stars,” is their kind of mission statement—if mission can be assigned to such willful meandering—and it’s one quietly accomplished via its lulling cascades of minimal loopiness ineffably permeating the (un)consciousness.
Hitting Up The Heavens is available on Eat, Sleep, Repeat. [Release page]
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