The Kansas City producer Huerco S. put out his first release in 2012, when he was just 21 years old, and though its structures loosely hewed to the tenets of house and techno, he hadn’t yet spent much time in dance clubs. It was a fantasy of club music, a perspective schooled by records and YouTube and hearsay, and whatever it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its suggestiveness. Like a secret whispered in your ear while standing too close to the sound system, it was all the more exciting for the parts of the transmission that were garbled, or simply lost, on their journey from his machines to our ears.
Ironically, as his profile has risen, especially in Europe, and he has logged plenty of late nights in the kind of clubs Kansas City could barely dream of, he has progressively removed the elements that define house and techno—the steady kick drum, the rat-a-tat hi-hats, the body-moving bassline. On his debut album, 2013’s Colonial Patterns, the most exciting tracks were the ones that seemed the most unkempt and overgrown: Instead of techno's reliable, rectilinear grid, his structures followed mossier geometries, like paving stones forced aside by weeds, or a trellis sagging under the weight of rampant morning glory. Now, on his second album, the weeds have won. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.
There are no drums or percussion on any of the album’s nine tracks, just soft tendrils of synthesizer, submerged pulses, and tape hiss smeared on in thick, buttery swirls. The album opens with a soft, rose-tinted chord and it never gets much more abrasive than that. Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.
The music doesn’t do much; it doesn’t develop or even evolve. It just twists slowly in place, like wind chimes. In fact, it’s often hard to imagine that any of these patterns were played by hand at all; they feel aleatory, as though generated by arcane processes, like the movements of swallows over an open field, or the molecular behavior of melting ice. And though nothing here is completely randomized—this is still loop-based music, not noise—that sense of instability has a curious effect; the music never sounds quite the same way twice, and as sentimental as a track like “Promises of Fertility” or “Lifeblook (Naïve Melody)” might be, it’s virtually impossible to fix them in your mind, even while listening.
In places, Huerco S. seems to be nodding to systems musicians—experimental composers who use generative processes to create the work—and folding their ideas back into a more soothingly repetitive framework. The drifting “Hear Me Out” recalls the burnished bell tones of Oval’s 94diskont; the smeared and indistinct qualities of the album’s palette suggests the influence of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” a 1969 composition for voice and magnetic tape that dissolved the physical world into a spectral hum. On the opening “A Sea of Love,” you can just barely make out the outline of the patiently looping synthesizer melody; its contours are all but worn away, and you almost wonder if there’ll be anything left of it in another dozen listens.
That’s absurd, of course. This isn’t a dubplate, or a record made of ice; it’s a piece of wax and a bundle of 1s and 0s, and it'll stay this way as long as there are playback devices to play it on. But part of the album's magic is the way that Huerco S., after the fashion of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, has captured a feeling of fragility, of things flaking to dust before our very eyes and ears.
There’s only one thing to break the reverie, and that’s the musician's curious habit of finishing his songs by simply cutting them off in mid-swirl. It happens again and again, on “On the Embankment,” “Marked for Life,” “Cubist Camouflage,” “Promises of Fertility”—all of the record’s C- and D-side tracks but one, in fact. It’s a strange tactic: Here you are, blissfully immersed in this amniotic bubble of sound, and then—nothing, just a silence so abrupt it feels like waking up on cold cement. He does it so often that it has to mean something. The closest that I can figure is it’s a way of acknowledging that these objects of trans-human beauty could easily go on forever; to fade out would be a kind of illusion, a lie. By cutting them off in mid-stream, and sacrificing the experience in the process, Huerco S. is simply living up to a purist ideal. I’m not sure it works, ultimately, but you've got to admire his gumption. It’s a kind of tough love, essentially—a hard-headed approach absolutely in keeping with the history of Midwestern techno, no matter how downy the music itself. And anyway, there’s always the repeat button.
