Ravedeath, 1972

Tim Hecker recorded most of this album in a single day inside a Reykjavik church, then buried the pipe organ under so much digital corrosion that you can barely hear the room it was captured in.

The cover photograph — MIT students shoving a piano off a rooftop in the 1970s — is the album's governing idea, and "The Piano Drop" makes it audible, an instrument heaved into distortion until the acoustic source dissolves into grinding static. Across the three parts of "In the Fog," that organ keeps trying to sustain a chord and keeps getting eaten by its own overtones, beauty and decay locked in the same gesture. Hecker isn't mourning music so much as testing how much erosion a note can take before it stops meaning anything. The answer, it turns out, is a lot — the fog never fully clears, and that refusal is what keeps the record haunting instead of merely sad.