Through Force of Will

Tracks by Torn Hawk draw on various strains of nostalgia, chopping up thoughts and feelings into a mazy whole that inhabits a ground somewhere between sincerity and amusement. Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Virginia transplant who is the man behind the name, puts an astonishing amount of music out into the world, some of it beat-oriented, some of it edging close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave. L.I.E.S., Rush Hour, and now Not Not Fun are among the many labels to have released his work. Film plays an important part in Wyatt's world—a recent Rising feature noted how his stepmother operated a movie theater, his music is often complemented by a mish-mash of grainy YouTube clips heavy on collage, and his song titles frequently reference the silver screen ("Born to Win (Life After Ghostbusters)", "Damage with Jeremy Irons").

Wyatt calls his experiments in the visual realm "video mulching," most of which consist of a barrage of imagery of an 80s hue. Those clips fall somewhere between the late-night disorientation of John C. Reilly's Steve Brule character and Daniel Lopatin's experiments with sound and vision under his SunsetCorp moniker. Lopatin took tiny loops of 80s music and set them to fuzzed-out visuals, drawing on two fascinations he undoubtedly shares with the Torn Hawk project. Dire Straits, Don Henley, and Christopher Cross have all been sampled by Wyatt, and his off-the-wall work includes "Sundays CD, Skipping" (based around a glitched CD by indie pop icons the Sundays) and a track titled "The Music You Hear at Sea World and Never Forget".

The humor has been dialed down a notch on Through Force of Will, the latest Torn Hawk transmission, although the feeling of looking back to utopian visions of the past is firmly intact. What sets this apart from most chillwave is the strong sweep of romantic feeling that flows through Wyatt's mesh of guitar and electronics—there's palpable emotion here amid the tinny drum machines and twists of industrial synth. It doesn't all come out that way, especially when "Streets on Fire" begins with a hollowed-out drum sound that could have been ripped from a peak Jam & Lewis production. But Wyatt frequently uses his guitar tone, aligned somewhere between the dreamy strum of Mark McGuire and the type of squelchy soloing found on longer Spacemen 3 tracks, to give his music a vital sense of yearn.

Torn Hawk's emotional impact is offset by the visual package, which is all rugged photos of Wyatt, who looks more stud-like than his tender playing might suggest, especially when he's deep into the intricate picking on a track like "To Overthrow". But Through Force of Will partly works because of its intentional signal jamming, where things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance, with Wyatt guiding his audience through the drone-y ambiance of "Hutchison" and ending up in the altered-states pop of "Blindsided". The VHS aesthetics may have a touch of over-familiarity about them, but there's just enough in Wyatt’s beefcake poses to suggest another twist being wrung out of the template, giving his persona the air of an alien outsider invited to the drugs party.

It's in the parameters Wyatt throws around this project that he breaks away from the vagaries of chillwave, substituting ambiguity with personality. Or, as he put it himself in an interview: "I'm not going to restrict my impulses and make stuff in an anonymous fashion with some sort of minimal cover and numbered track titles." The only counterpoint to that is in the sheer weight of material being released, which can make it hard to get a handle on who he is and where he's going. There's already a follow-up to this record due imminently, and doubtless more will surface. But Wyatt clearly delights in setting things up in contrast to one another, particularly when polar opposites are involved, which gives him an incredibly broad field in which to play around. Somehow he's able to retain a sense of self even when looping his material over the blandest strains of 80s rock, and that's where he really succeeds, in defining a pallett that's recognizably his that concurrently allows him to go wandering in boundless directions.