Torn Hawk

Torn Hawk

Watching Heat On Mute

Not Not Fun

Valcrond Videographer Luke Wyatt is a versatile figure in the fields of art and experimental entertainment, with a body of work spanning mulched techno, hypnagogic rock, spoken word, and avant stand-up. His latest, Watching Heat On Mute, marks a return to the tape-hazed instrumental “smear style” showcased on Torn Hawk’s 2014’s classic Through Force Of Will, which Wyatt describes as a mix of “bleeding guitars, harsh-beautiful watercolor landscapes, songs about movies, soundtracks by cops.” Years of artistic exploration have honed the Hawk’s chops and sharpened its vision, culminating in a ten-track hit parade of hooks, heroics, and poetic shredding, riffed and spliced over broken baggy beats. Swooning downtempo guitar fugues (“Two Footprints and a Pillar of Flame”) and triumphant VHS heartbreak anthems (“Her Blur”) slipstream into kaleidoscopic amplifier worship (“A Burnt Map”) and out-of-body slacker shoegaze reveries (“The Fly With Jeff Goldblum”). Like city sunsets shot on recycled camcorder tape, this is grainy, gritty, handheld music, bleached but true, flickering with static and cinematic emotion.

Torn Hawk

Through Force Of Will [2024 Edition]

Not Not Fun

New York musician Luke Wyatt describes his instrumental hypnagogic guitar guise Torn Hawk as “music of a noble fabric whose weave is flawed and frayed.” With a decade of hindsight, the looping beats, smeared synths, and grainy hooks of 2014’s Through Force Of Will have taken on a richer cast, like closing credits anthems to heroic 80’s films long since forgotten. From widescreen new wave (“I Am Returning”) and baggy psychedelia (“Palace Racket”) to shredded New Romanticism (“Streets On Fire”) and glassy shoegaze (“Blindsided”), the songs fuse victory and vulnerability, soaring solos and tape hiss. Wyatt characterizes the songs’ low fidelities and “distressed edges” as “intentional lace,” smudging outlines and degrading surfaces to carve out “more room to dream.” This 2024 memorial edition adds 25 minutes of unreleased vintage bonus material, expanding Torn Hawk's vision of “error and compression” across echo-soaked riffs, smoky synth fugues, and blazing technoid rock. Throughout, the music surges, yearns, and burns, unrestrained and undefeated, forever in pursuit of Wyatt’s mission to lift the listener from “the cave of loneliness to the amphitheater of self-love.”

Torn Hawk

Through Force Of Will

Not Not Fun

Luke Wyatt's looping night-rider trance-rock instrumentals as Torn Hawk often tend towards the moody/brooding side of Brooklyn's rhythm nation but for Through Force Of Will he's flipped the script, flexing his powers for hope not mope, for rallying through those final workout reps, ripping through the tape at the finish line, pumping fists to the sky over city hall. Triumphant guitar-shred blisters atop steady cardio drum machines and heartbeat synth-basslines, invoking a FX-scrambled montage of sweaty crunches, marathons through the mountains, and muscle beach dreamers keeping the faith. There's a few respites from the modal inspiration-rock but even these fit into the album's olympian game-plan: a lulling calm after the endorphins fade ("Hutchison"), a sleepless midnight, haunted by past defeat ("A November Mission"). The rest of the cassette's 50 minutes stay on task though: the champion returned, indomitable, overthrowing the palace, streets on fire, a trophy the size of the sun soaring into the horizon. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Video mulch artwork by Luke Wyatt, designed by Britt Brown. Edition of 100.