TIM HECKER レコード& CD

Review: A curveball for the ambient artist, 'No Highs' represents the longtime Tim Hecker's focus on the present state of the world. Compared to the textural blissouts of his earlier work, the clue for the meaning of this album is in the title. 'No Highs' is rather bleak and unsettling, reflecting the polluted and chaotic state of many parts of the world - all of it if we continue on the same path. Hecker's usual sonics are replaced with distortion, noise and dissonance, using electronics, saxophone and strings. Not intended to soothe or distract, as is often assumed with much 'ambient music', this is an album that succeeds in confronting and challenging instead.

Review: "Anoyo", Tim Hecker's latest must-check album, was apparently designed as a companion piece to its predecessor, 2018's "Konoyo". Like that album, it was inspired by his desire to fuse his brand of experimental electronica and wayward ambient music with the sounds of "gagaku" - a form of Japanese classical music famed for being played at the Far East nation's Imperial Court. In practice, that means recordings of traditional Japanese instruments and drums chopped, sliced, looped, mangled and reversed, fused with Hecker's own spacey ambient electronics and hazy electronic textures. It's a unique recipe, but one that results in a string of sublime, otherworldly compositions that just get better with each successive listen.

Review: On his last album, 2016's "Love Streams", long-serving ambient experimentalist Tim Hecker joined forces with an Icelandic choir and orchestra. This time round, he has headed East, utilizing the services of Japanese musicians and percussionists. The resultant set, "Konoyo", tips a wink to Japan's deep history in both ambient and jazz, but is far darker and dystopian in tone. It's an intriguing approach, all told, and one that allows for tracks to organically evolve, slowly shifting between fluid, otherworldly dreaminess and unsettling, paranoid creepiness. It's this interplay - not just between darkness and light, but also the experimental and the traditional - that makes "Konoyo" such a riveting and enjoyable listen.

Review: While Tim Hecker has a well-earned reputation for extreme electronic experimentation, he's always been capable of delivering releases shot through with intense beauty. It's this side of Hecker's output that's explored on Love Streams, his first album for three years. Effortlessly melodious, fluid, and constantly evolving, it pairs fuzzy, drone-inspired textures, melancholic atmospherics and ear-pleasing ambient melodies, with flashes of steel drums, manipulated string arrangements, and the distinctive sound of an Icelandic choir. It's a sound palette that ensures a stream of memorable, eyes-closed moments, from the Tangerine Dream inspired "Voice Crack", to the loved-up bliss of the two-part "Violet Monumental".

Review: Tim Hecker's music has a way of consistently confounding expectations thanks to his ever shifting nature, and Virgins is no exception. While 2011's Ravedeath 1972 felt weighed down by its sandblasted sound that brought to mind a ravaged landscape, and last year's Instrumental Tourist was filled with subtle Eastern influences, Virgins comes with a sound that feels somehow elegiac; opener "Prism" places cacophonous organs stretched to infinity, while "Radiance" is as close as Hecker will get to the sound of an angelic chorus. Other moments prove more introspective, such as "Live Room Out", and the sullen piano keys of "Black Refraction". It's an album with the same instantly timeless quality of Fennesz's Venice, and comes highly recommended.

Review: Canadian sonic experimentalist Tim Hecker has long been a celebrated exponent of the ambient art form. Since the mid 1990s, he's released a series of acclaimed albums that blur the boundaries between art, music and experimentation, concocting stunning soundscapes through the use of simple melodies, dense, FX-laden instrumentation and alien chord sequences. On the oddly-titled "Ravedeath, 1972", he continues his one-man journey into the echo-laden heart of soundscape electronica. His compositions are at times quiet and fragile ("No Drums"), at others bold and queasily discordant (the two-part "Hatred Of Music"), but they're rarely less than breathlessly beautiful. The three-part "In The Air" is, in particular, quite stunning.

Review: It was January 1996 on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Tim Hecker was looking to catch a ride with a local vessel to the neighbouring islands. There was one shrimping vessel in port that day, and its captain Jimmy was willing to take dishevelled hippies on board. He spoke some fragmented English. The boat set sail that evening. "Radio Amor" is dedicated to the idea of Jimmy the high-wire shrimper: misplaced nautical charts, trade winds, shortwave miscommunication and midnight whispers.

Review: "Harmony In Ultraviolet" is Tim Hecker's sixth album, Hecker's other albums appear on Alien 8, Mille Plateaux, EN/OF, and Fat Cat Records. "Harmony..." is a continuation of Hecker's interest in spectral communications, noise, impressionist musics, thresholds of listening pleasure/pain, and the limits of digital composition. This album is a significant development of his song-craft, challenging the usefulness of descriptors such as ambient, drone, metal, noise and electronic music. The New York Times has described his work as foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole.