Tim Hecker - Soundtracks for Abstract Cathedrals

In the field of experimental electronic music, between ambient and noise, Tim Hecker has probably been the most innovative and surprising musician to emerge after 2000. Initially linked to the glitch of Fennesz, probably the key reference point in the early phase of his career, over the years he has forged an increasingly personal poetics that has led him - at certain points - to take flights of fancy that few comparable musicians could ever hope to match. Driven by the ambition to keep changing and never rest on past successes (his career can be divided into at least four distinct phases), Hecker managed to devise a form of exploratory electronic music that soon moved beyond the influence of his putative father figure Brian Eno, giving rise to an alternative musical grammar and effectively opening the door for a new generation of experimental composers (Ben Frost, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Aidan Baker, Lawrence English, etc.).

It's likely that his distinctive approach to sound construction, his ability to deconstruct tracks and turn them into towering sonic cathedrals, had a particular influence on Rafael Anton Irisarri, just as the violence of his noise provided crucial inspiration for Ben Frost.

First phase: from Fennesz's influence to a tribute to the Italian partisans

Hecker debuted under the name Jetone in 2000 with Autumnmonia, a fairly atypical LP in his discography, tied to techno and more rhythmic IDM, combined with more atmospheric traits. Still under the Jetone alias, he released Ultramarin (2001), a minimal techno work that refines the ideas of the previous year. At this stage, there's little to suggest what would come in the following years.

His debut under his own name is Haunt Me Haunt Me Do It Again (2001). Although it can only be considered a rough sketch of what the young Hecker would become, it reveals a set of ideas that are anything but derivative. One can already glimpse that ability to shape sounds with traits that, if not outright gloomy, are at least autumnal, with drones and glitches oozing feelings that oscillate between melancholy and fear, amid seemingly lifeless landscapes (the feverish microscopic pulses of "Music For Tundra"), early attempts to combine abstract visions with grandeur ("The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural Overproduction"), sound manipulations that paint expressionist autumn scenes ("October"), and ethereal yet far from predictable ambient pieces ("City In Flames").

The masterpiece, the first of his discography, is undoubtedly "Boreal Kiss", a fragile music-box fresco that reveals enormous potential, one that Hecker would know exactly how to exploit in the future.

In 2002 the Canadian composer released only two EPs that can still be classed as laborious attempts to find his own identity. In both cases, something significant emerges. Trade Winds, White Noise contains "Days Of Your Lives", which explores tones somewhere between piano and vibraphone, while My Love Is Rotten To The Core represents his first genuine cacophonous approach, in which he tackles and savagely deconstructs one of his youthful loves, Eddie Van Halen. His noise-inflected rereading of Van Halen's riffs is original, as is the idea of a mini-concept piece about the reasons behind the band's breakup, enriched with countless samples and interviews. The standout is above all "Introducing Carl Cocks", a hyper-chaotic work that utterly deconstructs Van Halen's guitar picking.

Radio Amor (2003) discovers the piano and immediately reveals a greater command of sound manipulation, which grows ever more subtle and elaborate. It's the first LP to really get him noticed beyond a tight circle of insiders, and it draws - more than ever before - on the minimalist repetition of Terry Riley (the piano notes of "Song Of The Highwire Shrimper" or the loops of "Spectral" are a case in point). But Riley's technique is absorbed and repurposed to give the sound a quality of sordid hallucination, a vision that never quite comes into focus. Riley's rainbow colors become dense fog.

For the first time, moreover, an element appears that would become increasingly important in his later discography: despite the minimal sound, Hecker slowly begins building those abstract, ever more imposing sonic cathedrals - a prototype for the future work of Rafael Anton Irisarri, albeit in a far more abstract form - that would set him apart from most of his peers. "(They Call Me) Jimmy" is just one example of a repeated piano pattern and synth loops that build tension. Here too there's a masterpiece that towers above the rest of the tracklist: the unsettling "Azure Azure", dominated by guitar drones that grow ever more intense until the final zenith. It's a crescendo almost worthy of Glenn Branca, standing in contrast to the other, more minimalist-leaning tracks. Another experiment aimed at building powerful walls of sound is "7000 Miles", whose dramatic pulses partly anticipate Hecker's future output.

As often happens, the most experimental track on the previous album is the one that inspires the next record. Drawing inspiration from the courage of the Italian partisans, Mirages (2004) presents itself as an ideal continuation of the distortions of "Azure Azure". Less enjoyable than Radio Amor but more deliberate and studied, Mirages is probably one of those essential transitional works on the path to an artist's full maturity. The album is dominated by a constant struggle between two worlds, each trying to overpower the other without ever quite succeeding; on one side, remnants of minimal ambient clouded by continuous distortion, on the other, wild sounds asserting themselves with sheer force. "Acephale" is a clear example of this, with guitar manipulations pushing into territory previously untouched in Hecker's repertoire.

But the journey into the nightmare (or at least into the necessary struggle between good and evil) offers no respite. The piano all but disappears, except for the faint breezes of notes in "Neither More Nor Less", which fade away as a sinister, almost robotic female voice arrives, utterly devoid of expression. The track closest to the ambient category is "Celestina", slow and dreamlike, with an ethereal loop worthy of the best work of William Basinski. Glitch emerges in "Kaito", while "Balkanize-You" is far more oppressive, bordering on dark-ambient. "Incurably Optimistic" closes the record with apparent optimism: if evil brings death, life can only return afterward. It almost feels like an atheist liturgy for those who fought without cowardice, a hyper-modern electronic prayer against modernity, a requiem submerged in white noise.

That same year Hecker also released an EP of drones and field recordings titled Radio Marti Radio Havana. It's also a first, tentative attempt to engage with political and social themes. Radio Marti is a US station that broadcast from Miami to the Cuban people in Spanish, in the hope of sparking an insurrection against Fidel Castro's government. Radio Havana, by contrast, is Cuba's pro-government station, clearly driven by opposite aims. In this extreme opposition between two worlds separated by a stretch of sea, Hecker seems to be searching for a meeting point, a bridge between two worlds that fail to communicate. The radio recordings and the inclusion of Cuban music are buried under incessant noise and drones, but overall this is a typical case where the idea far outstrips the final result.

2004 was a particularly prolific year for Hecker, closing with the release of a live album, Mort Aux Vaches, recorded on May 5th as part of a project by the German independent label Staalplaat, which released a series of CDs by various artists on the theme of anti-militarism. The project's title ("Death to the Cows") refers to the derogatory term the French use for police officers.

In 2006 a CD-r was released, Pareidolia, containing a single five-minute track in which the Canadian composer works with the sound of a distorted guitar, but the result is forgettable and beneath his talent. In any case, the real turning point of his career is just around the corner. He gives techno another shot, dusting off his Jetone project with Sundown (2006), but this doesn't seem to be a field in which Hecker can stand out amid the tide of existing releases.

Second phase: the trilogy that crowns him a symbol of the contemporary scene

Harmony In Ultraviolet (2006) can be considered his breakthrough and his coming of age, released moreover by the prestigious Kranky label. It's the first instalment of what could be seen as a trilogy, the pinnacle of Hecker's career, later completed by An Imaginary Country (2009) and Ravedeath, 1972 (2011). It marks the beginning of a phase of noticeable evolution, one that pushes Hecker's music to deepen Basinski's loop poetics, lending it an almost sacred dimension. If earlier works could be described as atheist requiems, by now we can truly speak of sonic cathedrals, sites of a new and modern spirituality. Unmissable tracks like "Chimeras" and "Dungeoneering", with ever more meticulous layering, make Hecker's sound increasingly recognisable.

"Palimpsest", especially in its second half, anticipates much of his finest future intuition, while the embrace between noise and ambient keeps tightening. Hecker's ability to make the colours named in his song titles perceptible to the ear is simply brilliant: everything has a sound and a timbre worked out with obsessive care. The white-noise flood of "Whitecaps Of White Noise", for instance, is almost sensorially tangible, yet it remains, constantly, pure shapeless white abstraction.

Where Irisarri manages to paint real landscapes, Hecker creates abstract worlds, making them perceptible, and therefore at least partly real.

The trilogy is punctuated by a few EPs, the first of which is Norberg (2007), a single twenty-minute track (the longest of his career), which picks up the earlier atmospheres and Basinski-esque intuitions to give life to a long electronic symphony. A handful of deconstructed notes, torn apart by background noise, constantly try to emerge from the sonic magma that traps them. It's a relentless struggle, masterfully built.

The 20 minutes of the title track start from a small cluster of notes, initially still arranged in circular patterns, which noise penetrates and seeps out of, progressively expanding them until they turn into a tangle of harmonics and remain "imprisoned" within it. In a genuine, anthology-worthy act of destruktion, Hecker sets free the sonic matter that, in his later work, would become an expressive tool in his hands, ready to be moulded into those imposing architectures that have since become his true trademark.

Atlas Ep (2007), split into two tracks, is instead one of his most original and interesting short works, with ever more structured noise alternating with submerged melodies. The more chaotic first part and the more typically ambient second part are essentially two elaborations of the white noise heard on Harmony In Ultraviolet.

In 2008 Tim Hecker teamed up with fellow Canadian Aidan Baker on Fantasma – Parastasie, an extremely noise-driven, very dark work, almost gothic in intent (ghosts, nightmares, invisible women). It's a record in which the conceptual side of the work gives way to the emotional rapture often triggered by the furious pairing of Baker's white-noise (yet celestial) guitar walls and the varied electronic backdrop supplied by Hecker.

No sooner do you press play than the noise slabs of "Phantom Of A Pedestal" burst in with the violence of a raging wind, but it's with the second movement, "Hymn To The Idea Of Night", that the sonic fantasy created by the duo begins to touch shores of extraordinary beauty, where the interweaving of sounds and distortions reaches dizzying ambient heights. The sound then stretches out: in "Auditory Spirit" it works through subtlety and texture; in "Gallery Of The Invisible Woman" it traps an ecstatic melody within dense layers of guitar grime; and it loses itself in the unsettling, Lustmord-like silences of the closing movement, the definitive end of the séance.

The sound grows desperate with the reworked metal guitar of "Skeleton Dane", perhaps the most compelling episode, and that desperation turns into a paradisiacal experience in the immense evocation of "Dream Of The Nightmare".

The following year Hecker released, under his own name, An Imaginary Country (2009), a work offering a new, only seemingly smoother, take on that dimension suspended between noise and ambient music. This time Hecker seems almost to be watching his back, effectively taking a small step backward.

On Hecker's palette, blurred timbres, numbing psychedelic openings and a magmatic harmonic density alternate, advancing relentlessly across the whole album until it takes on the shape of dreamlike modulations, which in its final stretch echo hints of Eluvium's "Talk Amongst The Trees".

Hecker also starts giving his works a theme, even if they still remain pure abstractions (evanescent or imaginary landscapes). From the pulsing textures of the classic "Sea Of Pulse", with an electric bass humming underneath, to the romantic "Borderlands", whose fluid pulses, as they fold back on themselves, recall the movements typical of Boards Of Canada, the author seems to be reaching for more intimate atmospheres and even edging closer to melody.

The opening and closing tracks ("100 Years Ago" and "200 Years Ago" respectively) instead experiment with a very violent synthetic drone that tears apart all the preceding romanticism. Although Hecker tries to create new sonic worlds by slowing down and paring back to a minimum (the languid "Her Black Horizon"), his true trademark remains the power of drones on tracks like "Where Shadows Make Shadows", where digital ghosts drift from one side of space to the other, suspended mid-air, moving slowly but steadily. Working with a superb sense of perspective, Hecker now paints astral trails dragged along by Oriental-tinged slashes ("100 Years Ago"), now imperceptible ambient movements ("Currents Of Electrostasy"), now fresh electronic embroidery ("The Inner Shore"), while echoes of a darker, more intricate musical side surface in "Paragon Point", a gloomy fresco with gradually unfurling noise contours. Hecker closes the circle by moving backward: "200 Years Ago" is a cosmic, gold-edged climax, its notes hovering like atoms, each perfectly held within its own orbit.

An Imaginary Country represents a kind of melodic unveiling – not unlike what can be found in the recent work of Fennesz – here emerging decisively from a thick substrate of drone and reverb, at times notably dissonant. At the same time, the tracks' overall greater concision and their more robust emotional range tend to transcend the strictly cerebral imprint of Hecker's compositions, lending them a more immediate communicative clarity and a breadth barely achieved by his earlier works.

In 2010 he released a brief EP (eight minutes) containing a single track, Apondalifa, a sonic exploration built on a guitar loop and a few piano notes, drawn into the sound mass and used as the very material from which it evolves and coils, in a slow, steady crescendo that stretches the idea of impetus across a vast span of time.

His friend Lawrence English would later rescue this now hard-to-find EP in 2015, reissuing it together with the earlier Norberg on his Room40 label.

If An Imaginary Country perhaps didn't fully develop the ideas of Armony In Ultraviolet, the operation succeeds perfectly instead with Ravedeath, 1972 (2011), the final peak of this first phase and the definitive culmination of his most inspired period. Introduced by the emblematic video of a group of students throwing a piano off a university rooftop, it's an album that marks a new boundary between what music has been and what it could become. The symbolic gesture of destroying the classical instrument par excellence is the emblem of Hecker's message. This in itself is a major novelty: for the first time Hecker develops a theme and releases what could almost be called a concept album. Hecker erects imposing noise cathedrals that display an incredible narrative capacity, representing an absolute first for the Canadian composer.

Recorded in a church in Iceland, using the pipe organ (as the Popol Vuh did back in the '70s), Ravedeath 1972 expresses the most epic and ancestral traits of that land: a primordial magma in which dark, noisy turbulence blends with extraordinary naturalness into harmonic abstractions, synthetic gusts and swarming ambient saturation. Ravedeath, 1972 can conceptually be considered a noise work, yet it only rarely actually sounds like one, and not merely because of the heavy presence of processed sounds and swirling drones, which nonetheless let through the distinct perception of distortion, piano notes and, above all, ever-present keyboards. The result is a dazzling palette of synthetic-orchestral trance, whose only partially rounded contours evoke an imagery made of rough ripples, faithfully summed up in the album's title and in those of much of its tracklist, which depict powerful images such as hatred, suicide, paralysis and a spectral fog that dulls the senses in a solemn symphony – as in the first of the two significant trilogies inspired by atmospheric elements, like the majestic dark symphony of "In The Fog", split into three parts, a journey through inextricable electronic fog pierced by stabs of processed organ. It's the most vivid and engaging track of his career, the first time he manages to recreate absolutely real landscapes, following a narrative idea that runs through the whole album. Fog has never felt so sensorially perceptible through sound.

The pulsations that stir the surface of the mountain lake of "The Piano Drop" are a clear example of the new sonic synthesis achieved, between icy gusts and mysterious tensions. "No Drums" paints a small portrait of pure sonic isolationism, worthy of Thomas Koner's finest moments. Silence gives way to the impetuous walls of sound of the two parts of "Hatred Of Music", passages of pure romanticism in music, with an epic power close to the heights of Vangelis. Between the boundless sea of "Studio Suicide, 1980", redolent of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and the hazy leanings of Sigur Rós circa "Von" ("Analog Paralysis, 1978"), the album's harsh-ambient tangle opens up to piano in the closing triptych "In The Air", a new electronic suite of white noise, moving through melancholy notes and dispersing celestial trails that stretch their sound-wave into a motion outside of time and space.

A dense, multifaceted work that embraces different styles and touches on hard-to-reach emotional depths, Ravedeath, 1972 manages to shape ambient material with a rough touch that is at the same time steeped in romanticism. It's certainly Hecker's best album, the culmination of earlier ideas fully realized after years of refinement. Indeed, one could even say that most of the ideas contained in the record were already present in Harmony In Ultraviolet. Perhaps that's true, but what there were merely sketches from an experimenter, here become symphonies from a composer.

After the unexpected success of Ravedeath 1972, Hecker soon released Dropped Pianos (2011), with the same cover in negative, containing a series of piano sketches that inspired the genesis of Ravedeath. Although it can be considered a minor work, the album contains many remarkable moments that reveal a Hecker-as-pianist capable of recreating his typical sonic monoliths starting from brief piano sketches, thus showing his great skill as a sound manipulator.

The sepia-toned hues of piano fragments resonating in the ether wrap around essential melodies, run through by tiny sonic debris or fading into evanescent ambient flows that, at the stage at which they were captured on Dropped Pianos, were clearly destined to be further refined through later digital processing. Nonetheless, the work has its own intrinsic coherence and a form far less raw than one might imagine, ranging from transparent melodies ("Sketch 2") and intimate nocturnal reflections ("Sketch 4") to foggy layering and noisy flare-ups ("Sketch 5" and "Sketch 9" respectively), entirely consistent with the result later distilled into the album released in the early months of the year.

In 2012, the Canadian composer collaborated with Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) on Instrumental Tourist, a project that, however, doesn't stand out for originality.

Third phase: constant change, from the violent "Virgins" to the Renaissance-music experiments of "Love Streams"

Having reached such significant heights, Hecker could have kept repeating and refining his winning formula for quite a few more years. Instead, he chose to immediately retire his trilogy and turn the page, as only the greats manage to do.

Virgins (2013) changes course radically, attempting a new approach to electronic music and showing real courage and ambition. The basic idea is essentially to build a bridge between electronic music and certain elements of modern classical – not a new idea in itself, but one that Hecker develops in a thoroughly unconventional way.

"Virginal I", with its syncopated, repetitive piano, chaotic and controlled at once, is so strange and original that it borders on the unheard-of. The first half of the album almost seems to follow the flow of its predecessor, in a kind of liaison. The violent synths of "Prism" are set against the modern-classical piano of "Black Refraction", with those micro-variations that give a sense of flux.

There are many sketches of new ideas here, combining the pianism of Peter Broderick or Nils Frahm with the more electric distortions of Ben Frost. "Live Room" is exactly that: a rapid piano figure repeats itself only to be gradually overwhelmed first by drones, then by soft synths, in an explosive clash of contrasts. The nastiness and the harsh impulses disappear, making way for the extremely delicate fog of "Amps, Drugs, Harmonium". And neither "Stigmata I" nor its counterpart "Stigmata II", both built diametrically on disjointed vibrations, comings and goings and stop-and-go rhythms, manage to threaten the walls of a delightful album that closes its arc with "Stab Variation", an astonishing gothic miniature for industrial drones.

Virgins is Hecker's second life. He cleans himself out completely, dips his drones in holy water and comes up with immaculate output. He tries his hand at minimalism, at de-structuring his saturations, and replaces the near-dronegaze forms of the past with their perfect piano counterparts. And, once again, he fails to disappoint.

Three full years go by before Love Streams (2016), his eighth studio album and yet another (partial) shift. Hecker finds a new element to dissect and explore: the voice. A voice that becomes the meeting point between the present day and the Renaissance, the true connecting thread running through the whole album, like an unbroken continuous flow that runs from the synths of "Obsidian Counterpoint" all the way to the ghosts of "Black Phase". It's an almost unheard-of attempt to make the alien sounds of electronics coexist with the choral works of the Flemish composer Josquin Desprez (1450-1521). Desprez's Renaissance choirs (sung in Latin, then reversed on a computer), reworked and digitally denatured with the help of Jóhann Jóhannsson and producer Ben Frost, introduce aspects that are entirely new to Hecker's work.

The attempt might bring to mind the magnificent LP by the duo Ambrose Field & John Potter, "Being Dufay" (2009), but Hecker's music has entirely different ambitions; there's nothing sacred about it, nothing ancient, nothing that seems to honor past glories. Where Ambrose Field & John Potter skilfully weave electronic backdrops into a context that still follows tradition, immersing Renaissance motets in modernity without making them anything other than themselves, Hecker does something different: his manipulated choirs are thrown into an electronic vortex ("Music Of The Air"), into a chaotic maelstrom ("Castrati Stack"), denatured to the point of unrecognizability ("Violet Monumental"), and at times ("Black Phase") spared from deconstruction only to be torn apart by Frost's dramatic guitar distortions. It really does seem as though Hecker wants to show us what electronic music might become over the next ten or fifteen years.

But it isn't only the voice that leaves its mark: the superb "Music Of The Air" is one of the most pathos-laden tracks, where the sonic bed meshes best with voices and choirs. "Violet Monumental I" and "Violet Monumental II" stand out for their greater dramatic emphasis, their solemnity and their total deconstruction. "Voice Crack" also features the notes of a harpsichord, while in "Castrati Strack" the vocal manipulations reach unexpected levels of vigor and power.

But it's in the two closing tracks that Hecker's poetics reach their destination; "Collapse Sonata", with its slow unfolding — opening up, in its final two minutes, into Basinski-esque sonorities — represents the farewell to, and acknowledgment of, the old sonata form, at once honored and deformed, respected yet predestined victim of this demolishing process. An album like this could only close with the six minutes of the superb, emphatic "Black Phase" (the longest track), in its own way the summa and peak of the new Hecker, who here uses Josquin Desprez's Renaissance music in a context — as the video's imagery makes clear — that is anguished and frightening, venturing toward that line separating life and death, in a blurred vision (see the cover art) that splits antiquity from modernity.

Fourth phase: the Japanese period

Hecker's music had already reached enviable heights, but the Canadian composer wasn't satisfied and once again went searching for new shores. Fascinated by Japanese music, in 2018 and 2019 he released two albums — closely related to one another — in which he reworks on computer the gagaku music of the Japanese ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, based on the slender string and wind harmonies derived from the ancient tradition developed centuries ago in imperial courts and Buddhist temples. These are two very particular and difficult works, as if Hecker had chosen a field of work that was anything but easy.

Konoyo (2018) returns to an abstract vision of electronic music, we might say of pure sound. Recorded with the help of Kara-Lis Coverdale, it's an anguished, claustrophobic album that renders the original Japanese music truly unrecognizable.

Composed over the course of several trips to Japan, the album in fact offers an entirely different perspective on the world (whether real or imagined), the awareness of an underlying powerlessness that art is unable either to conceal or to overturn.

Among the many inputs reworked, reimagined and often rendered unrecognizable — once again with the help of Kara-Lis Coverdale, an indispensable collaborator from Virgins onward — the synthesizers are what most vividly evoke the existential, dystopian sci-fi of the third millennium, nostalgia for a future that failed to come about and for another, undesirable one that seems to have already definitively taken hold ("In Mother Earth Phase"). But if we wanted to pinpoint one crucial element that identifies the essence of the work, it would be the insistent intersections of high-pitched tones, sharp streaks of sound that, at the opening, evoke a lament, an unanswered question, and by the overflowing finale become a cry for help, an anguished song that gradually releases all the tension and sense of abandonment gathered in the first act.

Among the tracks, the opener "This Life" stands out in particular, built on new layers of drones, where the sounds of a pipe organ and Eastern instrumentation are still recognizable. Hampered by excessive length, the album closes with the fifteen minutes of "Across To Anoyo", which starts with an almost lysergic loop of a string instrument before losing itself somewhat in the minutes that follow.

Konoyo ("This life", the same translation as the opening track) is undoubtedly one of the Canadian artist's less immediate works. Unstable, chaotic and obsessively self-referential, it is at once a book of postmodern unease and a searing inner portrait of its creator, mirrored by a cover image whose close-up shot eludes the recognition of familiar figures in a fractured, neo-Dadaist accumulation.

The ideal second chapter, Anoyo (2019), corrects course (it runs roughly twenty minutes shorter) and seems to bring Hecker's starting ideas into sharper focus. An even more pronounced melancholy permeates this organic, fully realized symbiosis of world music and retro-futurism, where the concreteness of sounds drawn from the gagaku tradition is no longer the unbalanced side of a scale but rather a redeeming horizon, the landing point of a necessary escape from the madness of the West. Out of the most sorrowful disenchantment, Hecker thus conjures a spell that seeks to halt the passage of time along which the existential warning of the previous album was progressively coming true.

"That World" (nine minutes) finally makes clear how the fusion of experimental electronic music and Japanese gagaku should have sounded from the very start. The mood tends to be more relaxed and less dark, even though an underlying melancholy always remains. Rather than violent destructuring, what dominates here is expansion, a carefully reasoned interlocking of different sounds, creating a safe listening environment in which to seek a peace that finds no worthy place in today's society. In this sense "You Never Were" (eight minutes) probably represents the finest example of a union between two worlds that don't overshadow one another.

Although the sense of estrangement and the dramatic charge of this recent awakening remain, Anoyo makes it easier to let yourself be carried along by its atmospheres rather than getting lost trying to decode its language: the outward anomaly of that world partly mirrors our own, sharpening its contours into a cubic shape, a mysterious box floating in the darkness of the cosmos, refusing to fully reveal its true nature.

Hecker doesn't have the strength to deny what he has seen, to ward off the fate spelled out in no uncertain terms by this life, but, as in the liturgy of Virgins, he shapes his own sacred space in which turmoil and consolation coexist in equal measure, retracing its familiar geometries while waiting for a sign – or a dream – that might point him toward the coming horizon of his sublime sonic art.

In 2021 he tackles a soundtrack for the first time with The North Water, the British TV series based on a novel by Ian McGuire. Within the fifteen tracks, Hecker chooses to fold in much of the thinking from his discography, putting it to work in the service of the images of this violent tale of psychotic sailors and whale-hunting scenes. That solemn sound which has by now been "certified" by various critics as a sonic cathedral can't help but appear somewhat diminished here, but many of the insights that have made Hecker's career still remain.

This time the strings are decidedly more prominent than usual, for example in the "Seasick" triad, an interesting study of violins and cellos modified with skillful injections of electronics, particularly in the second part. There are hints of the recent "Japanese" LPs, Konoyo and Anoyo, but objectively less than one might have legitimately expected. Instead, it's his typically dilated, layered sound that creates the most interesting soundscapes, from the stretched-out synths of "Twinkle In The Wasteland" – typical of his discography – to the overlapping textures of "Delirious" or "Our First Whale", which draw heavily on the sounds of the trilogy Harmony In Ultraviolet (2006), An Imaginary Country (2009) and Ravedeath, 1972 (2011). There's also room for pure, unprocessed piano ("First On Deck"), an instrument Hecker rarely uses, which makes it all the more worth noting.

The North Water doesn't disappoint, but it's likely that, amid plenty of interesting ideas and skilled craftsmanship in service of the TV series, it lacks those memorable moments that have always been present in most of Tim Hecker's work.

A new season

No Highs (2023), made with the collaboration of Colin Stetson, marks the start of a new phase still taking shape, one that radically moves beyond the previous one by drawing on the best years of his career (those running from Harmony In Ultraviolet to Love Streams) and pairing them with new insights.

The Canadian composer once again positions himself as an interpreter of modernity, seeking to critique any notion of ambient music conceived as distraction or, worse still, as a moment to "relax", with the hundreds of ambient playlists on Spotify created for exactly that purpose clearly in mind. Hecker knows that a courageous composer shouldn't pander to the more superficial listener, but should instead stun and astonish them. That's why No Highs is austere and monolithic, grey and rigorously conceived as an absolute escape from "escapist" music.

At the start, the repetitive pulse of "Monotony" immediately recalls the minimalism of Terry Riley's "In C", but little by little the electronics take over, building step by step the layered textures that have defined Hecker's fortunes ever since Harmony In Ultraviolet. These rapid pulsations underpin "Lotus Light", close to the sound of "Love Streams", and "Monotony II", enriched by the alien sounds of Colin Stetson's sax, and above all "Anxiety", charged with tension and anguish, a synthesis of electronics and obsessive minimalism.

When Hecker offers up sounds that feel familiar to him, he does so as in his finest moments. The self-referential timbres of "Winter Cop", close to Basinski's loops, depict decadent landscapes almost like a photograph, while the glitches of "Glissalia" or the electronic alchemy of "Living Spa Winter" feel like a compendium of the traits that have crowned Hecker as a leading figure of experimental electronic music in recent years.

Shards (2025) can't be considered a new LP by Tim Hecker, but rather a collection of tracks written for various soundtracks composed in recent years that never found a place in earlier releases. That said, anyone who thinks Shards is simply a pile of leftovers is far from the truth, since this new release by the Canadian composer represents – in several respects – a telling synthesis of his artistic path over the last decade. Shards can therefore be seen as a series of fragments (as the title suggests) of ideas that never found a home on an LP, not so much for lack of quality as for difficult choices, or even sheer chance.

A brief album of just thirty-one minutes (the shortest of Hecker's career), "Shards" presents itself as a series of quick sonic watercolors, small sketches of experimentation in which – anyone familiar with Hecker's poetics – will be able to guess, track by track, the period each was recorded in. Obviously, all this makes the work particularly multifaceted and non-unified, since it wasn't designed to be a cohesive whole, but that doesn't stop a common thread from emerging nonetheless: Tim Hecker's unmistakable style and his timbral explorations, which make him a unique case within the international ambient scene.

Contributions by Matteo Meda ("Norberg", "Apondalifa"), Mauro Roma ("Fantasma-Parastasie"), Raffaello Russo ("Ravedeath 1972", "Dropped Pianos"), Alberto Asquini ("Virgins"), Michele Palozzo ("Konoyo", "Anoyo")

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