Hecker, Tim

Hecker, Tim

No Highs

Kranky

The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers—this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions “negation” as a muse of sorts—the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet.

Hecker, Tim

Anoyo

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Anoyo (“the world over there”) draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker’s processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return.

Hecker, Tim

Konoyo

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.  Experiential composer Tim Hecker’s ninth official full-length, Konoyo (“the world over here”) was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music’s increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone. As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016’s Love Streams, the heights of Hecker’s talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay. Hecker will stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album’s release, featuring members of the gagaku ensemble on shō, ryuteki and hichiriki, accompanied by Kara-Lis Coverdale.

Hecker, Tim

Mirages

Kranky

In conjunction with the reissues of Tim Hecker’s Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do it Again and Radio Amor albums on both vinyl and CD, kranky is also reissuing this classic 2004 album on the CD format for the first time.  “As a follow-up to the sublime Radio Amor, Mirages is an even more majestic album, striding with a confident heaviness further out into the wilderness, deep into the night.” —Boomkat   “...the keyboard parts on Mirages are prettier, and the overall mood is more contemplative, but there’s a deep pit of melancholy at the center of the record, a mood with a strongly cumulative effect.”  —Pitchfork   “The opener, ‘Acephale,’ first erupts into a teeth-gnashing guitar solo before nodding off into an absinthe stupor, while the highlights, ‘Neither More or Less’ and ‘Celestina’ are both brooding stroboscope soundtracks.” —XLR8R   “The follow-up to 2003’s critically acclaimed Radio Amor, Mirages further erodes the vapid predispositions of electronic music, uncovering a terrain where dissonance and melody coincide in a near-bohemian unison.” —Amazon

Hecker, Tim

Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again

Kranky

This is the first reissue of Tim Hecker’s classic 2001 debut full length release. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering.  “Haunt Me is alien, amorphous and occasionally noisy, but always welcoming.” —Pitchfork  “Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again is a brilliant album of subtle, evocative mood music.” —AllMusic  “Hecker was already on a different wavelength with Haunt Me, clearly seeking something that would trigger ASMR-induced enlightenment, and he ran with it.” —Stereogum

Hecker, Tim

Radio Amor

Kranky

This is the first reissue for Tim Hecker’s classic 2003 album. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering.  “Hecker at his most painterly and evocative.” —Pitchfork   “Radio Amor has a simultaneous tangible / intangible quality that is both miraculous and enigmatic.” —Tiny Mix Tapes   “Tim Hecker may be the finest sonic photographer around, the re-release of Radio Amor being further evidence for this claim.”  — Brainwashed   “Hecker’s 2003 standout is a stirringly emotional narrative, without the slightest aid of a single voice.” —Treble   “A slow-shifting mix of steely headrush and protracted morse code dispatches from the bottom of the ocean.” —Dusted

Hecker, Tim

Ravedeath 1972

Kranky

TIM HECKER’s latest work approaches a form of secular musical transcendentalism from within the battered temple of spirituality. Recorded in a church in Reykjavik, Iceland and using a pipe organ as the primary sound source, this new piece is essentially a live recording. In reality, it exists in a nether world between captured live performance and meticulous studio work, melding the two approaches to sonic artifice as a unity. It is in parts a document of air circulating within a wooden room, and also a pagan work of physical resonance within a space once reserved for the hallowed breath of the divine. While the title of the piece “Hatred of Music” might be a clue, the album is also partly an attempt to confront a pervasive negativity surrounding music. Historical rituals of destroying pianos, mountains of pirated CDRs pushed by bulldozers in Eastern Europe, or the melancholy of the digital music era began as sideline motifs which quickly informed the work on this record. They also really didn't at all. Despite that the context is wide open in such a form of musical abstraction, the substance of these immersive compositions showcases Heckerʼs continued mastery of organizing sound into a visceral near entity. It is an almost physical presence that the listener feels as much as hears. This work is a significant contribution to Hecker's oeuvre, one which spans over ten years of musical production. Ravedeath is an enigmatic document of beauty and force. The album was recorded mostly over the...

Hecker, Tim

Virgins

Kranky

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received an 8.3 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.  Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance. The sound palette of this work is wider, almost 'percussive' and tighter sounding than previous works. While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digital music does not do naturally—making music that is out of time, out of tune and out of phase. This follow-up to his Juno-awarded Ravedeath, 1972 album exchanges gristled distortion and cavernous sound in favour of a close, airy, more defined palette. At times it points to the theological aspirations of early minimalist music. But it is not 'fake church music' for a secular age, rather something like an attempt at the sound of frankincense in slow-motion, or of a pulsing, flickering fluorescence in the grotto. Some pieces go off the rails before forming into anything, others eschew crescendo compositional structures or bombastic density while going sideways instead. It points to the ongoing development of TIM HECKER’s work. It suggests illusory memories of drughazed jams or communal music performance that may have never been performed or been heard. These are mp3s that give confusing accounts either of sound's glowing physicality or of its prismatic evasiveness. It is an offering of...

Hecker, Tim

Dropped Pianos

Kranky

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! Received a 7.8 rating from Pitchfork. This new TIM HECKER release is composed of sketch pieces recorded in 2010 in preparation for what would become the Ravedeath, 1972 album. All of the compositions are piano driven and minimal in nature. This is not a new Tim Hecker album, but rather a peek behind the curtains into the working process. That these pieces stand on their own as compelling soundworks is a testament to the fact that Tim Hecker is at the absolute top of his game at the moment, and has been for years. Nine tracks in all.

Hecker, Tim

Harmony In Ultraviolet

Kranky

This is the first proper vinyl release for TIM HECKER’s breakthrough 2006 album. At the time of original issue, there was a small run of a few hundred vinyl copies done by a small German label, but this was pressed on an inferior sounding single LP which was much too short for the length of the album, not to mention the wide dynamic range of the recording. This new version is mastered at 45rpm over four sides for maximum sound quality. "The whole album moves with a sort of barely-contained violence that threatens to disintegrate or burst tracks into flame outs at nearly any point. it's powerful and intense ambient music that really doesn't sound like anything else being created right now."—Almost Cool