Tim Hecker - No Highs

The Quietus

Throughout his career Tim Hecker has consistently rejected any lazy keywords like ‘ambient’, ‘experimental’, and ‘noise’ that might be used to pigeonhole his music. Even the term ‘music’ might be starting to make him feel uneasy by now. If there was any underlying motif that recurs in his substantial body of work, it would have to be a fascination with the shapeless and formless things that defy simple classification.

Another major aspect of his elusive artistic identity, evident from both his musical output and academic research – is the primacy of hearing in his hierarchy of the senses. In much the same way as the Protestants split away from Catholic visual culture in favour of a more austere aural tradition, Hecker rejects corporate visual culture – elevating sound as the most effective carrier of twenty-first-century tensions.

While an admittedly extravagant analogy, the comparison between the Reformation and Hecker’s ethos does hold up. From playing in Icelandic churches, to 2016’s spliced-up choral experiment, Love Streams, Hecker has long toyed with religion as a kind of ironic muse, exploiting its inherent gravitas while simultaneously leading the listener toward what he once called (in an interview with the Red Bull Music Academy), “the empty husk of a dancing promise of God.”

Hecker utilises sound and space in a more pragmatic way than the church has historically tended to. Rather then attempt to evoke some kind of mystical experience, he would prefer to strip listeners of their egos and low-frequency thoughts.

Hecker has a good go at this with his eleventh studio album, No Highs. He continues his tradition of transmuting the raw material of conventional instrumentation into beautifully disfigured aural sculptures. No Highs presents an expansive and varied sonic palette, diffused with various shades of aching anxiety and quiet desolation.

On the track ‘Total Garbage’, for example, the fading strings and sax create a sense of unattainable longing. They sound gothic, grainy and monochrome in all their accents. While in ‘Lotus Light’, dynamic pitch shifts revolve and intwine around pillars of oscillating bleeper loops, as agogic wails contort in an orbit of musical debris. In ‘Monotony II’ an impressionistic tension between the organic and artificial is hinted at with the fluttering modal sax of Colin Stetson dancing over pulses of morse code.

Throughout the record, there is a feeling of something threatening in the air – but not threatening enough to kill. Something hopeful, but not enough to uplift. There is a sense of restlessness and transience in the loops stretched to their limits, and the granulated notes that get washed up on the peripheries of pieces like strange and lonely driftwood.

No Highs is a fitting name for the record – as well as for Hecker’s approach in general. There are no crescendos or sections that wrestle for attention, but rather, an ever-shifting soundscape that swirls and swims like a starling murmuration. The shapes it makes in the air are often wounding, but also graceful. And like all of his work, it is devastating in the best way possible.

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Read Daniel Bromfield’s review of the album.

Resident Advisor

Few ambient artists have reached the heights that Tim Hecker has in his decade-spanning career. Past albums have boasted collaborations with internationally ren..

A Closer Listen

“What is the function of music?”, asks the Canadian sound artist and composer Tim Hecker in a recent New York Times profile. “Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code? Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”

Here we have one of the defining artists of the Ambient genre, a man who can easily be credited with popularizing and refining its characteristic sounds via seminal works such as Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006), Ravedeath, 1972 (2011), and Virgins (2013), questioning the sonic phenomenon he has helped to redefine for a new age: background music. “Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” Hecker tells the Times. “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world. They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”

Hecker is well aware that his newest project, No Highs, will have the weight of the current Ambient trend on its shoulders, a weight that may threaten to bury and obscure the celebrated aspects of Hecker’s work which continue to occasionally shine through on this newest project: an ear for form and musical pacing that rivals that of your average composition professor, a sense of emotional ambiguity that allows for distortion, harmony, ecstasy, and melancholy to coexist in an often cinematic, grandiose, and swirling mass. Layers upon layers of reverb-laden riffs combine into a soundtrack for looking out over your balcony and romanticizing the past, walking through a gray town to another monotonous day at work, or yes, driving down a foggy back road in the middle of the night.

Is this background music? Could it be played comfortably in your average corporate elevator? Not really. I was drawn into No Highs by its opener “Monotony”, an appropriately repetitive yet oddly tense cycle of slow, siren-like laments, doom-laden synth-pad bass tones, and the distorted background flutterings so characteristic of both Hecker and his imitators. I felt like a character in a Murakami story in which a mysterious woman fails to show up for an unexpected reunion, or like one of the many melancholy and grief-stricken stage actors in Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021). Yet as I listened through the rest of the record a few more times — while cooking, while driving, while writing this review — I felt less and less drawn to it, and less and less excited to translate it into words. I am not, after all, a character in a film.

Perhaps I am suffering from what we experts like to call “Ambient overload”, a condition liable to produce cynicism, apathy, and lack of focus in even the most hardened of critics. Embittered as I am, the addition of “modal” saxophone improvisations from none other than Colin Stetson only serves to reinforce my suspicion that another dose of cycling, breathy, reverbed saxophone arpeggios might not be what we need right now. I say all of this while acknowledging the dirge-like beauty of a track like “Total Garbage” and the subtlety of a track like “Lotus Light”.

Tim Hecker is self-aware. Tim Hecker knows what he has done, and while he continues to show great ingenuity in recombining the pieces of Ambient in fresh yet familiar ways, a cynic like me may not be able to allow No Highs to serve as the experience amplifier it so obviously strives to be. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

The Guardian 0

(Kranky)
Full of alarms, arrhythmic pulses and deep bass, Hecker’s eerie work feels as if it’s bracing for cataclysm – but is nevertheless rich, warm and inviting