Tim Hecker would like to show you his reel. During the 2020 pandemic, the veteran power-ambient iconoclast began ramping up his film scoring work. His amorphous combination of distended dronework and analog orchestration began to infect horror films and TV dramas like a haunted Hans Zimmer. Most notably, Hecker conjured a gaggle of deformed miniatures for Brandon Cronenberg’s hallucinogenic sci-fi freak-out Infinity Pool, punk-rock-sized dark ambient bursts where throat-clenching pauses serve as the jump scares. But that’s also him behind the seasick, woozy, creaking sounds for BBC whaling miniseries The North Water, the frostbitten gulps of Austrian exorcism drama Luzifer, and the unnerving dissonance of atmospheric French horror film Lockdown Tower. Glacial and nebulous, Hecker’s heaving soundtracks aren’t as instantly satisfying as, say, Trent Reznor, Daniel Lopatin, or Mica Levi’s, but they inhabit a much darker and more mysterious space, delivering a tense, undulating, eldritch surreality all their own.
His 12th album, Shards, threads seven pieces left over from these four film projects. Even at a lithe 31 minutes, it serves as Hecker’s most diverse work, an unfixed landscape that moves from shadowy to frigid to transcendent with ease. The song titles and album notes leave no real clues as to which films each track was actually intended for—“Joyride Alternate” is a cool night drive compared to the clank and stomp of Infinity Pool’s Shining-esque “Joy Ride.” Instead, Shards is a new short film all its own: part sci-fi noir, part android tearjerker.
Romantic and ominous, opener “Heaven Will Come” is Blade Runner if scored by Krzysztof Penderecki: a smoky, pulseless electronic fog that builds into a swarm. Textures slurp in reverse, something howls in tune. When the trademark Hecker-ian bass drop makes the entire track rumble with low end, things become at once stranges and more familiar. The gorgeous closer, “Sunshine Key Melt,” is the mirror image, similarly bound in maximal, spectrum-filling sound, but instead producing the type of melancholy shoegaze he was releasing on albums like 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet. Twinkling sounds are a pointillist dream; a single piano note falls from the ether. Shards starts as Robert Eggers and ends as Terrence Malick.
In between lie some of the most unexpected detours of Hecker’s last two decades. The freewheeling mix of tender piano, bustling noises, and something that sounds like a manhandled upright bass on “Morning (Piano Version)” could pass as the Necks recording something that could fit on a 7-inch. “Joyride Alternate” pulses like a piece of Cliff Martinez-styled synthwave with some electrostaticky fringes around the edges. For “Monotone 3,” Hecker recruits the same collaborators from 2023’s No Highs, guitarist Joe Grass (Patrick Watson) on steel guitar and Victor Alibert on uncomfortably close bass clarinet. The track is a Terry Riley-styled minimalist rainstorm; Hecker hovers over it menacingly with some incredibly bleak electronic whine.
Hecker’s noisy, unsettling score work lurks in the same dark corridors as Mark Korven and Colin Stetson, an uncompromising oort cloud of the uneasy and clamorous, a place where man meets machine and machine often wins. A taster between the brooding No Highs and whatever he has planned next, Shards isn’t meant to be the next great Tim Hecker record—even if it does transcend its self-deprecating "odds ’n’ sods" title. Instead it’s a great way to hear one of our most beloved miasmists stretching his legs. Here’s hoping Hollywood thinks so too.
