At last fall's Unsound festival, in Krakow, I had the unusual experience of standing in an indoor fog bank. The visibility ended just a few feet in front of your nose; the shapes of other people drifted past while the haze pulsed in deep shades of red and blue and lavender. The music was a soup of drones, and the sound, the visuals, and the space itself blended together in such a way that you felt a little like you were floating in space.
The event in question was Ephemera, a site-specific collaboration between the Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker, German visual artist Marcel Weber, a.k.a. MFO, and Geza Schoen. While the audiovisual experience at most concerts rarely rises above the level of a laser light show, what made this performance-slash-installation so successful was not only its immersive, experiential quality; to longtime fans of Hecker's work, it was an act of transmutation, drawing out qualities that were latent in Hecker's music and bringing them to life around you, in four dimensions.
Over 15 years and multiple solo albums, Hecker has built up a formidable vocabulary of scrape and shimmer and crackle and throb. Using guitar, piano, organ, and, primarily, scads of digital processing, he treats sound as a plastic object, something physical to be molded and stretched. His work is sculptural in feel and widescreen in scope, and it is extraordinarily attentive to texture. Foremost among his concerns has been the idea of diffuseness, of dissolution. There are few hard edges, few identifiable motifs; musical events, like a shift in tone or the introduction of a new timbre, often take place under the cover of static. He prefers distant shapes with vague outlines.
Some of that fog burns off on Love Streams, an album that marks a subtle shift in Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark. "What do you do when you're known for making a certain type of work?" he recently asked, rhetorically, in an interview with The Fader. Feeling like he was beginning to repeat himself, he said, he decided that the solution "was not stacking things louder and heavier but working in a different way." That meant working with voices, for one thing—a complicated-sounding process of using software to translate medieval choral music to digital synthesis and then, working with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, to write and record complementary new choral parts.
He treats his voices in the same way he has typically treated instruments like piano and organ—that is to say, attacking them as if with steel wool—but they're still recognizable as voices. On "Violet Monumental I," a chattering soprano sings an abstracted lamentation that feels almost liturgical, and on "Music of the Air," disconnected bursts of voice are staggered in time and spread across the stereo field, lending the impression of wandering through a choir pit while the singers warm up. 4AD turns out to be the perfect home for Hecker's new album, given the way it faintly echoes the choral fixations of '80s 4AD staples like Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, and Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares.
Hecker's palette has evolved in other ways, too. "Obsidian Counterpoint" opens the album with a blippy stream of arpeggios, an explicitly electronic sound that is unusual for his work. Throughout, his sounds seem tugged in two directions at once, as though caught between the digital and the physical. In "Music of the Air," a buzzing, droning synthesizer patch bobs in unpredictable motions like a handful of jewel-colored flies. Toward the end of "Bijie Dream," a harpsichord-like sound mutates into something resembling a steel pan, a far cry from Hecker's typically Arctic-inspired palette.
These bold, declarative sounds—which also include the bleating bass clarinet of "Violet Monumental II" and the guitar-like riffing of "Voice Crack"—cut strong shapes through the murk, but Hecker's compositional sensibilities remain opaque: He traffics not so much in melodies or song forms as in unsteady tone clusters. There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel. Not a lot happens, except when it does: In the final minute of "Collapse Sonata," there might be more dynamic action, as tolling bells are gradually absorbed into a queasy slick of steel drum, digital distortion, and dissonant organ tones, than there is on the rest of the album put together.
It's a setup for "Black Phase," a dramatic conclusion that pairs somber choral harmonies with the gravelly guitars of Ben Frost or Sunn O))). It's as diffuse as the rest of the record, yet it feels somehow cathartic. Like Virgins, Love Streams tackles a lot of abstract concepts, like "live" sound, and synthetic sound, and rooms and space, and technology's ability to complicate all those things. But it's also about the ability to disappear into sound, to get lost in the contours of a slippery timbre, or to be made whole by a consonant harmony. At its close, those staccato vocal parts and that smoldering low end deliver a real emotional punch, the release to subtle tensions that have been building up throughout the course of the record's hazy, unpredictable run. It's a suggestion that, if you stumble around in the fog long enough, you might just find what you're looking for.
