Tim Hecker’s first album under his own name was called Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. This was 2001: Ambient and electronic music was still ruled by the penetrating austerity of labels like Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton—labels whose artists strove to make their music sound as digital as possible. Markus Popp's Oval, which inspired a lot of supposedly funny comments about whether or not its CDs were skipping, is still probably the best example of this—and in an era where CDs are starting to go the way of the public pay phone, probably the most quaint, too.
From its title down, Haunt Me presented a model of electronic music that was spectral, imperfect, and capable of erosion. The most applicable metaphors for it weren’t technological, but natural: Parts of the album sounded like the slow tearing of paper, other parts like wind blowing across infinities of sand. Hecker didn’t just imbue his computers with “warmth”—a lazy term that has long needed to be put down—but with mortality. (Remember that that this was 2001, a year after the Y2K scare made supposedly infallible stores of digital information look vulnerable in a very human way.) At the time, Haunt Me’s most obvious companion was Fennesz’s Endless Summer, a grainy, blissful album that resembles easy-listening music coming through on the broken broadcast of a distant star.
Hecker has more or less followed course for the past 12 years, releasing high-quality albums with the low-key consistency of someone apparently unconcerned with trend. His approach to sound and texture can be traced to mid-2000s Radiohead, the ominous holding patterns of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (fellow Canadians with which Hecker has toured), William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, and basically any music that sounds like it has been abandoned by its maker to rot. His peaks are arguable: My favorites are 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet (his most conventionally beautiful) and 2011’s Ravedeath, 1972, which was built out of a single session of live organ, piano and guitar, recorded in an Icelandic church, and later worked over in the studio.
Virgins is the first Tim Hecker album more focused on performance than process. Most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with Bedroom Community, the collective that also includes composers Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Paul Corley. (Frost helped record Ravedeath; Paul Corley engineered both Ravedeath and Virgins, and co-produced Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven at Bedroom Community’s Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik; Oneohtrix Point Never’s Dan Lopatin collaborated with Hecker on 2011’s Instrumental Tourist: The world of forward-thinking electro-acoustic music is a small and fraternal one.)
The live-room conceit is an interesting turn for an artist who for a long time worked in a primarily digital realm: Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music—a return to idea of sound as something that exists in the air before on hard drives, and of albums as specific records of specific people in specific places. Even the electronics—and there are still plenty of electronics—sound like they’re refracting and ricocheting off of wood and metal, scraping a ceiling, trying to find a way out.
Hecker’s music has always been eerie, but never this forceful. Some sections of Virgins feel like soundtracks for horror-movie climaxes when the camera fixes on a sickening image and refuses to turn away, fascinated and trapped at the same time. Even the album’s quieter moments are more tense than they might’ve been on Hecker’s earlier albums—a function, maybe, of a live-room environment where every creak and whisper seems to be happening a few feet from the speakers instead of at some artificially cavernous distance.
This is music that benefits from being heard loud and/or on headphones in the same way couches are best experienced by actually sitting down in them instead of just brushing your fingers against the upholstery as you leave the room. Like a lot of Ben Frost’s albums (or something like Swans’ The Seer), Virgins feels possessed by the idea that no advancements in society or technology will ever shake our primal reactions to fear, wonder, awe and what in a more naïve era used to be called the sublime. And while it’s a fallacy to think that hyperseriousness is the only way to strike people at their core, it’s still inspiring to hear an artist—especially one who started out as mellow as Hecker—double down and make a statement so confrontational. Once haunted, now he’s the one who haunts.
