Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet

The most recent album by Montreal musician Tim Hecker is one of those welcome but rare works that has me appreciating music from a completely new angle. One continuous piece, it's built from a dense mass of heavily effected shoegazer guitars, floaty synth clouds of thick fogs of manipulated noise, and delicate keyboard melodies. Going beyond multi-layered, its layers blend into a continuously-shifting geological mass, but experienced at a human pace. The construction clanks soon after the beginning bring you into a world where some huge and fantastic structure is being built, whirling you past each corner to absorb every detail. But it's not so much a sonic cathedral, but a living, dynamic organism, continuously breeding new strands of sound. Far from abstract brain music, it's also full of genuinely beautiful fragments of melody, and, of course, harmony and colour, from the Cocteau Twins-like "Chimeras", the intense heartbeat loop of "Dungeoneering" to the undersea ambience of the title suite. [ Note because of the continuous sequencing, this absolutely needs to be heard on CD, or via a media player with gapless playback! ]

June 3, 2008

9 out of 10

See blog entry: Warm Noise (3 Jun, 2008)

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