Tim Hecker

Descending into the bowels of the good ship Thekla, its not insubstantial revamp still lingers in the air. It still smells like paint, and the exceptional new sound set-up hits you like a wave. We’re back again, this time to see Tim Hecker. What is it to see a headline drone act (in a boat)(on a Monday night)?

Combined with the Ben Frost gig a week ago (a show that was simultaneously aggressively bright, overwhelmingly dense and blessed with the sickest drummer we’ve seen all year), Thekla are on something of a roll, no doubt largely due to the confidence gained by that heavy new soundsystem. Where the Frost show was pomp and bombast and dazzling aggression, Hecker, using similar tools of distortion and blown-out melody, takes a subtler, more emotive tack. He appears to perform a loose reworking of 2013’s Virgins, but where that album brought his disjointed but undeniably beautiful sense of melody out of the murk, live he seems to revert slightly, hiding the guitars and pianos behind thick walls of noise and distortion and sub and hiss. It felt like music to zone out to (the heavy smoke and near-darkness certainly aided such a reaction). And this is where we get confused. How are you supposed to take in music like this? What is the accepted method of immersion? It’s true that the volume and the violence of the sound means it’s impossible to ignore, but is it OK to go sideways, to use it as a vehicle to carry thoughts and ideas around your head? We don’t know the answer. There probably isn’t one. Does it matter? Tim Hecker doesn’t care. It sounds amazing.