News / / 17.10.13

TIM HECKER

Virgins (Kranky)

17/20

The music we affix the ‘ambient’ tag with tends to veer down one of two paths: there’s the isolation tank explorations of the New Age-y chemtrail kind; your Harold Budds, your Tangerine Dreams, your Mountains. Then there’s the darker stuff, the records that explore internal geographies as much as idealised actual paradises. Over the last decade, Tim Hecker has stomped down the latter.

His masterpiece, 2010’s Ravedeath 1972, was a study of instrumental decay, a haunting and haunted rumination of sonic dissolution. On Virgins, Hecker exchanges spectrality and concealment for a shockingly clear, clean sound: rotted etchings of terror for the HD generation. The Canadian’s collaborations with Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never, collected on the brilliant Instrumental Tourist LP, write themselves in the margins here. There’s only one major differentiation between the two; Lopatin’s recent material is intentionally-cloying, knowingly-sterile and insincere in the most PoMo sincere way possible, while Hecker’s record is fraught with feeling, intentionally-abstracted from the realm of the theoretical, heard best as a continuously unspooling stream. Going into individual tracks, trying to pinpoint moments of specificity seems counterintuitive to exploring Virgins. It sounds like moonlight sontanas melted in the arctic sun. It feels like bathing in VHS footage of deep forests at dawn. Whatever. It requires complete and repeated consumption.

 

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Words: Josh Baines

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