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loscil, “Lake Fire”

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Scott Morgan has been quietly and steadily releasing beautifully crafted and fog-veiled grayscale ambient-dub excursions for over a quarter century now so I was not expecting a huge creative leap forward this deep into the game, but Lake Fire may very well be the strongest loscil album of his career. Morgan’s breakthrough doesn’t sound like it came easily though, as this album was assembled from the reworked ruins of an aborted suite for electronics and ensemble (though one brooding and blackened piece from that suite (“Ash Clouds”) did manage to survive the culling). Notably, literal ash clouds were quite a significant inspiration this time around, as Lake Fire is something of an impressionistic road trip diary from a drive through the mountains of British Columbia while sky-blackening wildfires raged in the distance. In fact, the album cover is an actual photo of those smoke-obscured mountains that Morgan himself took from a rowboat on a lake.

Obviously, veiled & water-adjacent melancholy is nothing new for Morgan, but he brings a fresh intensity and an ingenious new approach to rhythm to his usual vision on pieces like the brilliant opener “Arrhythmia.” The insistent pulse of skipping loops suggests a malfunctioning amusement park wave machine that is furiously churning out waves of killer dub-techno fragments while its overworked pressure valves rhythmically vent bursts of steam. In fact, one of my favorite facets of this album is how masterfully Morgan creates rhythms with an unconventional palette of hisses, throbs, and subtle metallic textures rather than anything resembling a kick drum or cymbals.

The following “Bell Flame” works similar magic with skipping loops of ambient shimmer anchored by an insistently repeating bass motif, evoking a lonely early morning drive along a dramatic cliffside as the sunrise burns slowly away the last vestiges of morning mist. The album’s finest moment, however, is “Flutter,” which gorgeously combines a deep, dubby bass motif with blearily streaking, warped, and choppy chords. While the album admittedly ends with a bit of a lull (the final two ambient pieces), damn near everything before that point is pure (and almost impossibly wonderful) headphone bliss, as Morgan is truly without peer in weaving together vivid and richly detailed layers of alternately hissing, jangling, heaving, churning, billowing, and machine-like textures.        

Listen here.

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Tim Hecker, “Shards” (Kranky, 2025)

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This compilation is mostly one for serious Tim Hecker heads and completists only, as it collects an array of unreleased pieces and alternate versions from his recent soundtrack work for television and film (La Tour, Luzifer, The North Water, and Brandon Cronenberg’s killer Infinity Pool). Since Infinity Pool already got its own album, it only appears here for a sibilant and synthy extended variation of “Joyride,” but Shards also packs a trio of solidly upper-tier pieces unavailable elsewhere and an array of intriguingly uncharacteristic stylistic elements. Some stylistic departures work better than others, but the most damning thing I can say about the weaker pieces is that they either sound like lost interludes from a previous album or the beginnings of a future masterpiece that has not yet been shaped into its final, ideal form.  

The album opens strong, as the haunting and hallucinatory “Heaven Will Come“ feels like an elegiac blurring together of Hecker’s Virgins and Anoyo eras: glassy, darkly angelic synths smear, dissolve, and strain heavenward over groaning chord swells. The album’s biggest surprise comes next, as “Morning (Piano Version)” resembles a wistful Harold Budd-led jazz trio before a swell of haunting strings slowly morphs into a buzzing, gnarly crescendo that sounds like an incoming fax from a demon who does not really keep up with modern technological advances. 

The album’s aforementioned would-be masterpiece follows, as “Monotone 3” cycles through several different motifs like a medley held together only by a fitfully fluttering woodwind motif. I am not a fan, but if Hecker had stuck with the gorgeously rippling zither/harp-like opening theme and swapped out the woodwinds for snarling saxophone flamethrowing, I would probably be writing about how that song blew me out of my goddamn chair right now instead. Elsewhere, the closing “Sunset Key Melt” is the album’s zenith, as its gently and blearily tumbling hiss-veiled melody sounds like the flickering mirage of a delicate Andrew Chalk piece being slowly enveloped by a gnawing swell of roiling distortion. When it fully blossoms, it evokes nothing less than a feedback-streaked sky of shimmering hallucinatory birds slowly fluttering above a burning city. 

Listen here.

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Tim Hecker, “No Highs” (Kranky, 2023)

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This latest opus from Tim Hecker is amusingly billed as “a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient.” Given the weighty themes of his previous albums, Hecker’s actual inspiration presumably runs much deeper than that, yet the “beacon of unease” part of that claim may be more literal than it sounds, as one of the album’s central features is described as “Morse code pulse programming.” While I am not well-versed enough in Morse code to determine if Hecker’s oddly timed rhythms are covertly incorporating text or a narrative into these warped and nightmarish soundscapes, the gnarled and harrowing melodies that accompany those erratic pulses are more than enough to make the album thoroughly compelling listening regardless. 

Aside from that, No Highs marks yet another significant creative breakthrough for a formidable artist hellbent on continual reinvention and bold evolution. While it is hard to predict whether or not No Highs will someday be considered one of Hecker’s defining masterpieces or merely an admirable and unique detour, its handful of set pieces feel quite brilliant to me and I do not expect my feelings to change on that point..

The general tone of No Highs feels like a continuation of the smeared, howling anguish of Konoyo and Anoyo, approximating lonely distress signals emitted from the smoldering ruins of Konoyo‘s planetary death spasms. Compositionally, however, No Highs feels like an entirely different animal altogether, as Hecker has swapped out roiling maximalism for simmering minimalism and distilled his palette to little more than insistently telegraph-like synth pings punctuated with occasional plunges into swirling and howling cosmic horror. In fact, the album makes me feel like I am stationed at a desolate outpost in a blackened wasteland nervously watching apocalyptic storms mass on the distant horizon. Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces tend to be the ones where those storms reach their full fury, such as the opening “Monotony.”

Like many pieces on the album, “Monotony” begins modestly with an insistently pinging synth rhythm, but that calm proves to be illusory as one hell of a howling maelstrom stealthily forms to propel the piece towards a thoroughly harrowing and gnarled climax. I am especially impressed at how thoroughly Hecker smears and warps his sounds, as they continually feel like they are fading in and out of focus (and in and out of tune) to create organically shapeshifting (and oft-ugly) harmonies and an immersively spatialized listening experience. To my ears, No Highs often evokes a nightmarish (and more visceral) inversion of Boards of Canada’s sun-dappled and nostalgia-soaked “worn and wobbly tape” aesthetic.

The longest pieces tend to be the strongest as well, as lead single “Lotus Light” blossoms into yet another tour de force of smeared and undulating horror, while “Anxiety” culminates in a roiling shoegaze/dreampop finale with some help from recurring guest saxophonist Colin Stetson. I did not expect to be so excited about Tim Hecker enlisting a saxophonist, but his instincts turned out to be characteristically unerring in that regard, as Stetson’s infrequent surfacings are a reliable highlight. 

There are a few other pleasant surprises lurking elsewhere, such as pedal steel flourishes, buried techno grooves, or fluttering Terry Riley-style sax patterns, but they are essentially just icing on an already wonderful cake (cutting edge sound design, inventively frayed and sickly textures, haunting melodies galore, etc.). While there are admittedly a few elements that make No Highs a bit less instantly gratifying than some previous Hecker classics, his absolute mastery of space, tension, texture, and catharsis is truly mesmerizing.

I can think of few artists who have managed to keep such an extended hot streak going and even fewer who potentially re-shape the future of electronic composition with each fresh statement. Tim Hecker may be two decades deep into his career at this point, yet each new album still feels like a legitimate event.

Listen here.

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loscil // lawrence english, “Colours Of Air” (Kranky, 2023)

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This stellar collaboration springs from a conversation that Scott Morgan and Lawrence English once had about especially “rich sources” for electronic music composition. Unsurprisingly, that discussion led to the inspiration behind much of English’s recent solo work: a 19th century pipe organ housed at the Old Museum in his native Brisbane. Colours Of Air is often quite different from English’s drone-inspired solo fare, however, as he and Morgan sifted “the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance” and found “flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust.” In less poetic terms, that means that these eight color-themed pieces “reduce and expand” English’s pipe organ recordings into a hallucinatory fantasia enhanced by Morgan’s talents for elegantly textured sound design and submerged, slow-motion dub techno pulses. Obviously, promising-sounding collaborations between electronic music luminaries are a dime a dozen, but this is one of the rare ones that feels like an inspired departure from expected terrain and something greater than the sum of its parts. While I suspect my perception is at least partially colored by the album description and the timeless majesty and religious nature of old pipe organs, the best moments of this album beautifully evoke what I would imagine light filtering through stained glass would sound like if I had been blessed with synesthesia.

The opening “Cyan” is the album’s masterpiece, as it slowly builds from the “suspended animation” feel of a single looping organ chord into a slow-motion loscil-style dub techno piece with a gorgeously warm, alive, and shimmering ball of light at its heart. While the remaining pieces admittedly feel a bit less supernatural and transcendent than that initial statement, “Cyan” is nevertheless an ideal illustration of the “rich source” notion that guides the album: the piece is basically just a few chords and a simple bass pattern, but Morgan and English do one hell of a job at luxuriating in the glimmering details of those chords. That is not the duo’s only trick, however, as the rest of the album features a number of compelling variations on their sacred-sounding minimalist deconstructions. For example, “Aqua” gradually evolves from a seesawing bed of melancholy yet dreamily aquatic-sounding chords into a smeared, Noveller-esque melody that evokes the haze of a comet slowly streaking through the cold night sky over a mountain range.

Elsewhere, the coldly throbbing and futuristic “Magenta” feels plucked from a sci-fi nightmare, as its machine-like and insistent pulse provide the stark backdrop for plunging tones that evoke burning wreckage falling from the sky in extreme slow-motion. It feels like it would be the perfect score to a Lessons In Darkness-style documentary devoted to the smoldering landscapes of ruin and burning metal portrayed in the dystopian future of the Terminator films, so aspiring documentarians should definitely keep that in mind when our artificial intelligence inevitably turns on us and reduces our cities to cinders. “Black” is yet another highlight, as its deceptively straightforward drone foundation acts as the shore for heavy, slow-motion waves of quivering psychotropic magic. I suspect there may be some gems lurking among the remaining four pieces as well, but it will probably take a bit more deep listening before I am attuned enough to their time-stretched wavelength to realize what I have been missing, as it definitely took me a few listens before the sublime sorcery of “Black” fully revealed itself. While those other pieces may be eluding my desire for instant gratification at the moment, the ones that I have connected with thus far easily rival the past glories of either artist. I suspect I have only begun to penetrate the full depths of this immersive, inventive, and emotionally rich union.

listen here

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Earthen Sea, “Ghost Poems” (Kranky, 2022)

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This latest release from the long-running ambient dub solo project of erstwhile Mi Ami/Black Eyes bassist Jacob Long is stirring up some feelings of regret about how I managed to sleep on this project for so long.  While I am not yet sure if Ghost Poems simply caught me at the right time or if Long has been unusually inspired recently, my previous exposures to Earthen Sea left me feeling like the ambient/dub balance was too heavily weighted towards the “ambient” side to leave a deep impression.  I suspect the balance has not changed all that much since I last checked in, but Long seems to have made a big leap forward in perfecting his execution with this album (it “further refines his fragile, fractured palette into fluttering arrythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning,” according to the label).  Apparently, I am very much into fluttering arrhythmias of yearning now, as the first half of this album boasts a handful of pieces that can stand with just about anything in Kranky’s rich and influential discography: rather than resembling dub techno that has been deconstructed and dissolved into a soft-focus haze, Ghost Poems often feels like Long has managed to seamlessly combine the best of ambient and the best of dub techno into something fresh, wonderful, and uniquely his own.

According to Long, one of this project’s central themes is “the melancholy of 7th chords on a fake Rhodes patch,” which feels like quite an apt and self-aware description.  In lesser hands, that might be uncharitably viewed as a formulaic approach, but Long seems to instead belong to a more rarified type of artist who is passionately devoted to perfecting a single theme that obsesses him and he seemingly has no trouble finding myriad intriguing ways to keep that theme evolving. Unsurprisingly, blearily melancholy and repeating fake Rhodes chords are indeed the heart of the album, but Long inventively enhances that simple theme with a host of delightful textural and rhythmic elements.  Some of those elements are expected ones, such as the presence of deep bass throb, understated kick drum patterns, and subtle cymbal flourishes that give these pieces their physicality and sense of forward motion.  Those more conventionally musical touches are just pieces of a larger puzzle though, as Long also gets a lot of mileage from “domestic sounds (sink splashing, room tone, clinking objects) filtered through live FX to imbue them with an intuitive, immaterial feel.” 

In theory, that is not exactly new territory, but it sure feels like it sometimes (particularly on the opening “Shiny Nowhere,” as crackling, shuffling, and dripping sounds gamely replace the expected snare and cymbals in the lurching, slow-motion groove).  Given how explosive and cacophonous some of Long’s previous bands have been, I was quite surprised by his talent for distilling a piece to its absolute essence and never playing a single wasted or unnecessary note.  My favorite piece is the hiss-soaked and sensuously seductive “Stolen Time,” but “Felt Absence” and “Snowy Water” help make the whole first half a murderers’ row of elegantly frayed and dreamlike hits.  To some degree, Long’s “variations on a theme” aesthetic unavoidably starts to yield diminishing returns as I get deeper into the album, but some of his best ideas do not surface until later pieces like “Slate Horizon” and “Deep Sky” (both of which make very inspired use of subtly shivering cymbals and clicking drum sticks).

Listen here

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Pan•American, “The Patience Fader” (Kranky, 2022)

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This latest full-length from Mark Nelson’s long-running and unpredictably shapeshifting project is a collection of understated, near-ambient solo guitar instrumentals that Kranky describes as the culminating release of the composer’s “romantic minimalism” side. It certainly is a languorously meditative and unrepentantly lowercase suite of songs, blurring the lines between an “ageless, scarred” Americana and dreamlike ambient drift. Significantly, the album was recorded during the first summer of the pandemic, as Nelson views these songs as a sort of “‘lighthouse music,'” radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending ‘a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.'” 

Given its gently minimal, near-ambient “lone guitar in the fog” aesthetic, The Patience Fader is likely to be something of a polarizing release: it falls dangerously close to calming Windham Hill-style prettiness a couple of times, but it can also feel incredibly poignant and sublime if one chooses to listen deeply enough. While it feels weird to describe music this quiet and slow-moving as “a bold move,” it is exactly that. It would have been much easier for Nelson to revisit familiar, more fan-friendly territory than to attempt to convey something profound and ineffable while blearily hovering at the edge of perception like a ghost.

The wintry, desolate, and fog-shrouded view immortalized in the cover art was both a curiously counterintuitive and impressively apt aesthetic choice for a number of reasons. The most immediately striking collision of themes, of course, is that The Patience Fader is a considerably warmer album than the cover art would suggest (and it was recorded during considerably warmer circumstances as well). However, the image does portray a landscape that feels like it is in a lonely state of chilled suspended animation, which nicely mirrors the music in a significant way: all ten of these pieces feel like they exist in a state of bleary and blurred suspension. That is just the backdrop, however, as Nelson’s tender melodies metaphorically transform that “before picture” melancholia into something a bit more sun-dappled and hopeful. Only a bit, mind you, but in a way that definitely matters—like how a break in the clouds on a foreboding day might allow a few rays of light to stream through the window to share their warmth and possibly illuminate floating dust motes in a lovely way.

In less poetic terms, that means that the baseline aesthetic of this album is basically a slow-motion, art-damaged twist on back porch slide guitar blues reverberating through a soft-focus ambient fog. My two favorite pieces are “Harmony Conversion” and “Just a Story,” but it is generally true that all of the longer pieces are excellent and that all of the shorter pieces either feel like transitional interludes or like they end too soon to leave a substantial impression. It is also generally true that these songs all feel like variations upon a single elegantly distilled theme, so the ones that boast a distinctive twist understandably tend to be the ones that stand out the most. 

For example, the opening moments of the far-too-brief “Corniel” feel like a lost great Tim Hecker piece (and a harmonica-driven one at that), while “Harmony Conversion” combines swooning intertwined melodies with some subtle dub touches. “Just a Story,” on the other hand, feels like a heavenly collision between Takoma-style Americana and the slow-motion, minimalist psychedelia of Dean McPhee. It also feels like a heavenly collision between the album’s rippling, dreamlike production and Nelson’s gift for songcraft, as the wistful melody is legitimately gorgeous and a few of the chord changes will likely elicit gasps or chills in those who appreciate such things. That makes it the album’s obvious stand-alone highlight, but the vision as a whole is Nelson’s more impressive achievement, as he reduced his music to its most nakedly minimal and intimate and did so with nearly unerring execution. This album feels destined to someday be celebrated as a cult/niche masterpiece in lowercase music circles.

Samples can be found here.

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Grouper, “Shade” (Kranky, 2021)

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I suppose I have been a devoted Grouper fan since sometime around 2008’s Dragging A Dead Dear Up A Hill, but there was a long stretch during The Reverb Years in which I was genuinely mystified by the outsized reverence that people seemed to have for this project (very similar to my experience with The Disintegration Loops, though I love several of Basinski’s other albums). In more recent years, however, I have become considerably more convinced that Liz Harris is some kind of iconoclastic visionary (albeit a very slow-moving one), though I am not sure if she is shaping the culture so much as providing a much-needed corrective to its rapidly accelerating and tech-focused trajectory. 

While my initial impression is that this 12th Grouper full-length is not quite as uniformly strong as some other Grouper albums from recent years, that is less relevant than the fact that it continues Harris’s trend towards more intimate, emotionally direct, and beautifully distilled songcraft. In that regard, Shade gives me exactly what I want from a new Grouper album: at least one song that is an absolutely devasting gut punch on the same level of “Parking Lot” and “Living Room.” To my ears, that album-defining gem comes in the form of the folky, bittersweet closer “Kelso (Blue Sky),” but there are probably a couple of other sublime and/or unexpected gems destined for semi-permanent heavy rotation in my life as well.

I was a bit surprised to learn that Shade collects songs spanning 15 years, as they convincingly feel like they all could have been birthed from a single extended flash of inspiration in a remote cabin (most pieces feature only hushed vocals and an acoustic guitar, though tape murk is definitely a recurring feature too). According to Harris, “this an album about respite” and “the coast,” as one of Shade‘s primary themes is how our memories, experiences, connections, and selves are shaped and framed by place. 

Fittingly, Shade was recorded at various places along the Northern California and Pacific Northwest coasts (including a “self-made residency” on a mountain). Stylistically, this is one of Harris’s more nakedly “folky” albums, as there is plenty of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, tender vocal melodies, and a minimum of effects (just flesh, steel, and wood, basically). The album is broken up by a handful of pieces that feel more like soundscapes, but that is mostly because they are songs that are so blearily lo-fi and tape-distressed that they cross over into semi-abstraction.

Happily, some of those hiss-ravaged pieces turn out to be surprise album highlights though, such as the opening “Followed the Ocean,” which resembles an achingly gorgeous and ghostly ’70s country gem heard through a blown-out car radio. Elsewhere, “Disordered Minds” feels like a killer dreampop song absolutely smothered in tape murk and possibly played at the wrong speed, but it still manages to sound like heaven in spite of that (it reminds me of Russian Tsarlag, but warm and beautiful rather than rotted and disturbing). 

As far as the more “straight” material is concerned, I am similarly fond of “Pale Interior,” which feels like a hazy hypnagogic cover of a Vashti Bunyan classic. That said, the inarguable centerpiece of Shade is the aforementioned “Kelso (Blue Sky),” as the tape fog finally dissipates to reveal a moving and sublime near-masterpiece that feels like I died and woke up in a heaven where Nebraska is a Hope Sandoval album rather than a Bruce Springsteen one (and I love that I can hear every single scrape of Harris’s fingers moving across the fretboard). Naturally, all of that adds up to yet another great Grouper album, but the real magic is that Harris’s recent work somehow feels like something else altogether (something even better), akin to a getting a long unexpected letter from a beloved yet elusive friend that I am never quite sure I will hear from again.

Samples can be found here.

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Ana Roxanne, “Because of a Flower” (Kranky, 2020)

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Ana Roxanne’s cryptically titled debut mini-LP was one of 2019’s most pleasant surprises, as she masterfully wielded a minimal palette of hazy vocals, subtle instrumentation, and field recordings to construct a suite of songs that felt both remarkably intimate and completely untethered to conventional structure or contemporary trends. In fact, I suspect I could have been easily convinced that ~~~ was a highly coveted private press obscurity from the early ’80s. This latest release (her first for Kranky) takes a somewhat different direction in some ways, but thankfully remains every bit as beguiling as its predecessor: the field recordings may be less prominent and Roxanne’s previous impressionistic, amorphous structures have been largely replaced with more conventional shapes, yet the hooks are now stronger and the songs more memorable. 

That feels like a perfectly acceptable trade-off in my book. While I am historically dismayed when artists that that I enjoy move further away from the idiosyncrasies that made their early work so special, Roxanne proves herself to be the rare exception to that trend, as the best moments of Because of a Flower take the warmth and melodicism of ~~~ to some truly beautiful new heights.

I was both surprised and disoriented to learn that Roxanne apparently spent five years working on Because of a Flower, as it feels like a significant evolution from ~~~, yet it is entirely possible that some of these pieces were composed at the same time as her debut (or possibly even earlier) . In a conceptual sense, however, it makes perfect sense that Roxanne may have been working on two noticeably divergent releases at once, as the two feel a lot like different chapters in the same abstract memoir. On ~~~, Ana’s soundscapes seemed primarily inspired by warm feelings of nostalgia for her family and childhood. Because of a Flower, on the other hand, seems to be more thematically focused upon her intersex identity (and the more recent stages of her life). 

It would probably be extremely easy for a casual listener to miss that though, as she has an intuitive genius for incorporating those themes in subtle and oblique ways that enable her work to feel artistically honest and deeply personal, yet also resonate on a universal human level. For the most part, the album’s more personal themes manifest themselves in repurposed textbook passages, “cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions.” It was admittedly a bit of a surprise to hear found sounds borrowed from movies rather than the natural world, but she invariably makes very effective use of them (the endearing “tropical beach” ambiance of ~~~ does happily resurface on the album’s final two songs though). As enjoyable and evocative as Roxanne’s choice of samples can be, however, the heart of this album is unquestionably the blearily gorgeous vocals that float languorously over dreamlike drones or melodic bass lines.

For me, the centerpiece of the album is the slow and sensuous “Camille,” as Ana’s voice soulfully coos and swoons over a backdrop of warm organ chords and an R&B-inspired drum machine groove.There are also some snatches of film dialogue thrown into the mix, which nicely enhances an already wonderful piece by adding a sharper and more unpredictable textural layer. While I tend to think of her work as vaguely “ambient” in nature, the addition of a beat suits her aesthetic extremely well. I suspect she would have a bright future as an arty outsider R&B artist if she wanted that. 

That said, her aesthetic works just fine without a beat as well, so there is no shortage of other highlights and they head in some unexpectedly varied directions.For one, “A Study in Vastness” is absolutely sublime, resembling a ghostly, deconstructed Enya with some dark and moody undertones lurking within its fog of blurred drones. “Suite Pour L’invisible,” on the other hand, is a bit more representative of the album’s overarching aesthetic, as it is built from a warmly melodic and ringing bass motif enhanced by quietly twinkling guitar arpeggios. Musically, it calls to mind a classic 4AD sound akin to This Mortal Coil, but Roxanne’s strain of Romanticism feels too simple, intimate, and spontaneous to warrant close comparisons to anyone else: she might be exploring similar moods and using similar instrumentation, but the casual naturalness of her vocals make almost everything she records sound uniquely her own. 

That makes sense, given her working method of “beginning with ‘a drone element and a mood,’ then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist.” Her work has the effortless charm of an artist who is so full of life and so comfortable with singing that it is hard to imagine her ever making a vocal decision that does make a song instantly better (presumably because she has reached an entirely post-decision plane of pure instinct).

I would be remiss if I did not also single out the divergent instrumental “—” as another gem, as it unfolds as a gently pulsing and dreamlike reverie of burbling electric piano that organically shapeshifts into fresh tendrils of melody. The remaining three pieces are certainly likable as well, but they are a bit more atmospheric in tone, arguably functioning more as integral parts of the album’s overall arc than as individual highlights. I am tempted to describe Because of a Flower as Roxanne’s “singles album” and ~~~ as its more abstract and New Age-inspired counterpart and that would not be an objectively misleading characterization. However, each has at least one piece that muddies the waters enough to elude such easy generalizations. 

On Flower, it is the songs that begin and end the album that feel like the connective tissue linking it thematically and compositionally with its predecessor. Between those two poles, however, lies quite a wonderful four-song streak that feels like something new. A small part of me admittedly wishes that there were more “songs” as tightly crafted and rhythmic as “Camille,” but I suspect that is just the lingering part of me that craves familiarity. That part of me needs to shut the hell up, as Roxanne has done a superb job of carving out her own quiet niche in an oft-overwhelming cultural landscape and Because of a Flower is a lovely and beautifully crafted album. As an absorbing and thoughtfully sequenced whole, I suppose it surpasses the more uneven ~~~, but the two albums feel enough like complementary halves of the same vision that choosing a favorite feels like missing the point entirely.

Samples can be found here.

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Tim Hecker, “Anoyo” (Kranky, 2019)

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Eight years ago, Tim Hecker released his landmark Ravedeath, 1972 album and followed it with an EP that revisited the source material in a more organic, stripped-down fashion (Dropped Pianos). With Anoyo, Hecker beautifully revisits that same trick, albeit this time unveiling Konoyo‘s underlying gagaku ensemble rather than Ravedeath‘s underlying pianos. The other significant difference is that Anoyo is more than a mere companion piece that pulls back the curtain to reveal the scaffolding of a great album. Rather, Anoyo arguably equals and completes its predecessor, transforming Konoyo‘s blackened textures and haunted moods into something significantly warmer, more spacious, and more natural-sounding. Moreover, Anoyo gamely stretches even further from Hecker’s comfort zone than its parent. Whereas Konoyo essentially fed Hecker’s gagaku guests into a woodchipper, this release feels like a thoughtful, meditative, and organic collaboration with them, as Hecker’s electronics eerily drift and swirl through the traditional Japanese sounds like a supernatural mist.

From the opening sweep of koto notes that leads into “That World,” it is immediately apparent that Anoyo presents a side of Tim Hecker quite unlike any that I have seen before. If I did not know better, I would guess that he offered to record and produce the gagaku musicians’ own album in exchange for their work on Konoyo, as the most predominant sounds are dreamily snaking and billowing masses of flutes rather than anything that sounds conspicuously Hecker-esque. Obviously, that is not the case, yet Hecker treats the source material with an uncharacteristic delicacy and lightness of touch on that particular piece, overtly showing his hand only through the deep bass tones and the fluttering swells of backwards strings.

The flutes are the true heart of “That World,” however, and they attain an almost “chills down the spine” level of ghostly beauty. Consequently, Hecker wisely leaves the piece as spacious and uncluttered as possible, as adding anything further would have only diluted the magic. The following “Is But A Simulated Blur,” on the other hand, heads in the opposite direction, as the warped and woozy synth-like drones are very much textbook Hecker. He ingeniously twists the formula in quite a striking way though, as a haze of feedback or processed flutes swoops and plunges eerily in the periphery while pounding, erratically timed taiko and kakko drums imbue the piece with a very meditative and ritualistic feel. The first half of the album then winds to a close with the sublime and vaporously undulating drones of “Step Away From Konoyo.”

Anoyo‘s second half initially picks up right where the first half left off, as “Into the Void” is yet another understated drone piece, though its gently tumbling, fragmented strings and uneasy dissonances give it a darkly impressionist feel rather than a meditative one. When contrasted with the surrounding pieces, “Step Away” and “Into the Void” can seem like a mid-album lull of sorts, but it is a deliberate one: Anoyo‘s arc can be viewed as a steady constriction followed by a similarly steady expansion back to its original state. Or, more abstractly, like a deep exhalation followed by a deep inhalation.

Correspondingly, the album starts to reassemble into more ambitious and structured forms with “Not Alone.” Much like with “Simulated Blur,” the shifting tempos of the drumming give the piece an exotic and ritualistic air, but Hecker is even more restrained this time around and limits his palette to just quivering washes of slow chords. It is an airy and quietly lovely piece. In keeping with the album’s telescoping trajectory though, it is the closing “You Never Were” that makes the deepest impact of Anoyo‘s resurgent second half. Initially, the backbone of the piece is a fitful, broken-sounding koto motif adrift in a quavering sea of shimmering feedback or harmonic swells. Gradually, however, a submerged organ theme starts to emerge from the haze, and a different snatch of melody appears that unpredictably sputters and sizzles in the foreground. In the final moments it fully blossoms into a blurred and dreamlike organ mass, but the real beauty of the piece lies in how elegantly Hecker manipulates textures and dynamics as he moves towards that destination.

For about a week, I was absolutely convinced that Anoyo was a better album than Konoyo, but I eventually realized that I was just completely in love with “That World” and had a deep fondness for taiko drumming. “That World” is one of Hecker’s career-defining masterpieces, and a few other songs beautifully evoke a mystical, dream-like ritual, which is more than enough to make Anoyo (“that world”) a significant release. However, focusing on the individual songs neglects the deeper and more thoughtful artistry of the whole. Taken as a stand-alone work, these songs flow together seamlessly in a satisfying arc, achieving an exquisite symmetry. I was also struck by how the song titles form a hopeful non-traditional haiku. However, Anoyo is not a stand-alone work—it is the yang to its predecessor’s yin (or vice versa). The song titles of Konoyo (“the world over here”), for example, also form a poem (a considerably darker one).

While the overarching concept uniting the two halves is ambiguous enough to interpret in various ways (particularly since I have seen differing translations of “konoyo”),that ambiguity does not detract from their power and beauty as a diptych. In fact, that open-endedness even enhances those traits, as it is possible to project any number of themes (religious and otherwise) in the transformation from Konoyo‘s bleak torment to Anoyo‘s clarity and transcendence. Hecker essentially mirrors the anxiety, darkness, and pain of the modern world, then pulls back the camera to show that the sorrow and chaos are mere details of a rich and complex tapestry (or possibly that it is all an ephemeral illusion). Either way, The Transfiguration of Timothy Hecker is a moving and absorbing event. With the exception of perhaps Virgins, Anoyo and Konoyo go the furthest of Hecker’s albums in eroding his usual artistic distance to reveal depth and feeling in a raw and direct way.

Samples can be found here.

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Tim Hecker, “Konoyo” (Kranky, 2018)

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While he has long been one of my favorite artists, Tim Hecker has truly blossomed into a creative supernova over the last several years, as each fresh album seems to set a new standard for the state of electronic music. For the most part, this latest release continues that improbable streak of masterpieces, though Konoyo‘s vision is radical in a much different way than Love Streams or Virgins. The raw material was quite a bold departure from the norm, however, as Hecker collaborated with a gagaku ensemble in Tokyo. Despite the unusual instrumentation and the unexpected participants, Konoyo still sounds perversely like a classic Tim Hecker album, albeit the broken, squirming ruins of one. I suppose that makes it feel like slightly less of visionary bombshell than some other releases at times, but that is merely because Hecker’s focus was on more subtle evolutions this time around, stripping away unnecessary density and adventurously playing with textures and structures to present a hallucinatory masterclass in experimental composition that seethes and churns with dark emotion.

The conceptual premise for Konoyo (“The World Over Here”) is rooted in some conversations that Hecker had with a friend (now deceased) about both the concept of negative space and a frustration with the ineffective overuse of density as a compositional crutch. The path between the original inspiration and the album that ultimately results is never a linear one with Hecker though: given his exhaustive and ambitiously transformative creative process, it is always a surprise to see what shape the music takes when it finally emerges at the end. For example, I suspect Tokyo Gakuso would find most of their contributions here to be fragmented, twisted, and decontextualized into utter unrecognizability. Hecker definitely took the thoughts about density to heart though, albeit not quite in anything resembling the expected way.

In the opening piece, “This Life,” the central theme of howling, swooping, and tormented strings unfolds over an unpredictably shifting backdrop that wanders from tumbling, smeared arpeggios to bleary chords to grinding, bass-heavy surges of power without ever building towards a stable structure or arc. It feels quite fluid and improvisatory, despite the fact that it was all painstakingly planned, as the structure of the piece feels like it is bending, waxing, waning, and dissolving in reaction to the serpentine movements of the main theme. That approach works beautifully for that specific piece, as the demonic strings are vivid and vibrantly alive enough to thrive on their own, particularly since Hecker is continually intertwining new sounds and transforming their dissonant harmonies. With a strong enough central theme, the underlying structure does not need to prop anything up or provide any sense of forward motion, so Hecker is free to use it instead to create a wonderfully disorienting sense of fractured and fragile ephemerality. Everything is changing all of the time and it is deliriously absorbing and gloriously hallucinatory. Not every piece on Konoyo manages to pull off that feat with the same aplomb, but it is certainly great when it works.

That free-form approach to compositional structure makes Konoyo a challenging album to wrap my mind around, as it feels like I am experiencing an endlessly changing flow of motifs and fragments over a willfully inconstant and unsettled foundation. As such, the album is more like a shifting series of compelling moments rather than a structured presentation of seven individual compositions.That deeply experimental approach is still quite compelling, as Hecker’s music is characteristically wonderful and distinctive as ever, yet Konoyo is perversely like a John Coltrane live recording: it is undeniably dazzling on a moment-to-moment basis, but I will be damned if I can remember which songs were played or when they started or stopped when it is all over.

That said, a few pieces besides the opening “This Life” stand out as especially striking, most of which fall on the album’s second half. In particular, I love the many inspired textural flourishes that billow out of the brooding and amorphous “Keyed Out,” especially the squirming, stuttering arpeggios and the buried sounds of distressed vinyl or mangled tape. “A Sodium Codec Haze” is another favorite, as Hecker tears through a gorgeously swaying and rippling reverie with whistling howls and chattering surges of something like garbled machine noise. Also, the final stretch sounds like a chorus of slow-motion and nightmarish wind chimes, which is quite appealing as well.The album’s two longest pieces are quite powerful too, as “In Mother Earth Phase” is the most nakedly beautiful and structured piece on the album, while the epic “Across to Annoyo” is a feast of skittering, gnarled, and strangled textures.

Aside from the radical transformation of his compositional technique, it must be said that Konoyo is also unique among Hecker’s releases in its darkness, as its beauty is very much a bleak one. The strange and cryptic cover art is quite fitting, evoking a kind of contemporary urban dystopia that is cold and devoid of beauty, though ramshackle art can still blossom from its sad detritus. If Virgins sounded like it was recorded in a collapsing cathedral and Love Streams felt like it was recorded by a choir of angels, Konoyo feels like it was recorded in a post-apocalyptic junkyard by light of flaming garbage cans.

I will not attempt to guess what Hecker was feeling or whether he had any deeply metaphoric intentions, but the tone is definitely a heavy and striking one. In stripping away much of his usual artifice, Hecker has created a much more direct and raw emotional connection than usual. As such, this release is unlike anything else in Tim Hecker’s discography and I love him for that. He could have easily made a universally beloved album by sticking to his rough trajectory, but instead he opted for a much more sorrow-steeped and difficult road. As such, Konoyo is probably the most challenging and prickly release in his discography, which may alienate some less-adventurous listeners. Artistic boldness and listenability rarely go hand-in-hand though and this is easily one of Hecker‚Äôs most ambitious and provocative statements to date.

Samples can be found here.

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