Tim Hecker – No Highs

Kranky

The barely visible greyscale cover of Tim Hecker‘s latest is the perfect embodiment of the dully guarded repetition that seeps from the album, its insidious electronic creep dusty and belaboured.

With titles like “Monotony”, “Anxiety” and “Total Garbage”, you kind of know what you are in for, added to the press release’s comment that it is “a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive capitalist ambient…”. I love that comment and here Tim is still leading, if not a charge, then at least a leaden amble in the right direction.

Smears of grit across a bleak, blasted landscape, covered up and peering out at somewhere desolate. Distortion and digital manipulation of physical instruments renders them to dust and scattered across the remnants of a once civilised society. No Highs is strangely enervating; you can literally feel it pulling at you, sapping your energy, sounds struggling to escape and work their way upward. A slow collapse into stasis seems to be the result of global overstimulation, a reaction of ennui causing sounds to turn in on themselves.

There are moments of energy injection and it causes a darkness, a sense of thwarted escape. Futility boils up in the buried layers as you feel yourself scrabbling vainly through the wreckage for something onto which you might cling. Elsewhere, a faded grandeur is swamped by memories of what it used to be; some previous wonder worn down to a residual echo of itself.

Sometimes these scattered sounds are imbued with an almost unbearable light, washing the images clean of colour and with Alvin Lucier-like repetition engaged. The impression is of gradual dissipation with brief moments of human frailty such as like Colin Stetson‘s wounded sax breathing asthmatic life into a crumbling infrastructure; a twisting call for something to be done before it is too late. Tim allows us faint glimmers of hope like this; he knows that we haven’t fully embraced the collapse and distant electronic swells do their best to prevent the overwhelming sensation of deadened angst.

Crazily though, there is something addictive in this collapsing hypnotic despair and we always know that somewhere, a chink of light will shine through, allowing us hope that all is not lost. The drifting tranquillity that subsumes towards the end is something to grasp but once again, with this album, we can see why Tim is ahead of the pack. There is a bravery to this which draws us like moths to a particularly unruly flame.

-Mr Olivetti-