Tim Hecker wish to present you his reel. In the course of the 2020 pandemic, the veteran power-ambient iconoclast started ramping up his movie scoring work. His amorphous mixture of distended dronework and analog orchestration started to contaminate horror movies and TV dramas like a haunted Hans Zimmer. Most notably, Hecker conjured a gaggle of deformed miniatures for Brandon Cronenberg’s hallucinogenic sci-fi freak-out Infinity Pool, punk-rock-sized darkish ambient bursts the place throat-clenching pauses function the soar scares. However that’s additionally him behind the seasick, woozy, creaking sounds for BBC whaling miniseries The North Water, the frostbitten gulps of Austrian exorcism drama Luzifer, and the unnerving dissonance of atmospheric French horror movie Lockdown Tower. Glacial and nebulous, Hecker’s heaving soundtracks aren’t as immediately satisfying as, say, Trent Reznor, Daniel Lopatin, or Mica Levi’s, however they inhabit a a lot darker and extra mysterious house, delivering a tense, undulating, eldritch surreality all their very own.
His twelfth album, Shards, threads seven items left over from these 4 movie initiatives. Even at a lithe 31 minutes, it serves as Hecker’s most numerous work, an unfixed panorama that strikes from shadowy to frigid to transcendent with ease. The music titles and album notes depart no actual clues as to which movies every monitor was truly supposed for—“Joyride Alternate” is a cool night time drive in comparison with the clank and stomp of Infinity Pool’s Shining-esque “Pleasure Trip.” As an alternative, Shards is a brand new brief movie all its personal: half sci-fi noir, half android tearjerker.
Romantic and ominous, opener “Heaven Will Come” is Blade Runner if scored by Krzysztof Penderecki: a smoky, pulseless digital fog that builds right into a swarm. Textures slurp in reverse, one thing howls in tune. When the trademark Hecker-ian bass drop makes the complete monitor rumble with low finish, issues develop into directly stranges and extra acquainted. The attractive nearer, “Sunshine Key Soften,” is the mirror picture, equally sure in maximal, spectrum-filling sound, however as a substitute producing the kind of melancholy shoegaze he was releasing on albums like 2006’s Concord in Ultraviolet. Twinkling sounds are a pointillist dream; a single piano be aware falls from the ether. Shards begins as Robert Eggers and ends as Terrence Malick.
In between lie a number of the most sudden detours of Hecker’s final 20 years. The freewheeling mixture of tender piano, bustling noises, and one thing that appears like a manhandled upright bass on “Morning (Piano Model)” may move as the Necks recording one thing that would match on a 7-inch. “Joyride Alternate” pulses like a chunk of Cliff Martinez-styled synthwave with some electrostaticky fringes across the edges. For “Monotone 3,” Hecker recruits the identical collaborators from 2023’s No Highs, guitarist Joe Grass (Patrick Watson) on metal guitar and Victor Alibert on uncomfortably shut bass clarinet. The monitor is a Terry Riley-styled minimalist rainstorm; Hecker hovers over it menacingly with some extremely bleak digital whine.
