Canada's electronic noise sculptor, Tim Hecker returns to the west coast after many years with a date at Neumos, on the cusp of his new album for Kranky Records. As with his recent string of albums for both Kranky and 4AD, his newest is an immersive music of unease, or in Hecker's own words, "‘I Make Pagan Music that Dances on the Ashes of a Burnt Church’". Discussing the rise of omnipresent streaming music organized into "moods", Hecker sees ambient music becoming a genre of convenience. Rather than inoffensive soundscapes that distract or soothe, with little utility beyond backdrop to work, study, or relax to, Hecker has returned to reflecting the pollution, agitation and conflict of our confounded reality. Like its more wholesome and innocuous ambient siblings, "No Highs" is immersive and embraces the listener in an ocean of sound. Unlike that growing body of work, it restlessly rejects easy submission to its tide. On this subject, Hecker spoke with the New York Times, inquiring; “What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”, he asks in Grayson Haver Currin's feature, "Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.". He details how, in the early days of the pandemic lockdown like so many who make their creativity their enterprise, he felt confounded and anxious, overwhelmed by home-schooling and managing living costs. He was concerned that there would be little or no music industry on the pandemic's other side, and wondered what he might create next, and for what purpose. He describes how he turned down an offer to produce sounds for a startup meditation app, and instead focused on streaming tv and film scores. The results were, Andrew Haig's miniseries "The North Water", and Brandon Cronenberg's third and higher profile feature film, "Infinity Pool". The process of bringing "Brandon Cronenberg’s Rich-on-Holiday Horror" to the screen were as difficult as its subject matter. Part body horror, part science fiction economic allegory, with hints of Ian McEwan and more than a little conceptual debt to J.G. Ballard's "Super-Cannes", the concerns and themes of this exploration of "Body Trouble", elucidates the conceptual underpinnings of Tim Hecker's work more transparently than any other recent offering by the composer. The film's gruesome commentary on class and a dividing global economy of haves and have-nots, speaks to Hecker's own thematic interests, which fittingly was a labor to bring to the screen, and wasn't without its own complications, "‘Infinity Pool’ and the Battle for an R Rating".
