Tim Hecker - Love Streams

The recording of Tim Hecker’s ‘Love Streams’ took place throughout 2014 and 2015 at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik. And naturally, its ebb and flow mimics the starkly beautiful wilderness of the Icelandic landscape.

It’s a record which is at times unforgiving and foreboding. But moments of clarity aren’t absent. There’s the feeling that, like the overwhelming nature of Iceland, you can suddenly see a rainbow emerging through the great mist produced by the crashing waterfalls around it.

Like all of Hecker’s work, it’s a record focused on sound and texture, an all-absorbing record that eschews traditional structures and is instead spectral and imperfect, the slate that he’s sculpted prone to that feeling of erosion. It takes its cues from the avant-classical orchestration and extreme electronic processing of his previous full-length, 2013’s ‘Virgins’, but he’s augmented the sonic debris by adding the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, whose vocal arrangements were scored by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.

Inspired by 15th century choral scores brought into the digital age, Hecker’s touchpoints are hardly voguish. Talking about the record, Hecker has used phrases like “liturgical aesthetics after ‘Yeezus’” and the “transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune”. Certainly phrases to conjure with. And it feels ecclesiastical, like hymns for the digital age.