The rise of always-on streaming threatens to reduce ambient to a genre of convenience: palliative soundscapes to study and relax to. Tim Hecker has other ideas. Rather than distract or soothe, the veteran laptop composer’s latest reflects our jaundiced reality – full of aural pollution, oil splatter and other nasty stuff. Like the most wholesome ambient works, No Highs is immersive and oceanic. Unlike them, it is not somewhere you would want to bathe.
The record opens with a warning – an arrhythmic pulse bent by tremors and ill-omened sirens. But the promised threat never arrives, just lurks like something repressed. On his last few records, Hecker used piano or ancient woodwind to sweeten and lift his drone washes. No Highs is darker, dingier, yet oddly inviting. On songs called Monotony and Monotony II – yes, he has jokes – his fuzzy morse code tones become a strange source of comfort, like an alarm integrated into a dream.
Hecker’s Canadian compatriot Colin Stetson contributes saxophone, swapping his usual ascendant raptures for fluctuating dread. Warm overtones rise from those sax murmurs and bass quagmires; processed strings refract knives of light. But never do the rich tonalities try, in the customary ambient way, to nourish the soul – except, perhaps, through violent catharsis, like a shamanic ritual where vomiting precedes enlightenment. Hecker seems to want you on guard, braced for cataclysm. Nerves fray, discords linger, that sense of panic accumulates and draws you helplessly in. And this allusive, wordless album starts to feel eerily modern and big.