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TIM HECKER

Tim Hecker

The North Water (Original Score)

    After selling out on all variants, this score has now been re-pressed on clear vinyl.

    Tim Hecker’s incredible score to ‘The North Water’, starring Colin Farrell and Jack O’Connell.

    The score is pressed on clear vinyl and housed in a deluxe spined sleeve with double sided printed insert and digital download card.

    Features beautiful artwork throughout, using stunning imagery from the film.

    “The score for ‘The North Water’ was written just before and during the pandemic in 2020, mostly over arguably one of the darkest winters of some memory in Montreal,” says Hecker.

    “The music was an attempt to add depth and texture to a five-hour doomed arctic journey that charts a trajectory from hardened optimism into abject futility. We worked with a primary palette of synthesizers, electronics, and treated cello, in rich live spaces as well as suffocating dead ones. This version of the score is an enhanced mix of some of the material that made its way into the project.”

    Adapted from a novel of the same name by Ian McGuire, it tells the story of a disgraced doctor who becomes a medic onboard an Arctic whaling ship.

    TRACK LISTING

    Seasick
    First On Deck
    Delirious Hunt
    Seasick II
    Left On The Ice
    Our First Whale
    Ice Row
    It's A Mistake To Think Too Much
    The Warmth Of Drax
    Winter’s Coming
    Loot
    A Breather
    Seasick III
    Twinkle In The Wasteland
    Starting Over Again

    Tim Hecker

    The North Water - Original Score

      “The score for ‘The North Water’ was written just before and during the pandemic in 2020, mostly over arguably one of the darkest winters of some memory in Montreal,” says Hecker.

      “The music was an attempt to add depth and texture to a five-hour doomed arctic journey that charts a trajectory from hardened optimism into abject futility. We worked with a primary palette of synthesizers, electronics, and treated cello, in rich live spaces as well as suffocating dead ones. This version of the score is an enhanced mix of some of the material that made its way into the project.”

      Adapted from a novel of the same name by Ian McGuire, it tells the story of a disgraced doctor who becomes a medic onboard an Arctic whaling ship.

      STAFF COMMENTS

      Matt says: Have you seen The North Water yet? It's amazing - accentuated and enhanced by Hecker's immersive and detailed score. Possibly avoid if, like me, the thought of being trapped in a submarine 3 miles underwater absolutely scares the living shit out of you. Otherwise - you're good!

      TRACK LISTING

      Seasick
      First On Deck
      Delirious Hunt
      Seasick II
      Left On The Ice
      Our First Whale
      Ice Row
      It's A Mistake To Think Too Much
      The Warmth Of Drax
      Winter’s Coming
      Loot
      A Breather
      Seasick III
      Twinkle In The Wasteland
      Starting Over Again

      Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions with members of Tokyo Gakuso which led to the 2018 work Konoyo, but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Hecker’s processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters.

      This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return. 


      TRACK LISTING

      1. That World
      2. Is But A Simulated Blur
      3. Step Away From Konoyo
      4. Into The Void
      5. Not Alone
      6. You Never Were

      Tim Hecker

      Konoyo

        Experiential composer Tim Hecker’s ninth official full-length, Konoyo (“the world over here”) was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo.

        Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music’s increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone.

        As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016’s Love Streams, the heights of Hecker’s talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay.
        Hecker will stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album's release, featuring members of the gagaku ensemble on shō, ryuteki and hichiriki, accompanied by Kara-Lis Coverdale. 


        TRACK LISTING

        1. This Life
        2. In Death Valley
        3. Is A Rose Petal Of The Dying Crimson Light
        4. Keyed Out
        5. In Mother Earth Phase
        6. A Sodium Codec Haze
        7. Across To Anoyo 

        Tim Hecker

        Love Streams

          'Love Streams' takes its cues from the avant-classical orchestration and extreme electronic processing of his previous full-length, 2013’s 'Virgins', but shaped into more melancholic, ultraviolet hues. Inspired by notions of 15th century choral scores (particularly those by Josquin des Prez), transposed to an artificial intelligence-era language of digital resonance and bright synths, the album was assembled gradually, with layers of studio-tracked keyboards, choir and woodwinds being woven into the mix, then molded and disfigured through complex programming. Like hearing some ancient strain of sacred music corrupted by encryption, Hecker admits to thinking about ideas like “liturgical aesthestics after Yeezus” and the “transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune,” during its creation.

          The 'Love Streams' sessions took place throughout 2014 and 2015 at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland - where parts of both Virgins and Ravedeath, 1972 were tracked - with Hecker reuniting with the same crew of collaborators from Virgins (Kara-Lis Coverdale, Grímur Helgason) and bolstered by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, whose vocal arrangements were scored by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.

          The title of Hecker’s new work can be interpreted any number of ways - erotic, technological, spiritual - although his own conception is appropriately vast, calling it “a riff on the ubiquity and nihilism of streaming of all forms of life.” Now we stream more than we love. Nowadays music too frequently resembles a product, or white noise. With a career spanning fifteen years, Tim Hecker belongs to a select camp actively resisting this undertow, this reduction in significance.

          STAFF COMMENTS

          Barry says: What more apt a title could be given to the newest excursion of Canadian Sound sculptor Tim Hecker than 'Love Streams'? Recalling moments of Four Tet's similarly titled 'There Is Love In You', chopped vocal harmonies atop twinkling synths, churning yet shimmering industrial drones underpinning the whole adventure. This is Hecker's most optomistic and beautiful exploration yet. This is, as Princess Jasmine once famously said : a 'Shining and Shimmering Wonder'.

          Tim Hecker

          Virgins

            'Virgins' exchanges gristled distortion and cavernous sound in favour of a close, airy, more de?ned palette. At times it points to the theological aspirations of early minimalist music. But it is not 'fake church music' for a secular age, rather something like an attempt at the sound of frankincense in slow-motion, or of a pulsing, ?ickering ?uorescence in the grotto.

            Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance.

            While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digital music does not do naturally—making music that is out oftime, out of tune and out of phase.

            Some pieces go off the rails before forming into anything, others eschew crescendo compositional structures or bombastic density while going sideways instead. It points to the ongoing development of Hecker's work. It suggests illusory memories of drug- hazed jams or communal music performance that may have never been performed or been heard.

            It is an offering of music into the void, a gift of digital ?ller between distractions. Yet hopefully it also stands as a document of the enduring faith in the narcotic, enigmatic function of music as long-form expression.

            Mixed by Valgeir Sigurðsson and Tim Hecker. Additional assistance by Randall Dunn and Ben Frost.

            Mastered by Mandy Parnell at Black Saloon Studios in London, UK.

            Tim Hecker

            An Imaginary Country

              "An Imaginary Country" is the stunning second release on Kranky for Tim Hecker and his seventh album in total. Previous releases were on Alien8, Mille Plateaux, EN/OF, Fat Cat Records. Follows a collaboration with Aidan Baker (Nadja) for the Alien8 label and a track on Kompakt's much praised "Pop Ambient 2009" compilation. "An Imaginary Country" continues from the trajectory of Tim Hecker's last album, the critically acclaimed "Harmony In Ultraviolet", while also showing a few new tricks. Tim has incorporated more pulses into this work and also works with a sound palette including over-driven mellotron strings and synthesizer. At times this album is less overtly aggressive than previous works, but the notion that this is pastoral work would be dead wrong as there are plenty of the agitated crescendos for which Hecker is known. This music backs off from the void of immensity in favour of a terrain of lushness and warmth. With this album Tim Hecker expands his palette as well as his range, further cementing his reputation as a singular and significant entity in the world of contemporary music.



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