Album Review: Shards by Tim Hecker

For anyone wanting to escape reality for just a few moments, there are few better composers around to help with that journey As the title suggests, Tim Hecker‘s latest album Shards is a collection of musical fragments. These compositions were originally intended as film and television show scores, and as such, there’s no particular narrative structure or over-arching theme that binds the album together, other than the purpose that bought these tracks into being. This is not to say that the album is a mess of themes, and pacing, or that these are not fully realised pieces, far from it.

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Tim Hecker’s classic albums were typified by volume, presence, and an eerie sense of desolation, creating soundtracks for landscapes devoid of humanity. His first triptych--2001’s Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again; 2003’s Radio Amor; and 2004’s Mirages, developed a vocabulary of static, crackle, and hiss to evoke images of arctic tundras and industrial cityscapes made ghostly by halogen streetlights. Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006) augmented the minimalism with a fierce undertow of heavy metal sub-bass, which, in turn, eventually culminated in the damned, doomed malevolence of 2013’s Virgins.

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