Tim Hecker, Barbican, gig review: Old and new collide in a misty haze

The Canadian sound artist and producer intriguingly resculpts his latest album Love Streams

(Emily Berl)

On Love Streams, Tim Hecker’s eighth solo studio album, the Canadian sound artist and composer did something he had never done before: experiment with choral arrangements.

Disillusioned with the interminability of electronic music – a genre in which it is all too possible to never stop adding layers, always tweaking and embellishing, getting louder and ever more monstrous – he looked to the past in order to pare back and alter his musical direction. Inspired by choral pieces of the 15th Century, he took certain scores and translated them into a modern setting. He then enlisted the help of Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson to score complementary arrangements, performed by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble. The resulting recordings were manipulated and fed into themselves, re-emerging until the new sounds altogether had been created.

“What’s organic and what’s digital ceases to be important,” Hecker once said of his approach to production and composition, in an interview with The Fader. On Love Streams there are distinctly organic sounds and there explicitly digital sounds, but it’s that reverberant space in between in which the intrigue and most fruitful exploration lies.

And it’s that foggy, enigmatic space in which we find ourselves tonight for a performance of Love Streams, albeit a resculpted, reinterpreted version of the studio album, with brief interjections by his previous album, 2013’s haunting Virgins. Before the house lights dim, plumes of mist cloak the stage so that by the time Hecker appears, he is a barely discernible silhouette, bathed in dark blue glow. The lighting is the work of Berlin-based visual artist MFO, and it follows loosely the hues and undulations of Hecker’s sound – moments of illuminated clarity are swiftly usurped by tense obscurity. That grasping tension is present throughout, but tightens its grip as the distorted electronic groans are played alongside the sound of ethereal voices.

Although the same motifs re-appear throughout the performance – enforcing the idea that Love Streams is one sonic sculpture, rather than a collection of pieces – Hecker’s dexterity in bringing in, developing and removing different aspects is impressive. One moment we have fluttering sheets of electronic melancholia, offset by the jarring rattle of what sounds like an electric guitar, then moving onto a repeated phase of keys, bleeding together in the same way that church bells do, all underlined by that ever-persistent misty sound. While there’s no immediately identifiable beginning or end, it is enthralling, and it is only when the noise does eventually stop after an hour or so that you realise the extent of the emotional weight Hecker has drawn out of you.