hypersongs
?

Tim Hecker

A Montreal composer who works with processed organ, guitar and noise, and whose 2006 album Harmony in Ultraviolet is one of the most admired records in modern ambient music.

Origin
Vancouver, British Columbia; based in Montreal, Quebec
Years active
1996-present
Genres
ambient, experimental, drone, electronic
Labels
Mille Plateaux, Alien8, Kranky, Paper Bag, 4AD
Also known as
Jetone

From Jetone to Montreal

Tim Hecker was born in Vancouver (Wikipedia gives July 17, 1974, and flags the date as lacking a source). The son of two art teachers, he played in high-school rock bands, got a sampler and worked on solo material, and in 1998 moved to Montreal to study at Concordia University. He debuted in 1996 as Jetone, a techno producer, with Autumnmonia (2000, Pitchcadet), Ultramarin (2001, Force Inc.) and the Sundown EP (2006, Apnea), and was disenchanted with it by 2001.

Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (2001), the first album under his own name, was his shift to pulseless power ambient, in Spin's phrase. Radio Amor (2003, Mille Plateaux) was recorded in Montreal and Halifax and inspired by Jimmy, a fisherman he had met in Honduras in the mid-1990s; Pitchfork called it his coldest and most piercing work. Mirages (2004, Alien8) was made mostly from distorted and processed guitar, with guests including Fly Pan Am, Oren Ambarchi and David Bryant.

Kranky and the organ

In the early 2000s he worked as a policy analyst for the Canadian government. He left in 2006 to enroll at McGill for a PhD, completed in 2014 with a thesis called The Era of Megaphonics on loud sound as a productive force from 1880 to 1930, supervised by Jonathan Sterne, and lectured there on sound culture. The same year he released Harmony in Ultraviolet, his first album for Kranky, which used digitally processed and distorted pipe organ. An Imaginary Country followed in 2009.

Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) was mostly recorded at the Frikirkjan church in Reykjavik, a venue suggested by Ben Frost, with Hecker on pipe organ, guitar and piano, engineered by Paul Corley and Frost and mastered by James Plotkin. The cover shows MIT students dropping a piano from Baker House in 1972, and the title came to him at a rave in 2010. He called it a hybrid of a studio and a live record, and it won a Juno Award in 2011. Virgins (October 14, 2013), recorded in Reykjavik, Seattle and Troy, New York, with live ensembles including Ben Frost, Grimur Helgason, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Valgeir Sigurdsson, has Metacritic's 87, his highest.

4AD and scores

He signed to 4AD in February 2016 and released Love Streams that April, built on 15th-century choral works by Josquin des Prez, with Ben Frost, Johann Johannsson and Kara-Lis Coverdale among the collaborators. Konoyo (2018), Anoyo (2019) and No Highs (2023) followed, and the Shards EP in February 2025. He has scored The Free World (2016), the BBC series The North Water (2021) and Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool (2023), and made installations with Stan Douglas and Charles Stankievech.

His live sets are improvisations that process organ sounds with large swings in volume, and Setlist.fm logs 298 setlists from 2002 on. He has toured with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Ros. He says he keeps roughly one idea in ten, and told Cyclic Defrost in 2007 that he works alone in a home studio daily for two to three months until a record is done.

Records

Songs

Brian Eno

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Interviews

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Tim Hecker, Wikipedia
  2. Tim Hecker discography, Wikipedia
  3. Tim Hecker: Virgins, attack of the drones, Spin (2013-10-10)
  4. Tim Hecker: Virgins, Interview Magazine (2013-11-01)