Pitchfork

You put music by Montreal's Tim Hecker on the headphones and go for a walk around your neighborhood, and all of a sudden your other senses are heightened. The colors of the leaves are more vibrant; the stench wafting from an alley dumpster has an extra note of pungency; the sunlight on your face feels a little warmer. His music is designed for immersion, and it has a tendency to transform the space in which it's heard. The first time I listened to last year's Harmony in Ultraviolet I was riding on a bus, sitting in back, feeling the rumble of the engine beneath my seat. The windows had a plastic coating of some kind that gave everything an orange tint. As we idled at the corner, the glass shook and warped and it looked like a huge, brightly-colored earthquake outside, and the music reinforced the idea that the ground would rupture at any moment.

So anyway. I've missed Tim Hecker a bit this year, but he returns with a vinyl-only 10" EP later this month. Atlas consists of two tracks, each in the ten-minute range. Here we have the A-side, "Atlas One", which combines shifting drone, feedback, and plenty of digital crackle with random-sounding clusters of guitar harmonics that sound like they're being played by a gusty wind. Rather than building to a big peak, as he sometimes does, this track feels more like one of his dense travelogues, a steady unspooling of richly-textured tone and color. The pictures to go with it are up to you.

[From the Atlas 10" EP; due 11/27/07 on Audraglint]