Pitchfork

Tim Hecker's latest album, Mirages, highlights a peculiar problem with abstract electronic music: Artists with the talent and vision to develop an identifiable sound sometimes have difficulty breaking away from it. A minute into "Acéphale"-- the first track on Mirages-- I knew instantly that I was listening to a Tim Hecker album. His distinctive layering of crackly digital static, mournful swoons of drone, and rumbling bottom is easy to source if you're familiar with either of his previous records, last year's Radio Amor or 2001's Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. "Acéphale" opens with an extended twist of death metal guitar (an element that repeats periodically throughout the album), a welcome and appropriate addition to the Hecker palette, but the song is still unmistakably his work.

But is it a bad thing to have a unique sonic ID? Abstract electronic music gains intimacy when a producer has a specific voice-- the imagined personality on the other side of the laptop becomes clearer and more distinct. The downside is that it can be unnerving to closely follow an artist's career over the long term when one release sounds quite similar to the next, even if the quality level remains high (see Boards of Canada).

Which isn't to say there are no differences between Mirages and its predecessors. This is Hecker's most subtle and flowing record, as well as the least "musical." While Haunt Me retained traces of Hecker's techno roots (particularly in its use of repetition) and Radio Amor experimented with harsher sounds and unusual use of piano, Mirages is a unified ambient suite, swallowing dark shades of gnarled guitar and exaggerated bass.

The keyboard parts on Mirages are prettier, and the overall mood is more contemplative, but there's a deep pit of melancholy at the center of the record, a mood with a strongly cumulative effect. Unlike Fennesz-- to whom he is often compared (a reference that, as the Austrian producer shifts his musical focus, makes less sense than it used to)-- it's impossible to imagine Hecker in terms of single tracks. His music strives for endlessness and needs to be digested over the length of an album. On Hecker's albums, you never even know for certain where one title ends and another begins.

Another new wrinkle is collaboration: Oren Ambarchi (who has worked with Fennesz, among others) adds guitar to "Kaito"-- one of the record's best tracks, a song that fuses Ambarchi's trademark slow and measured tones with Hecker's cluttered midrange. Fly Pan Am add an industrial clang to "Aerial Silver", and David Bryant adds guitar (mostly in the form of feedback) to the 10-minute closer "Incurably Optimistic!".

This final track is also the perfect illustration of the potential problem with trademark sounds within abstract electronic music. "Incurably Optimistic!" could be mixed into the center of Haunt Me and no one who hadn't heard that album would know the difference. And yet, it's also perhaps Hecker's finest single moment, with a crushingly sad organ melody reminiscent of a funeral service that gradually gives way to oblong piles of guitar distortion. "Incurably Optimistic!" is such a gorgeous track-- and such a fine end to this thoroughly enjoyable record-- that I have to wonder: With music this moving and well-constructed, can we fault Hecker for repeating himself?