Tim Hecker
An Imaginary Country
While not receiving the near universal acclaim that greeted 2006's Harmony In Ultraviolet, An Imaginary Country has ratcheted up consistent praise since its release back in March. It's not hard to see why. Following the standard get-ready-for-ambience opener "100 Years Ago", the album makes its intentions plain in the blips of bass and loops that populate "Sea of Pulses"--this one? It's a crowd pleaser, or as much a crowd pleaser as this sort of music can be. Shucking off the music-as-wallpaper definition that ambient music has carried since the groundbreaking work of Brian Eno, Imaginary Country is a soundscape that anticipates an audience. Made almost completely of tracks that last less than five minutes, it's infested with a sense of movement and memory--the expansive sense of skyborn travel of "The Inner Shore" giving way to the dark, wormy holes of "Pond Life"--as if Hecker felt the best way to experience the album's title was to take an HD excursion by way of audio documentary. "Borderlands", one of the more loop and piano driven tracks, follows those first four pieces with the album's first taste of a pause, even going so far as to end in a fade out.
Those first five pieces seem to make the case: this isn't an introspective work, or at least, it isn't intended to be one for the listener. Imaginary Country behaves as if the exploration has been finished already, and Hecker's goal is one of accuracy in documentation--he wants you to see what he saw, and hear what he thought. Using ambient sound and a comprehensive understanding of the place he's created, Hecker's latest accidently creates a new experience altogether. It's all imagined, but by the time that the eight minute "Where Shadows Make Shadows" reaches conclusion, one has all but forgotten the artistic origin. The trip is too immersive, the mirage too tangible--call it journalism, if you have to. It's nonfiction either way.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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