Tim Hecker

Sat., Nov. 21, 7:30 p.m., $12 with Aidan Baker, Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 215-291-4919, kungfunecktie.com.

by K. Ross Hoffman

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Published: Nov 18, 2009

electronic/ambient

As we inch into the frostier months, it's an apt time for the glacial, richly enveloping abstract drone music that Montrealer Tim Hecker has made his stock-in-trade for nearly a decade now. Over that time his works have grown gradually denser, chillier, more distorted and increasingly oblique — leading to the immense, starkly beautiful, but occasionally troubling and even oppressive 2006 opus Harmony in Ultraviolet — but his latest, An Imaginary Country (released this past January), represents a partial thaw, evincing a newfound emotional range and openness. While it treads typically Heckerian timbral territory, there are textural, structural and even subtle melodic impulses that feel more fundamentally rooted in the natural world — track titles ("Sea of Pulses," "Pond Life," "A Stop at the Chord Cascades") seem to underscore this, suggesting a sort of conceptual travelogue — and if, like nature itself, the journey is by turns exquisitely wondrous and forbiddingly harsh, the abiding sense is one of deep serenity and absorbing warmth.

Sat., Nov. 21, 7:30 p.m., $12 with Aidan Baker, Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 215-291-4919, kungfunecktie.com.

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