Harmony In Ultraviolet

Harmony in Ultraviolet is Tim Hecker's sixth album. It is a continuation of Hecker's interest in spectral communications, noise, impressionist musics, thresholds of listening pleasure/pain, and the limits of digital composition. This album is a significant development of his song-craft, challenging the usefulness of descriptors such as ambient, drone, metal, noise and even electronic music. If references are necessary it could be described as a sonata for the elements, songs of crackling embers, tidal pools, spruce skylines and autumn winds. Gerhard Richter's abstract paintings are also a fair orientation. Materially speaking, it is a record of whirring drones, whispering fissures, dense disintegrating chords, late-night noise and truth-telling harmonics. Yet this record follows no overarching process, no underlying narrative. It is both a homage for the Italian partigiani and also not at all. It is songs about ghost writing and midnight whispers but then again it isn't. In many ways this album can be viewed as a work of total destruction, embracing indeterminacy as an aesthetic ideal.