Love Streams

In itself, this serves as testament to Hecker’s ever more potent ability to make music that feels alive, that is successful on both a physical and mental level.

Hecker stretches to greater heights. If Ravedeath, 1972 and Virgins were pinnacles for the producer, Love Streams leaps into orbit, beaming elegiac streams of sound to the heavens and beyond.

Love Streams is at once familiar and totally alien; a work of art that reminds us why we need art in the first place.

Love Streams is always on the move. It’s alive and constantly evolving: a slippery beast of a record that you can try and get a hold of, but thankfully you probably never will.

There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel.

The sum of these parts is utterly energising.

Through tackling the repercussions of vocal processing and by demonstrating some of the most profound uses of it, Love Streams gives credence to the act in a way that vilifies the most obscure uses of it, even when the end results yield little more than the evaporated phantoms that we continue to chase in our everyday lives.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

The word “immersive” is bandied about a lot, but Hecker’s work really is.

Love Streams is easily Hecker's most accessible work to date, yet it's also one of his most challenging, as it finds him pushing his sound into new directions while he explores the possibilities of the human voice.

It works on a purely instinctual, emotional level. It feels like music aimed at the gut, rather than the head, which might explain its burgeoning appeal. In the best possible way, Love Streams is a draining listen.

Less reliant on theory or process, Love Streams is a testament to Hecker’s innate musical sense of direction.

It takes a few listens to even begin to peel back its multi-layered complexity. It’s a triumph, though: a dense, paranoid and phenomenally pretty exploration of post-millennial wonder that’ll keep you coming back, even as it fills the pit of your stomach with dread.

For all its diverting technical backstory, for all our attempts to manoeuvre Tim Hecker into various neat genre boxes, ancient and modern, his music is ultimately ravishing in a way that transcends method and contest, [May 2016, p.83]

A record that's serene on the surface but with a dark undertow. [May 2016, p.91]

That you are compelled to stay listening to see what it might be is proof of this record's eerie power. [May 2016, p.111]

In Hecker's uncanny knack for blending noise and ineffable sound together, he makes for a turbulent sonic trip that ultimately feels redemptive.

Love Streams is far from Hecker’s best release. But it’s a promising development in his career, in that it proves not only that Hecker hasn’t run out of ideas but that he’s still bursting with them.

Virgins is dark and brilliant and haunting as it raises the hairs on the back of your neck, while Love Streams washes over you--or sometimes floats by off in the horizon--due to its subtlety and complex, deliberate construction.

Love Streams is a more amiably cluttered affair: bolder, stranger and, at times, considerably more bewildering, but with an ultimately playful, exploratory guiding spirit. [No. 130, p.57]

Simply enough, Love Streams is a discomforting listen, and the addition of voices to Hecker's repertoire adds an additional tool of disorientation to his web of repurposed crackles and spurts, not the warmth one might expect.

The atmosphere of this music is lighter and less haunted than some of Mr. Hecker’s past work; some parts of the new album, like “Music of the Air,” can be thrilling in its evocation of a seamless connection between the physical and the synthetic. It also, sometimes, seems more impersonal, as if the ideas have the edge over their physical manifestation.

Love Streams manages to break through the vaulted cathedral ceilings and peer above the clouds, largely eschewing the degraded, gothic textures Hecker has become so fond of in favor of more vivid, almost celestial palettes.

There are moments when the structure of this album fails to centre itself, and it is easy to get lost in the finer details of the arrangements. ... It is clear from Love Streams, with its increased manipulation of vocals and wider palette, that he is becoming braver. [Apr 2016, p.51]