“Obsidian Counterpoint,” the five absorbing minutes of electronic pinprick shimmers, airy flutish burbles and spongy, spasmodic shard-stabs that open Tim Hecker’s eighth full-length, has more rhythmic and melodic activity than many of his albums contain in their entirety. The track initiates a crowded, complicated set that deviates even more sharply from his drone-oriented oeuvre than 2013’s abstruse, imposing Virgins. But whereas that album, when not stately and mesmeric in habitual Hecker fashion all but abandoned here, was often queasily claustrophobic and distressing in its density, Love Streams is a more amiably cluttered a air: bolder, stranger and, at times, considerably more bewildering, but with an ultimately playful, exploratory guiding spirit.
Hecker further expands his palette of organic sound sources—most notably, the voices of the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, manipulated into avatars of both ethereal beauty and disorienting fragmentation—while delving more deeply into overt electronic synthesis. There’s a lot to parse, with multiple textural shifts per track and little attempt to shape it all into a coherent, fluid whole—but it never feels like a chore. It’s a rich, engrossing provocation from a master architect of dizzying, immersive sonic spaces, for whom the tag “ambient” has grown increasingly inadequate.
—K. Ross Ho ffman
