An Imaginary Country

Album Review

Tim Hecker's elegantly inventive way around sound art moved into a full decade of released work with An Imaginary Country, one of his most serene and, from its striking start "100 Years Ago" forward, uplifting albums. The power of feedback as exultant swell has had many iterations over the years and it would be understandable to call its use here shoegaze or something similar — combined with the electronics on the appropriately named "Sea of Pulses" or "Where Shadows Make Shadows," the striking penultimate track, any number of superficial connections could be drawn to artists such as Fennesz and Ulrich Schnauss. But each of those performers has his own approaches, as does Hecker himself, and the breathless extended surge of the album as a whole takes the slow-rising-dawn power of such work down his chosen road, perhaps best summed up by the song title "Currents of Electrostasy," with piano and feedback turned into a blissful but still mournful whole. Hecker's ear for appropriate names for his songs crops up throughout — the chilled emptiness of "Borderlands," chimes echoing off into an unguessed distance, may be the warmest dark ambient song released in 2009, though "Paragon Point" comes close for both steady looming power and an enveloping sense of atmosphere.