Tim Hecker – Virgins

Tim Hecker’s choice of nomenclature for his songs can be incredibly misleading. On Virgins, his undeniably enigmatic but strikingly warm follow-up to the award-winning Ravedeath, 1972, titles like Stigmata I and Amps, Drugs, Harmonium nestle up to Stab Variation. Yet there is nary a Ministry cover nor violent aural assault in sight.

Virgins is concise, cogent and considerably less clouded in hypnotic fuzz than Hecker’s previous efforts, as if the Canadian has finally made friends with the edit function. Black Refraction and Radiance positively hover in shimmering equipoise between the beguiling and the beatific, the latter almost conventional with its gentle piano figures and only sporadic ghostly interruptions and disconnects. But the beauty of this album and, by proxy, Hecker’s muse, lies in its sheer incomprehensibility. Whatever theory or reasoning you apply to this is irrelevant; Virgins is a masterful album which appears to exist in a vacuum, merely guided by an invisible, indiscernible hand. [Colm McAuliffe]