Tim Hecker

Anoyo

While Hecker continues to be a paradigm in formulating how sound exists, he proves with Anoyo what it means to extend his means and throughout its cleansing spirit, Hecker evokes a bewitching status, serving as one of today’s continued and top creators of elysian odysseys.

Despite its brevity Anoyo contains some of the most straightforwardly beautiful music Hecker has made in some time, and makes for a strong companion and continuation to the themes and sonic developments made on Konoyo.

On Anoyo, Tim Hecker stretches out his heady winning streak for another 32 striking and captivating minutes.

With his second record featuring a gagaku ensemble, famed experimental artist Tim Hecker produces a very different facade that shines through a beautifully minimal perspective.

The follow-up to last year’s Konoyo—recorded, like its predecessor, with a Japanese gagaku ensemble—functions as a counterbalance to that album: a kind of photo negative, more subdued but no less overwhelming.

Going back to make a new album from sessions that had already been used could have ended up sounding overworked. Instead, Anoyo is the counterbalance to what has been done. These albums shouldn't be compared, but taken in together.

The work exists as something greater than the sum of its parts, an emergent property of the dynamism at work within each track.

Compared to the astonishing Konoyo, Anoyo does feel a bit like less focused variations on the same ideas, but as it stands, it's still an intriguing, otherworldly blend of ancient instrumentation and technological exploration.

Anoyo succeeds on its own terms too: the combination of sounds is still captivating, especially recommended for anyone who feels to this day that new age music was underrated.

Konoyo impressed because it felt as though two diametrically opposed forms of music were coming together; here, they simply fit together as natural accompaniments.

As listenable and engaging as much of the record is, it lacks the transcendent quality that has marked his formidable discography.

While Anoyo's showcase of Hecker's ambient textures, paired with Gagaku, is organic and interesting, it feels like a retread of ideas or an assemblage of scraps from the recording of Konoyo.