Audiopile Review: Truly innovative work by true innovators is too easily forgotten. The godlike Peter Hammill was a central inspiration for acts ranging from David Bowie to The Fall to Soft Cell, but when was the last time you heard his name mentioned? Okay, apart from in this newsletter? Anyway, point is, in the early 2000s, artists like Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz did a lot to place the aesthetic of neo-psychedelic rock acts like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth into the amorphous boundaries of ambient music. But their profiles are relatively low today. Despite releasing a steady stream of excellent studio albums and film soundtracks, Canada’s own Tim Hecker just doesn’t get the credit he deserves for helping create aesthetic possibilities we take for granted today. His latest, ‘Shards’, might help to address this. Essentially a compilation of tracks written for various soundtrack commissions, it’s a no-filler album in-its-own-right. High on drama and variety, it feels like a stinging riposte to the glut of generic ambient music clogging up the streaming services. If you’ve been sleeping on Hecker’s later work, this is an excellent place to jump back in.

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