Last days of Passiontide by Eastern Rite, the news announce the final death of Vaporwave - again - the sky is grey. Burnt circuits incense the air and hacked sounds of a party that didn’t happen yet echo from a dark and creepy basement underneath an office space whose walls are glass.
The seen and the unseen are coexisting as struggles for one’s sense of spirit ownership - if there’s such thing - take turns to manifest on more or less atomic levels. If there’s a thing to make it certain that it’ll rain forever and the temple’s curtain shall be torn in two at any given moment, that must be the watery textures of Love Streams seep a sense of bleakness through the ether.
With Tim Hecker’s Love Streams vaporwave dies its most physical death; a collective consciousness of screens goes blue, while the most organic, fleshed out visions of near-perish blink through for a second everywhere. Love Streams feels like shutting down the stream of consciousness and the deluge to succ(eed) that questionable ever after.
The most visible album of Tim Hecker so far, “Love Streams” feels like his least exoteric one. With a leitmotif referencing the darkest of minerals (Obsidian Counterpoint) and liturgical choir in weirded out digital manipulation, the narrative clings to sacred rites of purging by means of high vibration sadness. It takes time - and stretches it out - as digital tones dissolve into breathable, volatile fog and lilac blinking neon. It has been compared to a modern-day sonic cathedral, praised for its liturgical post-modern value and tied into the symbolism of Hecker’s latest AV installation, Ephemera.
The album recreates in virtual environment the discouraging beauty of Western sacred spaces aiming vertically to a point of loss and selflessness. It’s reportedly been around in ages where sound meditation practices took aim at the divine acting on a neural level as the actual opium for the masses. And then it’s been around for all those recent culture-jamming struggles, digging into infinite levels of underground, hunting for the sound of God, wasting your youth on darkwebs.
Tracklist:
A1. Obsidian CounterpointA2. Music Of The Air
A3. Bijie Dream
B1. Live Leak Instrumental
B2. Violet Monumental I
B3. Violet Monumental II
C1. Up Red Bull Creek
C2. Castrati Stack
C3. Voice Crack
D1. Collapse Sonata
D2. Black Phase