Love Streams

"Love Streams" arrives late in Hecker's discography as one of his most emotionally direct statements — which, for Hecker, means the emotion is still thoroughly obscured by layers of synthesis, feedback, and processing, but it is there. The title is almost warm, which is unusual for him, and the music follows: choral textures processed until the human voices at their source become something else entirely, something between the biological and the synthetic. There are moments where you can almost hear words, almost make out the harmonic logic, and then the processing reasserts itself and you lose it again. This creates a frustration that is itself the emotional content — the sense of something meaningful just beyond comprehension, the experience of meaning as a category rather than a specific thing. The piece is approximately thirty minutes in its full form and earns the duration by changing slowly but constantly, never quite arriving anywhere, which turns out to be the point. This is music for confronting what lies beyond language while still being made of something like language.