Tim Hecker

This is the first intervention by Canadian musician Tim Hecker in a Mexican museum. Known for his elegant combinations of ambient, digital noise, drone, and minimalism, influenced by his recent conversion to Buddhism, Hecker will premiere a piece composed specifically for the MUAC's Sound Experimentation Space (EES) and its 22.2-channel system, which will extend the explorations carried out on albums such as Harmony in Ultraviolet, Ravedeath 1972, or the most recent Shards. It is an immersive experience that demands the listener's full sensory participation.

This new composition is situated precisely at the juncture where the remnants of the landscape release a melancholy of great beauty, further accentuating its post-apocalyptic elements: the almost desperate cries of the animals, the furious vibrations that soon fade into a whisper, and the moments where electronic sounds become tense. By capturing these environments, Hecker sheds the chromatic palettes that once completely filled the space of his work and seems to come face to face with a moment of particular planetary desolation, not only on an environmental level, but also social, political, and perhaps aural. Faced with this scenario, what might be the capacities for decoding and action through listening? How do ears become involved in such radical existential changes?

Wastelands deliberately leaves these questions open, sustaining, at least for a few minutes, the wastelands of the sonic.

—MUAC