This long-awaited new reel of continuous noise arrived just in time for me to test out the new gapless playback whatsit on iTunes (it works for me, although seemingly not for him).  While some of my listening has been done via this, volume turned up way past sensible, giving me the joy of trying to separate speaker crackle from window wobble from shouting neighbour (like I would have heard that!) from the sonic glories of the impressionistic masterpiece Harmony In Ultraviolet, the majority has been done using the iPod’s suddenly much more obtrusive gapful playback.

With Harmony In Ultraviolet, Tim Hecker takes one look at the vertiginous platform constructed by Fennesz (whose Endless Summer and Venice are two of my favourite albums of the last decade, so I’m dishing out some pretty high praise here), and leaps off it for kicks into the sea, a sea which looks deceptively placid from on high, but the closer you get to it reveals an at times ferocious surface and constant trench-like musical and emotional depth.

Swimming through the noise, you can occasionally pick out recognisable elements.  A bottom end piano note rings out, decaying like surface ripple.  Guitar circles hungrily, treated until it is reduced to low growling and disconcerting whining.  More usually, the sounds are unclassifiable – what are the ominous bangs and scrapes sunk within opener “Rainbow Blood”?  And are those Jeck-like turntable string symphonies, quickly splintering under the building pressure?  Waves of rhythm infrequently crack the surface, but are quickly subsumed within irregular squall.  The album can rage with boat-breaking and face-ripping intensity one minute (the deep white noise of “Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight”) before leaving you adrift and becalmed the next (the minimalist resonance of the “Harmony In Blue” suite).

Via both listening methods, headphone and otherwise, I find myself ascending rapidly through various states of being, usually attaining nirvana about half a dozen tracks in (somewhere around “Dungeoneering”), which tends to render the remainder of everyday life pretty meaningless.  For all I care, North Korea could have the bomb.  For all I care, Tesco could have the bomb, or Trinny and Susanna, or even my nemesis Miles, or even my boss, who is probably wondering why my out-of-office reply is switched on and I am rocking maniacally in my chair, glazed of eye, and wide of grin.

Download mp3s of Chimeras, Radio Spiricom, and Blood Rainbow courtesy of Brainwashed and Kranky.