Tim Hecker's third album under his own name solidifies his position as one of the world's finest ambient-music producers. Allegedly a concept album about Hecker's 1996 trip to Honduras, the disc embodies the innovative spirit of digital tone-sculpting heard on Oval's 94Diskont and Fennesz' Endless Summer. Hecker further explores the shattered-mosaic principle that informs those two classics while also mirroring My Bloody Valentine's blissful, enveloping wombient guitar-and-keyboard approach. He wields shortwave radio chatter, static, digitally processed pianos and guitars, and reverberant drones like an impressionist painter, evoking both twinkling poignancy and menacing turbulence in an ebb-and-flow cycle that's aptly oceanic, considering the back story about Hecker's fateful ride on a shrimp boat in the Caribbean. Though not academic-sounding at all, Radio Amor should be on the curricula of future college courses on music.
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