Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.

Tim Hecker could not name his most streamed song on Spotify, even after several guesses.

Was it “Chimeras,” the electronic musician guessed by phone before a recent Berlin performance, selecting a 2006 piece where prickles of electric guitar scatter like a galaxy around a lulling beat? (Not in the Top 10.) He tried “Sketch 3,” an 80-second piano reverie he considered “an oddball.” Closer, in second place.

Informed that “Boreal Kiss, Pt. 1” — a deep cut from his obscure 2001 debut that sounds like a glass harp routed through a dial-up modem — had six million streams, far more than everything else in the Top 10 combined, he chuckled. “That is crazy, crazy,” he said slowly.

He was an Ottawa civil servant then who had just finished a master’s in political philosophy and was making music on the weekends from his basement home. His ideas were inchoate, his approach innocent. “I was so optimistic about the tools I had,” Hecker, 48, said. “Those were first passes at chord progressions you’ve been playing your whole teenage life.”

In the decades since, Hecker has become one of the most pre-eminent and nuanced electronic producers of his generation, his phosphorescent pieces constantly tunneling among bliss and terror, depression and wonder. His albums, including “Harmony in Ultraviolet” (2006), “Virgins” (2013) and “No Highs,” which arrived earlier this month, revel in ambiguity, conjuring dream states that make you wonder if you like dreaming at all.

These meticulous instrumentals also helped reopen the gates for the tide of ambient music that has seeped into life’s quiet corners, whether soundtracking yoga classes, co-working spaces or meditation apps. The impressive stats of “Boreal Kiss, Part 1” stem from a popular playlist called “Ambient Essentials.” Hecker wants no part of it.

“Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” he said in a sudden rush weeks earlier, in a call from his Montreal studio. “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world. They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”

Hecker described his early life outside of Vancouver as the “classic Canadian suburban experience.” He played trumpet and ran cross-country, occasionally went camping. When he was a dishwasher at a Canadian steakhouse chain called The Keg, a co-worker passed him cassettes of British post-punk and American folk. The long-running CBC radio show Brave New Waves became his “voice in the night,” he said, its experimental music fascinating him as he drifted to sleep. He began borrowing guitars and drum kits, exploring for himself.

There was a latent sadness, too: When Hecker was 12, his mother died. He suppressed the turmoil until after he became a father himself, going to years of intensive therapy recently, well into his 40s. Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”

This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. (Each sapling, strung to a hip belt, took five seconds to get into the ground.) As he worked, he dieted on psychedelics and early British electronica. Grizzly bears prowled near the planters’ camp at night. Danger, beauty and intrigue commingled, a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.

Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. He needed no one else. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”

Hecker first made techno under the alias Jetone, then slid into the sort of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity because it felt less dependent on being young or sticking to a scene. His sonics and sentiments quickly deepened, suggesting a constant and often very loud tug of war between anxiety and enlightenment. This reflected, he said, “the rainbow of possibility for people — extreme joys, incredible suffering.”

To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he’s found a motif he likes, maybe a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody, he repeatedly improvises over it, letting as many as 200 pieces pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole. He excises bits that don’t fit, editing that mass of sound until all the layers interact.

“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said. “I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”

In the early days of lockdown, Hecker, like so many, felt only confused and anxious, home-schooling kids and managing bills. He worried there would be no music industry on the pandemic’s other side, and he wondered what he was supposed to make. He turned down an offer to produce sounds for an upstart meditation app and instead focused on film and TV scores, including Brandon Cronenberg’s subversive thriller, “Infinity Pool.”

He was grateful to respond to someone else’s cues rather than make decisions himself. “I had no music in the tank,” he admitted. “I was out of ideas.”

Finally, in the winter of 2022, he fled Montreal for 10 days, taking suitcases crammed with keyboards, cords and small speakers to Oaxaca. He set up a makeshift studio in an apartment there, kneeling on pillows for hours on end as he built and broke rhythms, searching for moments that felt new, even hallucinatory. They became the core of “No Highs.”

Soon after Hecker returned to cold Montreal, he asked his longtime friend, the powerhouse saxophonist Colin Stetson, to improvise alongside those still-nebulous pieces. “We didn’t discuss concept, theme — the tracks were just scaffolding,” Stetson recalled in an interview. “But one was madly exultant. Another was innocent, searching. A couple were relentlessly tense. He was not running down a single alleyway.”

“No Highs” is a sly and discomfiting record, elements of unease lurking beneath a cool exterior and tongue-in-cheek titles like “Monotony” and “Living Spa Water.” Almost half the tracks circle the eight-minute mark, Hecker’s attempt to undermine streaming algorithms he believes prefer clarity and concision. “No Highs” is an attempt to give himself a playlist pink slip.

“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”

Hecker doesn’t doubt the salubrious value of pleasant instrumentals, whether called ambient, New Age or easy listening. And he understands the need to break from hectic social rhythms; “No Highs,” after all, stemmed from his own paradisiacal escape from new lockdowns back home.

A long-lapsed Catholic, Hecker began studying Buddhism early during the pandemic and meditating in his studio nearly every morning. When touring for “No Highs” ends, he plans to return to the San Diego monastery of the Thai Forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu for a week, making breakfast for the monks and doing chores. That work reminds him of planting those trees after college. He’s started camping again and is interested in extended backpacking trips, inspired by Bhikku and Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail chronicle, “A Walk in the Woods.”

“It’s not a panacea for living in the world,” he said of such resets. “But the frequency of the mind is slowed, less prone to flailing.”

And many mornings, he looks at Apple Music to see if there’s something new from Michiru Aoyama, a beyond-prolific Japanese musician who sometimes releases an eight-track album of placid music every day. (By mid-April, he’d issued 93 in 2023.) Hecker called Aoyama the “ambient genre, par excellence.” These are calming but pointed reminders of what his own music isn’t, even if they sometimes share stylistic descriptors.

“It is totally opposite from my own work — arguably overwrought, taking too long,” he said, laughing. “There’s something reassuring about waking up to a new Michiru album, like coffee being served. I want my spa music, too.”