I haven’t been sleeping well the last couple of weeks. First I thought it was the excitement of travel, then it was the random sprinkling of hot and muggy days: now I realise it’s because of, well, you know…

I close my eyes and my mind wanders, unbidden, unfocused, wanting. Eventually I slip into restless uneasy slumber, emerging bleary eyed at some still-early hour unable to return to sleep properly before the alarm tells me I need to face the working day. I seem to hum with desire, constrained by factors mostly neurotic that set my mind on a lever. Why now? Why this?

An Imaginary Country suffered for a long time as being one of Tim’s more overlooked and underrated records: even now, sandwiched as it is between the titanic HiUV and Ravedeath it doesn’t get the look in it wholly deserves, but its see-sawing static and heaving drones paint a melancholic dreamstate that batters in ways that the ethereal former and visceral, catastrophic latter don’t achieve.

It, like me, seems to arrive already in motion, moving in feverish and calamitous drones that carve and wander, abrading like sinuous rivers new paths over the established and calm bedrock. This erosive force is strongest at its bookends, sandwiching a plaintive interior with obliterative thresholds that we can hardly stand.

Opener “100 Years Ago” sets itself idiosyncratically alongside its closing compatriot “200 Years Ago” , the record held between them an entire lifetime of emotion in just one night. Sophomore “Sea of Pulses” gates the tipping point, all blustery static and tones of unplaceable origin bending out of angst. And penultimate “Where Shadows Make Shadows” cycles once again into crescendo and ascension, melatonin levels diminishing with the advent of dawn and the vortex of spinning thoughts arrives in disruption once again.

While it can seem that there are moments, perhaps many moments, that aim to overwhelm, there are also those of peace, even bliss. Brief interior interlude “Utropics” hums with distant chorals before melding into the slow chords of “Paragon Point” whose carefully plodding pace muses slowly whilst a buzzing torment hisses just below its glassy surface. It continues to slipstream in the effortless “Her Black Horizon” and chasing “Currents of Electrostasy” also as we settle into the ebb, the wane, the blissful empty-headedness in sleep, out of thought and time.

And of course it would be remiss to not mention the enchantment of “Borderlands”, one of my favourite Hecker tracks, with its glimmering piano arpeggiations rolling like crystal echoes inside the dome of our brain, sublimating into a fine layer of anxious sleep.

I’m tired. Maybe I’m lonely. Definitely I don’t know what I want. Like always I feel frustrated that my life can so easily be dominated by emotions, so easily be set in-motion by a few words, a few meetings. Then the only respite seems to be the space within sleep, if I’m allowed to reach it first.