Tim Hecker @ Academy 3, Manchester, 16 May

Tim Hecker’s eighth album Love Streams encouraged widespread acclaim on its release back in March; the Canadian maestro's masterful ambient music has perhaps become more accessible than ever, partly due to the ghostly contribution of the Icelandic Choir Ensemble. Deprived of their spectral voices on stage, tonight shows Hecker reverting to type, lulling the Academy 3 into his synthscapes and causing us to lapse into a fever dream.

Hecker has never been one for fanfare, sneaking on stage obscured by darkness and three elevated beams, starting to play before anyone realises that he's even there. Identifying individual tracks during one of his sets isn’t as vital as noticing your experience of mood and time shifting gradually. As Hecker’s futuristic drones build and the crowd accustom to the harshly filtered modulations of scraps of sound, it’s like disappearing into a hazy, unsettling realm.

Hecker eventually settles on a snatch of twinkly melody, the three elevated beams revealing themselves as still blue lights. The atmosphere in the room is strangely airless as it fills with intrusive pinball noises, mangled guitar noodling and flecks of horn trying to make their way through the muffled rush of noise.  Everyone seems anaesthetised, frozen in their own hallucinations.

We've been under for an hour when Hecker decides to ease us out with a flash of purple light, briefly waving to the crowd before making his exit. The procedure is complete, and we find ourselves waking not entirely sure of what just happened but feeling that something, imperceptibly, has changed.