#judith hamann

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Judith Hamann

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Judith Hamann - Days Collapse Days Collapse Night

Amplify 2020

2020

[dustedmagazine]

Judith Hamann — Days Collapse (Another Timbre)

days collapse by Judith Hamann

If you have to have your life shut down by a global pandemic, you could do worse that to face the circumstances that Judith Hamann did in March 2020. The Australian-born cellist, who had spent the previous few years leading a peripatetic life that involved moving from one musical project to the next without a fixed address, had signed up for a three-month long artist’s residence sponsored by the Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP). So instead of being stuck on the road, she had a place to stay and a studio on Suomenlinna, an island mere minutes by ferry from downtown Helsinki, Finland.

Still, however fortunate Hamann was, she wasn’t free from the sorrow that overtook the world; she knew what was happening to people all over. Like so many other musicians, her schedule went from full to empty overnight. And as Finland locked down, there was no way for collaborators to join her. So, when the AMPLIFY 2020:quarantine festival invited her to contribute mere days after she arrived in Finland, Hamann went straight to work with the material at hand. She laid the sounds of her voice, cello, and feedback like thin strips of fabric stretched across field recordings of her drawing in her studio and the wind blowing across the island. That original piece, “Days collapse days collapse night,” imparted a sense of stillness that expressed the “everything’s stopped” tenor of the times. Another Timbre invited her to expand upon it, and that’s how Days Collapse came into being. 

While the album is nearly five times the length of the original piece, it stays very close to its spirit. It is a collage of busy-ness and solitude, long tones and empty spaces, inside and outdoors. Sometimes there’s not much of Hamann in the sound. During the early minutes of “As with covering wings,” she threads barely-there filaments of feedback through a soundscape of birds carrying on their business and waves lapping in the distance. The way that the natural looms over puny human action recalls old Chinese ink and water landscapes. But then track upon track of her bowed cello slides over the field recordings, as if to acknowledge the impossibility of leaving well enough alone. That’s just not what humans do, right?   

Somewhat by chance, Days collapse arrived as part of a sudden proliferation of Hamann recordings. Until recently, you could mostly hear her contributing parts to records by Oren Ambarchi and Graham Lambkin, or playing duets with fellow cellists Charles Curtis and Lori Goldston. But in the latter half of 2020, she released three other albums; a pair of solo performances on Blank Forms, and a more elaborate electro-acoustic construction on Black Truffle. Each is worth your time, but Days collapse is the one most strongly connected to the still-transpiring pandemic era.

Bill Meyer

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Judith Hamann — Aunes. 2025 : Shelter Press.

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Judith Hamann’s Aunes

[cdlistening]

Judith Hamann, 'Music For Cello and Humming' CD (Blank Forms)

Thursday, October 7, 2021, 7:42pm (partial listen)

Put this one on briefly in the background, and it ended up drawing me in anyway. I am looking forward to hearing more of this person on a couple of LPs I have on the way. I think before this one gets filed away for a bit, I am going to have to take this on a walk - I have a suspicion that the use of full focus and headphones will be rewarded.

[cdlistening]

Judith Hamann, 'Music For Cello and Humming' CD (Blank Forms)

Monday, August 16, 2021, 6:10pm (full listen)

This disc arrived from the mighty Eclipse Records mail-order today, alongside a hefty stack of other CDs I've been dying to check out. Repeat listens will be essential with this particular disc, but already my hopes and dreams for what it might be have been fully met; it's as subtle and drifty as I imagined, and there is a huge depth of subtlety on display here. As with many composed works, I am eager to know what the "scores" look like, and here the liner notes trod a narrow line between aggressively extra-musical (not a bad thing necessarily) and also highly literary, confessional, and engaging; a great release, looking forward to going deeper.

[kfromthecastle]