Judith Hamann – Aunes

Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne who presently resides in Berlin. A collaborator who has duetted with the rigorously de-trained Lori Goldston, the sound sculptor Marja Ahti and the interdisciplinary filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta while also contributing to projects by Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada and Oren Ambarchi, her recent solo works including Shaking Studies and Music for Cello and Humming on Blank Forms and Hinterhof on the deep listening label Longform Editions have focused on an examination of humming and ‘shaking’, which incorporates everything from physical tremors to trills and vibratos or warbling wolf tones which find an overlap between the frequency of the played string and the resonances of the cello’s body, while Hamann has also been drawn towards the generative possibilities inherent in the ‘collapse’ of musical textures, times, seasons and kinds of space.

Her new album Aunes which arrives on Félicia Atkinson’s Shelter Press is already one of the most absorbing and self-contained records of the year. Its sometimes cloistered lyricism reminds of Allan Gilbert Balon’s debut album The Magnesia Suite from last year, with the same sense of presence and personality drawn from a more restrained musical palette, while Aunes also bears traces of Max Richter’s staggered melodicism and the durational pipe organ works of Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone, with their meantone temperaments and wolf intervals, their steeped polyphonies and sunken or swashbuckling drones.

Burbling synthesizer oscillations vie with her cooing voice on the album opener ‘by the line’, as her patter of whispers and faint sighs, languorous and elongated fricatives or sibilants sound at times almost like a dampened saxophone, giving a wispy, reedy and organic quality to the composition. Rustling pages add a percussive dryness to the track, as blowing air with her tongue nestled against the gum line, Hamann produces a whistling sound like a kettle slowly coming to the boil, both sibilant and serpentine before a solitary sine tone concludes the piece. Whispered chatter and crunchy footsteps introduce ‘Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore’, a field recording which blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior as the studious stillness of a choir at practice filters through the sounds of an outdoors stroll, perhaps with a spot of gardening to boot.

In fact the six pieces which make up Aunes were captured across several countries and years, with ‘Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore’ the document of a hillside walk up towards an outdoor mass in the Tuscan village of Chiusure, as Hamann layers choral voices with footsteps, chirruping insects and other incidental sounds.

The name of her album draws from an old French measurement which Napoleon sought to codify, to vanishing effect. A measure of cloth, while Napoleon sought a compromise between his metric system and popular custom, the old aune had differed in length depending on the type of fabric and the locale. An aune of silk in Paris for instance might differ markedly from an aune of linen in Rouen, with the measurement often changing from town to town. Hamann conceives the six pieces of Aunes as indistinguishable from their materials, while ‘Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore’ is compared to the works of the composers Moniek Darge and Luc Ferrari, where ‘location recordings are folded in on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect’.

‘seventeen fabrics of measure’ follows on with a more spectral and liturgical air, with some shuffling against the leather seat of a chair as Hamann’s voice tenuously accompanies the scraping of strings and more piercing synth tones. There are a few chimes, a strepitous of bird calls, gravelly field recordings and some percussive sputtering before the composer finds herself down by the harbour, listening out to the far-off blasts of foghorns made by circumspect ships. Then the brief ‘bruststärke (lung song)’ (an old forestry term which refers to a rudimentary estimate of the yield from felled trees) features dallying gulls and a chill breeze as Hamann tugs at the collar of her windbreaker.

A church organ plays on ‘schloss, night’ as porters rearrange the scenery, humping furniture or walking to and fro as the deep churning drones of the organ flitter and hover between foreground and background. A falling voice, almost like muted keening or ululating hangs on top of the chords alongside a light dusting of celestial winds from the half-opened organ stops plus some metallic twinkling. Finally on ‘neither from nor towards’ we return to Hamann’s cello, justly intoned and with a darker yet richer character as her vocals half extemporised and half preordained slowly climb to fill the ceiling.