The deep greens and greys of Liene Pavlovska's cover painting, with its intimations of movement among seemingly disparate colour fields, is an apposite way into Judith Hamann's album days collapse. Both works – Hamann's four-part suite for electronics, field recordings, cello and humming, and Pavlovska’s (presumably untitled) painting – were created in the spring of 2020 while their creators were on an arts residency on the Finnish island of Suomenlinna, some 15 minutes from central Helsinki, having arrived just prior to the spread of Covid-19 into Europe. Both seem to suggest the possibility of transcending boundaries through shifting perspectives.
Hamann, a self-described ‘cellist, improviser, organizer of sounds’, had been investigating the concepts of ‘shaking’ and ‘collapsing’, ideas which clearly fed into days collapse and gave her some tools to aid in negotiating the doubled stresses of quarantine in an unfamiliar place and grieving the recent death of a close friend. The album grew out of a piece called ‘days collapse days collapse night’ Hamann made for Jon Abbey's Amplify 2020: quarantine festivalFootnote 1 and released on 29 March 2020. Soon thereafter, Simon Reynell commissioned Hamann to expand the piece into a full-length album, one of several ‘quarantine commissions’ various artists have fulfilled for Another Timbre.
The resulting album is both discursive and – in some sense of the word – unified. At the level of individual sounds, they often enter into Hamann's musical world isolated as single sonic events or, at most, paired as if a line were beginning only to gutter into silence. These sounds sounding alone, separated by silences, hesitancies, intimately and closely recorded before being reassembled in a virtual aural space, feels, a year on, like the perfect evocation of those first weeks of quarantine as each of our worlds individually collapsed inward – they have a resigned sadness to them, but not a nihility; they are a commentary on aloneness rather than a cry into the void. This atmosphere of optimism in the face of difficulty is also apparent in the structure. Each track is largely static in its mood and materials, but each ends with a few tens of seconds of something new. However introspective the music can become, or depressing the world becomes, change is constant. I heard this as hopefulness.
The sound sources intentionally produced by Hamann are primarily cello, humming, electronic sounds and the scraping of pencil on paper (one of her coping routines was daily 10-minute drawing sessions), while Suomenlinna itself provided barnacle geese and other birds, wind and water. All four tracks adopt different distributions of similar basic materials, and there is a unity of approach and structure which holds the album together as an artistic whole without sounding goal-oriented moment to moment. Throughout the work, even the electronically-produced sound elements seem to breathe and pulse with life as much as the human-played cello and the voices of animals and Hamann herself. Every element swells and shrinks, comes in and out, in its own time. The overall effect is of an unconstrained (in the sense of not being forced into a system) polyphony of natural, human and electronic sounds, each sounding in their own way, sometimes radically different from one another, sometimes timbrally blending so as to momentarily disorient the listener. With no visual clue, the drawing of a pencil over paper can sound remarkably like breathing, cello harmonics like a sine tone, high-register cello like humming, low-register sul ponticello much like artificial white noise.
This timbral play is one example of the transcending of artificial boundaries on this album. There is a beautiful moment that happens midway through the fourth track – almost a like climax – when the isolated notes from cello and voice and electronics seem, for once, to slip from being independently parallel into a kind of colour melody or hocket. Is there one melody shared? Is it counterpoint? Or are there actually only isolated, independent sounds and my mind just desperately wants them to find each other, so – for at least this listener – they do?
One further example of boundary-crossing: throughout the album, Hamann has left in what sound to me like artefacts of the recording process. These include what might be the rubbing of fabric on microphones (for example, from a field-recording microphone held unobtrusively in a pocket or bag), clicks from touching the recorder or the discomfiting sound of wind in the microphones. The choice to leave these marks of the recording process, to leave a record of the artist-as-recorder within the soundworld of the work, is also a kind of boundary crossed. With these gestures, Hamann leaves behind the Romantic–modernist idea of artist as separate from the work, and the work as separate from the world. Any artistic work is the record of a person in a time and place, and those leave their traces whether the artist wants them there or not; Hamann's foregrounding of them is a stimulating artistic choice.
Like the best field recordings – a genre it partakes of as well as transcends – days collapse rests on the ear like something natural; it moves the air like something alive.
