Aunes is an album about measurements that cannot be detached from the things being measured. Its title comes from the aune, an old French unit used for fabric whose actual length varied according to region and material. An aune of silk was not necessarily identical to an aune of linen. Unlike the standardized metre, the measurement retained a relationship with texture, location, and use. Judith Hamann applies this idea to music, refusing to treat duration, tuning, melody, and form as neutral frameworks imposed upon interchangeable sound. Each of these six pieces seems to discover its own dimensions through the specific bodies, rooms, instruments, weather, illnesses, and communities involved in its creation.
“By the Line” opens with warm synthesizer layers that might initially suggest ambient music, but Hamann quickly makes the environment too intimate and materially unstable for passive drifting. Clothing moves near a microphone. A voice hums softly inside thick harmonic vapor. Small recording artifacts interrupt the smoothness, while melodic fragments form without separating themselves cleanly from the surrounding texture. The line in the title may be a boundary, a measuring mark, a melodic contour, or the thread along which fabric is cut. Hamann follows it without pretending that the line exists independently of the material beneath it.
Their cello practice has long concentrated on beating frequencies, just intonation, shaking, humming, and the unstable relationship between instrumental discipline and bodily limitation. Aunes expands that investigation into a form resembling private songwriting. These are not songs in the conventional sense of verses carrying a lyrical personality toward a chorus. They are songs because each piece holds a particular emotional condition, location, and bodily gesture together. Melody enters more openly than on some of Hamann’s earlier work, but it behaves like something found inside resonance rather than placed above it.
“Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore” documents a walk uphill toward an outdoor mass in Chiusure, Italy. Footsteps, insects, nearby voices, distant singing, and incidental environmental sounds create a social space without explaining it. The microphone moves through an event rather than standing outside it as a neutral observer. People are heard from different distances, and those changing distances become part of the composition. The recording preserves no complete documentary account of the mass. Instead, it retains the approach, the surrounding landscape, partial voices, and the sensation of arriving somewhere whose meaning already exists for the assembled community.
Hamann folds these recordings through time until the distinction between document and memory becomes uncertain. A footstep can appear as evidence of one physical walk, but repetition or editing turns it into rhythm. Distant singing may belong to a particular religious gathering, yet once separated from the complete ceremony it becomes a hovering melodic presence. The work does not erase the original location, but neither does it claim that recording can preserve a place intact. The microphone collects fragments, and composition allows those fragments to dream about where they came from.
“Seventeen Fabrics of Measure” develops the album’s central metaphor most directly. Cello, voice, and electronic material hang together through delicate relationships that seem capable of tearing under excessive pressure. The title imagines multiple fabrics, each demanding its own system of measurement. A thick material cannot be handled like a thin one; something elastic changes dimensions while it is being examined. Hamann’s tones behave similarly. A cello note is not simply a pitch lasting a particular number of seconds. It is bow resistance, room resonance, breath, harmonic activity, concentration, and the gradual alteration of the performer’s body while the sound continues.
The voice is especially important because it introduces a material whose limits cannot be concealed. Instruments can appear to produce pure, external tones, but humming and soft singing expose breath, throat, fatigue, and vulnerability. Hamann does not use the voice to dominate the record with words. It remains close to bodily sound, sometimes merging with cello harmonics until the two sources become difficult to separate. The instrument appears to inhale, while the voice develops the sustained, resonant qualities of a string.
“Bruststärke (Lung Song)” compresses this bodily focus into eighty-four seconds of layered whistling recorded during an asthma flare-up. The German word Bruststärke refers to chest strength or vocal power, but the piece emerges from a moment when breathing itself had become restricted. Whistling produces an imaginary aviary, full of high calls that could be birds, leaking air, or tiny electronic organisms. The beauty is inseparable from respiratory difficulty. Hamann does not turn illness into a heroic obstacle triumphantly overcome. The impaired lung becomes the specific measure through which this small song can exist.
This is the ethical and emotional center of Aunes. Standardized musical thinking often treats the body as equipment expected to execute a work correctly. Hamann instead allows the condition of the body to alter the work’s possible form. Asthma is not an error occurring outside the composition. Clothing noise is not automatically removed. Footsteps, room sounds, and imperfect vocal edges are not contamination around the true music. The material circumstances become the rule, rather than being forced to obey an abstract standard designed elsewhere.
“Schloss, Night” places wordless voice beside a church organ recorded at night. The organ carries centuries of institutional and sacred authority, but Hamann approaches it through half-open stops, wavering tones, shuffling, and clutter within the reverberant room. The instrument seems caught between functioning and breathing. Air moves through pipes without producing the full ceremonial certainty traditionally associated with the organ. Soft singing enters this unstable architecture not as a commanding solo but as another fragile current inside the building.
The room becomes an instrument whose performance cannot be entirely controlled. Reverberation lengthens sounds after their source has stopped. Small movements acquire exaggerated scale. A shuffled object may create a phantom rhythm, while distant mechanical activity begins resembling another hidden performer. Hamann listens to the church as a material body containing wood, air, pipes, stone, footsteps, and accumulated cultural memory. “Schloss” can mean castle or lock, suggesting both architecture and closure. At night, however, the locked structure opens acoustically, revealing a restless interior life.
“Neither From Nor Towards” occupies sixteen minutes and gathers the album’s methods into its most expansive statement. Overdubbed voices move beside deep, justly tuned cello tones in long, elegiac arcs. The title rejects the expectation that music must travel from a defined origin toward a recognizable destination. Hamann’s sounds do not appear rootless, but their direction is suspended. They inhabit the interval between departure and arrival, allowing melody to unfold without demanding a climax.
This piece reveals how personal the album is without turning privacy into confession. Hamann’s voice is present, yet it does not explain their life through lyrics. The cello carries emotion, but not through a theatrical solo. Intimacy arises from proximity to breathing, tuning, repetition, and the labor required to keep fragile tones together. The listener receives traces of rooms and journeys without being given a complete biography. The music protects the unknowable center of the person while allowing bodily evidence to remain audible around it.
Wilder Alison’s cover, made from an image of sewn and dyed wool, extends the title beautifully. Different pieces of fabric retain their own color, grain, and history while being joined into a larger surface. The seams are not defects to be hidden. They show how the object was assembled and where one material meets another. Aunes works in the same way. Field recordings, cello, synthesizers, organ, humming, whistling, footsteps, and clothing sounds are stitched together without pretending they were born inside one seamless studio session.
The album’s quietness should not be mistaken for vagueness. Every sound is grounded in a particular action or condition, even when editing has transformed its documentary identity. Hamann’s music is delicate because its relationships remain exposed, not because it withdraws from substance. The cello has weight. Lungs meet resistance. Fabric brushes a microphone. People gather on a hillside. Air passes through organ pipes. These physical facts create forms that could not simply be transferred to another material without becoming different music.
Aunes ultimately proposes that attentive listening requires flexible measures. The value of a sound cannot be calculated through volume, technical purity, complexity, or distance from everyday noise. Each material carries its own proportions. Hamann does not ask a weakened lung to behave like a healthy one, a location recording to behave like a studio instrument, or a private voice to behave like a public declaration. The music measures each thing through contact with what it actually is. Six songs become six fabrics, stitched across years and countries into an album whose form remains inseparable from the lives, rooms, and breathing bodies that made it possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.