The cover appears to contain almost nothing: a thick black square, an uncertain gray interior and hundreds of fine scratches spreading across the white field. Yet the longer it is examined, the less stable it becomes. The square could be a frame, gate, room, aperture, wound or crude enclosure. Its center does not open onto a clear image. It gathers density, as though repeated contact has gradually darkened the paper. Outside the border, thin marks escape in every direction, suggesting that whatever was meant to remain contained has already passed through the walls.
That is an excellent visual introduction to Hanna Hartman’s music. Her compositions begin with recognizable physical sources, breath, metal, liquid, machinery, birds, footsteps, friction, human cries and objects placed into motion, but recognition is never the final destination. A sound enters her archive carrying a history and practical identity. She removes it from that original situation, listens to its smallest internal behavior and places it beside something with which it was never expected to communicate. The resulting composition does not erase the everyday world. It rearranges the world until its hidden relationships become audible.
“Gattet” is the definite form of a Swedish word for an opening or narrow channel, especially a confined passage of water connecting larger expanses. The title can therefore describe the entire album’s method. Each piece is a constricted route between very different territories: instrumental performance and recorded material, recognizable event and abstract texture, microscopic detail and overwhelming physical force. Sound is pressed through the passage until it changes pressure. What enters as a bassoon, clarinet, impact or machine emerges carrying traces of several identities at once.
Hartman has spent decades collecting sounds and objects, not as a cataloguer trying to preserve a complete documentary record, but as a composer waiting for future correspondences. A recording may remain unused for years until another sound reveals the role it can play. This makes her archive less like a library organized by subject than a population of dormant materials. Each item contains behaviors that may only become visible when it meets the correct stranger.
That practice gives her music an unusual relationship with reality. Field recording is often presented as a transparent window onto a location, allowing the listener to imagine being transported into the environment where the microphone once stood. Hartman’s recordings do not behave transparently. The microphone does not merely preserve a place; it extracts pressure, texture, distance and movement from it. Once removed, those properties can be reorganized into an environment that never existed outside the composition.
“Black Bat” enters this world through the contrabass clarinet of Theo Nabicht. The instrument already occupies a threshold between categories. It can produce a clearly pitched note, but its lowest register contains so much air, key noise and bodily resistance that pitch begins dissolving into matter. Breath must travel through an enormous folded tube, and the mechanism required to control that tube becomes part of what the listener hears. The instrument seems less like a voice placed above the composition than a creature attempting to navigate inside it.
Hartman originally created “Black Bat” for the vast speaker system of Berghain. That origin matters because the piece is not simply loud music later amplified in a large room. Its scale was conceived through architecture. Berghain’s concrete interior and immense sound system allow a small event to become environmental. A scrape can cross the space like weather; a low tone can stop behaving as an object in front of the listener and become a condition surrounding the body.
The contrabass clarinet is therefore placed in a strange contest. It must remain physically human, Nabicht’s breath and fingers producing every instrumental sound, while entering a recorded world capable of exceeding human proportions. Hartman does not protect the soloist through the traditional concerto arrangement in which the surrounding material politely leaves room for an identifiable principal voice. Clarinet and loudspeaker environment contaminate each other. The instrument may resemble an animal, machine, respiratory system or damaged building, while apparently non-instrumental noises suddenly acquire phrasing and breath.
Birdlike calls, splatters, impacts, tears and abrupt cries pass through the piece without establishing a dependable landscape. The title encourages the mind to imagine an animal in darkness, but the bat never becomes an illustrated subject. Instead, the music adopts properties associated with one: rapid navigation through reflected information, sensitivity to a space the eye cannot clarify, and an existence organized around frequencies and distances that human perception only partly understands.
A bat’s map is created by sending sound outward and receiving its altered return. Hartman’s compositional process performs a related operation. She sends recorded objects into new surroundings and listens to what the collision reveals. Meaning is not located solely in the original sound or in the new context. It appears in the changed signal returning from between them.
“Black Bat” lasts less than eight minutes, yet it creates the impression of a much larger system briefly exposed. The short duration prevents the environment from becoming familiar enough to master. We enter after its forces have already begun and leave before learning their complete laws. The experience resembles finding an opening in a wall, seeing a strange ecosystem operating on the other side and losing access before the eye can identify everything moving there.
“Crush” removes the visible instrumental performer and places recorded sound itself at the center. Hartman built the piece from close-up recordings gathered in different parts of the world and material produced with the Buchla 200 modular synthesizer at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion. The title names both an act and its result: pressure applied until a structure changes, or an intense attraction that reorganizes attention around an object. Both meanings belong to the composition.
Close recording is a form of disproportion. A microphone placed extremely near an action hears details that ordinary spatial listening blends together or ignores. Surface becomes landscape. A slight crack becomes an architectural failure. Liquid movement acquires weight. The tiny mechanical prelude before an impact may become more interesting than the impact itself. Hartman’s microphone does not simply make quiet things louder. It changes their apparent size and social importance.
The Buchla enters without announcing a clean division between synthetic and documentary sound. Modular electronics can produce material with no direct counterpart in the physical world, but Hartman treats electronically generated tones and recorded objects as members of the same unstable ecology. A voltage-controlled event may resemble an insect, a stressed cable or liquid passing through machinery. A real-world recording may sound so unfamiliar that it appears electronically invented. Source identification becomes a game the composition repeatedly wins by changing the rules.
This uncertainty does not make the work vague. Hartman’s construction is extraordinarily precise. Events enter with exact weight and duration, often separated by spaces that sharpen their physical edges. The listener may not know what produced a sound, but can sense how carefully it has been positioned. Mystery is not created by indiscriminately piling noise together. It comes from the authority with which unrelated materials are made to occupy the same world.
“Crush” often feels like a sequence of impossible causes and effects. A brittle event appears to trigger a low movement that could not logically have come from it. A pressure builds in one register and releases somewhere else. Sounds seem to leave residue, with the following event entering an atmosphere already altered by what preceded it. Hartman creates continuity without relying upon melody or a stable pulse. The composition advances through material consequence.
The title also describes the treatment of scale. Entire environments appear compressed into short, concentrated gestures. The vast and microscopic trade places. Something that might occupy only a fraction of a second in daily life becomes a major structural event, while a large physical occurrence may be reduced to a thin flash. The composition crushes ordinary perspective, then uses the fragments to create another form of depth.
This is where Hartman’s background in radio becomes especially important. Radio composition cannot depend upon a performer’s visible gesture or an installation’s physical object to explain how sound is being produced. Everything must be communicated through duration, placement and the listener’s imagination. A radio work enters domestic space without bringing its original room. It may arrive through headphones, a kitchen speaker, a car or a small receiver late at night. The composition must build its architecture inside whatever listening environment happens to receive it.
“Crush” carries that invisible architecture. Its sounds feel tactile enough to touch, even though the objects responsible remain absent. A listener begins inventing mechanisms, rooms and organisms to account for what is heard. Hartman does not provide a narrative, but the mind generates provisional stories because the events seem too intentional to remain meaningless. Each imagined explanation survives only until the next sound changes the scale.
The piece was recognized with the Palma Ars Acustica prize, an award connected to radio art across Europe. That context fits the work beautifully. It is neither conventional instrumental composition nor documentary broadcast, but a form that treats loudspeakers as the location where a new material world comes into existence. The recording is not a representation of a finished performance. It is the composition’s body.
“Fracture,” the longest work, brings another acoustic instrument into this environment: the bassoon of Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. The bassoon’s cultural identity is unusually unstable. In orchestral music it may sound comic, pastoral, mournful, bureaucratic or ancient according to register and phrasing. Its long wooden body and doubled reed produce a tone rich in internal resistance. Air does not pass through it innocently. Every note contains pressure meeting material.
Vicente-Sandoval is especially suited to Hartman’s method because her playing explores the threshold between stable instrumental sound and the physical processes required to create it. Breath, key mechanisms, reed vibration and unstable resonance can be heard as compositional materials rather than technical debris surrounding the note. The performer does not merely supply bassoon melodies to an electronic backdrop. She gives Hartman another complicated object whose hidden facets can be opened.
“Fracture” sounds like a world being examined at the point where its surfaces fail. Footstep-like impacts, wind, crackle, hum, metallic collision and liquid or synthetic gurgling gather around the bassoon. The piece does not clarify which elements are recorded, electronically transformed or produced instrumentally. The fracture occurs between categories as much as within the sounds themselves.
A fracture is not necessarily a complete break. It may be a narrow fault that reveals the pressure previously hidden inside a structure. The cover drawing captures this distinction. The heavy square still exists, but the center and surrounding field have been worked over by countless thin marks. Damage becomes information. Every scratch reveals contact, direction and force.
The bassoon frequently appears to inhabit the same material family as the surrounding noises. A low instrumental tone can merge with machine hum; breath can become weather; key action can resemble small industrial mechanisms. At other moments the human performer emerges clearly, not as a heroic figure conquering the electronic environment but as another vulnerable body inside it. This movement between presence and absorption gives the piece much of its emotional power.
Hartman’s music is often discussed through objects, techniques and recording sources because those details are fascinating. One can learn about unusual microphones, potato starch, sprinklers, plant pots, bricks, air bags and objects accumulated over decades. Yet the work would become smaller if it were treated only as a puzzle asking, “What made that sound?” Identification may satisfy curiosity while closing a larger opening.
The more important question is what the sound becomes after Hartman has heard possibilities beyond its practical identity. Potato starch is no longer merely cooking material. A sprinkler is no longer simply irrigation equipment. An instrument is no longer a machine for producing approved notes. She does not pretend these objects lack histories, but she refuses to let usefulness exhaust their existence.
This gives her work an almost ethical attention toward matter. Everyday objects are normally valued according to service. Once damaged, obsolete or removed from their intended task, they become waste. Hartman listens after usefulness has ended. An object still vibrates, resists, resonates and enters relationships. Its capacity for meaning was larger than the function assigned to it.
That approach connects quietly with the title. A narrow channel is defined by what passes through it, but it also transforms whatever passes. Water accelerates, turbulence increases, pressure changes and the shores are shaped by repeated movement. Gattet treats composition as that sort of passage. Hartman provides boundaries precise enough to alter the behavior of sound without sealing it into one interpretation.
The album’s three-part structure creates another channel between increasingly different relationships with performance. “Black Bat” places an instrumentalist inside a compact, violent loudspeaker environment. “Crush” removes the performer and allows the recorded construction to exist independently. “Fracture” returns to instrumental presence at much greater length, now with enough time for the border between bassoon and fixed sound to be repeatedly built and broken.
The sequence can therefore be heard as body, disappearance and altered return. Nabicht’s contrabass clarinet enters as a dark physical protagonist. “Crush” leaves only organized matter and invisible causes. Vicente-Sandoval’s bassoon then reappears inside a world whose categories have already been destabilized. By the time a human breath returns, it can no longer be assumed to stand apart from machine, animal, weather or architecture.
The cover’s square resembles the boundaries of a loudspeaker cone, a screen, a stage or a page on which pressure has been concentrated. Hanna Hartman made the drawing herself, giving the package a direct continuation of her compositional method. The image is not polished into graphic neutrality. The hand remains present through irregular edges and accumulated marks.
Frans Gillberg’s restrained layout allows that drawing to dominate without explanatory decoration. The monochrome surface makes the eye perform a task similar to the ear’s work inside the album. At first the materials seem limited. With prolonged attention, differences proliferate: density, direction, texture, pressure, boundary and escape.
Firework Edition Records is an especially fitting home for the release. The label’s catalog has repeatedly treated experimental music as something that can remain physically direct, idiosyncratic and resistant to standard genre packaging. Gattet does not need to be translated into ambient music, noise, contemporary composition or electroacoustic demonstration. It occupies the narrow passage where those names meet and cease providing reliable guidance.
The album is demanding only if listening is understood as waiting for familiar musical rewards. There are no choruses, grooves or themes presented for easy retrieval. But it is deeply generous toward attention. Every few seconds offers a change in substance, depth or apparent scale. The music teaches the listener how to hear it by repeatedly demonstrating that nothing should be dismissed as incidental.
This is one of experimental music’s most useful gifts. Daily life trains people to ignore enormous amounts of sound in order to function. Ventilation, electrical systems, distant traffic, clothing, footsteps, doors and the small mechanics of the body are sorted into the background. Hartman reverses that hierarchy. Background becomes event, and the supposedly principal event may dissolve into texture.
The reversal does not require escaping ordinary life. It makes ordinary life larger. After hearing Gattet, a pipe, appliance, bird, damaged speaker or object dragged across a floor may briefly refuse to become background again. The record leaves the listening system slightly open, allowing unattended sounds to enter before habit closes the channel.
That opening is the true image inside the black square. It is not an empty center waiting to be filled. It is a passage worn into existence by repeated attention. The scratches do not destroy the frame. They show that sound has been crossing it.
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