Unsung

Hammill/Sonix

1. gated
2. west pole
3. delinquent
4. handsfree
5. eyebrows
6. delighted
7. 861 and counting
8. exp
9. the printer port
10. east pole
11. exeunt
12. 1 meg loop
13. gateless
14. deliberate

You can also now purchase downloads here, thanks to a new arrangement with burningshed.com.

The pieces on this final album in the (unintended) Sonix series of releases began life as experiments intended to lead to potential PH songs.

In the end, determined by their own rules, the pieces went in their own, often strange, directions.

Hammill describes the pieces as having, "An alternative aural landscape which, though free-spirited, still is ordered by internal rules."

The Sonix series provides an indispensable guide to the more experimental side of Peter Hammill's work.

//

"It's effectively the third in an unconscious series initiated with "Loops and Reels" and continued with "Sonix". It also bears something a familial connection with "Spur of the Moment" and "The Appointed Hour". As Artist for this release (and any subsequent ones in the genre) I've therefore decided to present myself as Hammill/Sonix.

The broad brief of this stuff, as you'll appreciate, is Experimental. That's not to say, of course, that I don't continue to regard approaching the writing and recording of each song proper as an experimental act; but sometimes things come along which appear to be in a place apart. So it was with this collection.

Evidently there is No Vox on this CD; nor are there any "directional" (for dance, for film) pieces here. Nearly all of it came about while I was in that fog of research for foundations which is the initial stage of conventional songwriting. Sometimes I start from a musical figure, sometimes from pure blocks of sound. Usually, drawn by whatever sense of architecture I possess, these initial sketches coalesce into a Thing which will become a Song. These Things - as I say in the liner notes - seemed reluctant to do so and remained resolutely apart. Over time I grew to see them as a collection whole unto itself. Hence this release.

In my view, "experimental" does not necessarily mean completely off the wall at all times. Some pieces here do, indeed, fall off the brickwork; but others are relatively calm, logical, ordered. To my mind there's always a slightly alien air about proceedings; indeed, my feeling about the CD as a whole is that it's something of a soundtrack for an unknown landscape.

Several pieces are fully played instrumentally; others use sound purely as building blocks...akin to making music out of clay. There are also some instances of cloned, or alternatively reflected, works. There are even two pieces which are on (highly conscious) automatic drive.

"gated", "gateless", "1 meg loop" and "eyebrows" are all more or less conventionally voiced and structured instrumentals, with guitar and bass predominating. More abstract, at least in their starting points, are "delinquent", "delighted", "deliberate" and 2 "Pole" pieces. These involved the recording and subsequent manipulation of fragments until a certain symmetry was achieved.

From a similar - but more radical - planet I fell upon "exeunt" and "861 and counting". The former is a completely fractured expansion on the simplest of drum fragments, extended, dubbed and put into full overload; the latter an interference pattern built up from a tiny element of guitar pushed through fractionally different delay times, all on or about 861 mSecs, hence the title.

The "automatic" pieces are "handsfree" and "the printer port". I got a jolt one day when I attempted to print something out from my Mac, only to find that my MIDI system was still connected...one of my sound modules was "playing" my attempted letter, or whatever it was. I hit the record button immediately. This may sound mad...but after much work on the resulting "music" something cogent, if strange, has emerged.

I see now that while I've given (somewhat equivalent) notes on all the above in the CD I neglected to mention one piece, "exp". This is an overdubbed collage and heavy edit of various fragments of disparate musical stuff. Effectively It fits in the middle of all the approaches.

The CD is something of a landscape of the Other. Its progression is not always stately, but the fundamental passage is from comparative order, even sweetness, through chaos and back out the other side. Diverse though the material is, I find that there is some consistency of journey about the whole enterprise. It won't be for everyone and, as with its predecessors, doesn't immediately link itself to my "main", songwriting work. But this is, as always, music to which I have applied myself with diligence and - I hope - intelligence."

From Sofa Sound Newsletter 21/ October 2001