#days collapse

Still, however fortunate Hamann was, she wasn’t free from the sorrow that overtook the world; she knew what was happening to people all over. Like so many other musicians, her schedule went from full to empty overnight. And as Finland locked down, there was no way for collaborators to join her. So, when the AMPLIFY 2020:quarantine festival invited her to contribute mere days after she arrived in Finland, Hamann went straight to work with the material at hand. She laid the sounds of her voice, cello, and feedback like thin strips of fabric stretched across field recordings of her drawing in her studio and the wind blowing across the island. That original piece, “Days collapse days collapse night,” imparted a sense of stillness that expressed the “everything’s stopped” tenor of the times. Another Timbre invited her to expand upon it, and that’s how Days Collapse came into being. 

While the album is nearly five times the length of the original piece, it stays very close to its spirit. It is a collage of busy-ness and solitude, long tones and empty spaces, inside and outdoors. Sometimes there’s not much of Hamann in the sound. During the early minutes of “As with covering wings,” she threads barely-there filaments of feedback through a soundscape of birds carrying on their business and waves lapping in the distance. The way that the natural looms over puny human action recalls old Chinese ink and water landscapes. But then track upon track of her bowed cello slides over the field recordings, as if to acknowledge the impossibility of leaving well enough alone. That’s just not what humans do, right?   

Somewhat by chance, Days collapse arrived as part of a sudden proliferation of Hamann recordings. Until recently, you could mostly hear her contributing parts to records by Oren Ambarchi and Graham Lambkin, or playing duets with fellow cellists Charles Curtis and Lori Goldston. But in the latter half of 2020, she released three other albums; a pair of solo performances on Blank Forms, and a more elaborate electro-acoustic construction on Black Truffle. Each is worth your time, but Days collapse is the one most strongly connected to the still-transpiring pandemic era.