Judith Hamman - Peaks

Boomkat:

Stepping from the metaphoric shadow of her peers, ‘Peaks’ presents Hamann as a skilled sorceress of quietly rustic, funereal music It’s sorta dewy with pastoral melancholy in a vein recalling everyone from Laura Cannell to Anne Guthrie and Kassel Jaeger in her dreamlike transitions between real instruments and their processed apparitions.

Deftly repatterning her daily life into a woozier dream state, Hamann combines fragments of recordings made on tour into a pair of durational dreamscape collages that, to our ears’-eye, sounds like a music for steep sided valleys to the ‘Peaks’ of the title, hugging wooded clefts where the sun doesn’t always get through and life deciduously goes on in the shade.

Her decayed, organic decompositions connote a sense of melancholy whoch can be taken as intended - reflecting a state of homesickness on tour - or perhaps a sense of sehnsucht for something more indescribable, existential, most like Elodie or Akira Rabelais, that’s always going to haunt and soothe us at the same time, especially when it’s done well; just like this very fine introduction to Judith Hamann’s dream world newly uncovered by Oren Ambarchi’s ever on-it Black Truffle.