Tracklist:

1. By the Line
2. Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore
3. Seventeen Fabrics of Measure
4. Bruststrke (Lung Song)
5. Schloss, Night
6. Neither from Nor Towards

Judith Hamanns most personal record, using her voice in her composition for the first time. Their playing has previously appeared alongside Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, Sarah Hennies, liane Radigue, and La Monte Young. LP housed in heavyweight inner and outer sleeves with artwork by contemporary artist Wilder Alison. Aunes is a rare solo album from peripatetic Australian cellist-composer-performer Judith Hamann, presenting six pieces recorded across several years and countries. Developing the collage techniques and expanded sound palettes heard on their previous releases, Aunes makes use of synthesizers, organ, voice and location recordings alongside the dazzlingly pure, enveloping tones of Hamanns cello. The record takes its name from an old French unit of measurement for fabric, varying around the country and from material to material. Unlike the platinum metre bar deposited in the National Archives after the Revolution as an immovable standard, an aune of silk differed from an aune of linen: the measure could not be separated from the material. In much the same way, in these six pieceswhich Hamann thinks of as songsformal aspects such as tuning, pacing, melodic shape and timbre are not abstractions applied universally to musical material but are inextricable from the instruments and sounds used, even from the places and communities in which the music was made. Audible location sound embeds the music in its place of making, as in the delicate duet for church organ and wordless singing schloss, night, where shuffles and cluttering in the reverberant church space form a phantom accompaniment, gradually displaced by a uneasy shimmer of wavering tones from half-opened organ stops. Casa Di Riposo, Gesu Redentore documents a walk up a hill to an outdoor mass in Chiusure, layering voices near and far with footsteps, insects and other incidental sounds. Like in the work of Moniek Darge or Luc Ferrari, location recordings are folded on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect. On other pieces, it is the emphatic presence of the performing body that grounds the music, whether in the intimate fragility of Hamanns softly sung and hummed vocal tones or the clothing that rustles across a microphone on the opening by the line. The idea of a music inextricable from its material conditions is perhaps most strikingly communicated on the albums briefest piece bruststrke (lung song), composed from layered whistling recorded while Hamann suffered through an asthma flare up, the results halfway between field recordings of an imaginary aviary and the audiopoems of Henri Chopin. More than any of Hamanns previous solo works, a strong melodic sensibility runs through Aunes, even when, like on seventeen fabrics of measure, the music hangs together by the merest thread. At other points, Hamanns love of pop music is more obvious: the rich synth harmonies of by the line could almost be a melting fragment of a backing track from Hounds of Love. The expansive closing piece neither from nor toward exemplifies the highly personal musical language that Hamann has developed in recent years through constant solo performance (and a rigorous discipline of instrumental practice), pairing two overdubbed voices with the boundless depth and harmonic richness of just-intoned cello notes, calling up Ockegham or Linda Caitlin Smith in its elegiac slow motion arcs. Hamanns most personal work yet, Aunes arrives in a striking sleeve reproducing a section of a painting made from sewn pieces of dyed wool by Wilder Alison, a friend and fellow resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude, one of the temporary homes where much of this music was recorded.