Hana Stretton - Tiarn LP

So much of the discourse around Hana Stretton’s music revolves around notions of escapism. Either it’s in terms of her recording process (exiling herself for a period of time to make a record alone) or in how it makes the listener feel (the kind of amorphous “emotive” lull that people that discover and listen to music on the internet always speak about, or references to ambient music). To my ears, neither of these ways of looking at her music truly get to the actual strangeness of her records.

Where her debut, Soon, took the listener into the sound world of her late-Grandmother’s farm, Tiarn is a denser, murkier, yet more intricately interwoven affair. Here she pushes the mics and tape recorders even further into overdriven, in-the-red territory. Stretton’s voice, cloaked in a sheath of noise, is embedded in layers of looping or repeating vocals (from a choir? An ethnographic record? Layered by Stretton herself?) intercut with crystal clear, wandering guitars and deep seismic shifts of low-end.

While of course there are obvious precedents and contemporaries in the world of folk (Stretton brings to mind Maxine Funke, Josephine Forster, even the pastoralism of Vashti Bunyan), there’s something more compositional going on here. The lyrics are obscured and don’t necessarily sit at the front of the mix, drawing attention to the open ended song structures (Jen reckons it reminds her of Incredible String Band’s ‘Wee Tam’), all within this strange artificial sound structure that I can only compare to Astrid Øster Mortensen’s great record a few years back.

In some ways, it also seems to carry on the legacy of some of the odder (but not necessarily freak folk) releases of the 2000s and 2010s, whether that be those of her label head honchos (Soda Eaves here, Mount Eerie/The Microphones in the US), Sufjan’s Carrie & Lowell, The Middle East’s odd (and criminally underrated) sole LP, or Grouper. –Mitch