Ben Chatwin: The Hum
Village Green

Sometimes artworks bring themselves into being. Look no further than The Hum, the sixth album issued by electronic artist Ben Chatwin under his birth name and his eleventh overall, the others having appeared under the Talvihorros alias. After plugging in his Moog synthesizer at his nineteenth-century home, a drone emerged that he quickly identified as the building's natural hum. That led to a reflection on how many of the sound frequencies around us go unnoticed when they lie beyond the threshold of human perception, and it also became the inspiration for his latest release. For this project, Chatwin aspired to bring some of those sounds into the range of audibility.

To do so, he began compiling ghost frequencies from different sources whilst also integrating familiar elements such as analogue synths, strings (performed and arranged by Pete Harvey), and vocals (by singer Kirsten Norrie). Critical to his MO, Chatwin disregarded the computer as a sound source, opting instead to make The Hum a completely analogue recording as well as one mixed live and mastered to tape. The result is thirty-eight minutes of electroacoustic material that's as close to Pan sonic as Chatwin has yet come (see the title track, for example).

Certain titles evoke the noise blizzard quality and occasionally eruptive tone of the material (“Snow Crash,” “War of the Ants”). The music is, simply put, engulfing, its sound design like a block of concrete and one possible analogue brutalist architecture. Intensifying the impact of the material, Chatwin sequenced the tracks so that each one segues into the next without pause, a move that gives the recording a powerful journey-like feel. In terms of magnitude, the result often feels colossal, yet it also captures his artfulness as a sound sculptor.

“Transmission” immediately shows that the new material is assuredly not wallpaper music. Underpinned by a bass throb, the track convulses in shredded waves with industrial shrieks battering the mass and swollen pulsations threatening to explode. An aggressive synthesizer figure then provides a stabilizing ground in “Transistor,” which otherwise sounds like an army charging into battle as a storm rages.

Chatwin's smart enough to know a relentless wall-of-sound is less satisfying than a presentation with dynamic contrast. Three tracks in, “Creep Strain” offers some degree of cool-down without compromising on the general character of the album, even if the track gradually mounts in intensity and volume as it advances. Attend carefully and faint traces of Harvey's strings and Norrie's voice can be detected, the former even more prominently featured in the subsequent “Snow Crash," while the strings-drenched elegy “Ghost in the Machine” guides the recording to a comparatively peaceful yet still energy-charged close.

December 2020