Articles
Christopher Tignor
Spotlight 13

Albums
Advanced Dreams
Federico Albanese
Matthew Barlow
Bruno Bavota
Black Unicorn
Bolder
Borghi & Teager
Carla Bozulich
Chris Campbell
Colo
Deadbeat / Paul St Hilaire
Detroit Swindle
Donato Dozzy & Nuel
Yair Etziony
Lewis Fautzi
Hammock
Mark Harris
Hideyuki Hashimoto
Kodomo
Listening Mirror
Lost Trail
Lucy
Machine Code
Yann Novak
Opitope
Origamibiro
Pinkcourtesyphone
Michael Robinson
Mariano Rodriguez
Dana Ruh
Janek Schaefer
Sketches for Albinos
Jakob Skøtt
Talk West
Christopher Tignor
Wen
Scott Worthington

Compilations / Mixes
Generation Hyper
Sharam Jey

EPs / Singles
Children of the Stones
Dexima
Dexta & Hyroglifics
dock 1
Dream Weapons
Dr.Res
FFM Vol. 2 EP
Glory Club
Nightstalker EP

Hammock: Oblivion Hymns
Hammock Music

There's always been a pronouncedly symphonic dimension to Hammock's music, but to a large degree its presence has been more figurative, even if strings have physically appeared within their music before (one thinks, for example, of 2010's Chasing After Shadows… Living with the Ghosts, which included a horn section, string quartet, and live drums). But with their latest collection, Oblivion Hymns, guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson have taken a quite literal symphonic plunge into neo-classical music by eschewing drums and most other post-rock associated sounds and featuring instead strings (courtesy of the Love Sponge Quartet), a children's choir, and a stirring vocal by Timothy Showalter on the hymnal closer (accordion, French horn, and glockenspiel also surface). Hymnal is, in fact, a word one could apply to the entire album, in both tone and, on occasion, style.

Anyone familiar with Stars of the Lid will probably be reminded of the group while basking in the radiance of the album's shimmering opener, “My Mind Was a Fog… My Heart Became a Bomb.” Even at this early stage, the album's character is sharply defined in the music's meditative, slow-moving blend of strings and guitar washes, and the nine tracks that follow do little to alter that impression. “Then the Quiet Explosion” achieves a kind of hushed grandeur in its merging of children's choir and strings with ambient guitar and piano atmospherics, while dramatic, strings-drenched moodscapes like “Like a Valley With No Echo,” “Holding Your Absence,” and “I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things” envelop the listener in sonic splendour for minutes on end. Ending the album on a wave of soaring uplift with the hauntingly beautiful vocal setting “Tres Dominé” seems like some kind of masterstroke, especially when its song form contrasts so markedly with what precedes it and when Showalter delivers the lines with such grace. Presented with such moments on the fifty-seven-minute album, one might very well feel as if one is, in keeping with the track title, “Turning Into Tiny Particles… Floating Through Empty Space.”

There's always a risk that the addition of symphonic resources to a recording will result in music that's overblown and drowning in pretension. That's not the case here: the children's choir is used judiciously, and the strings are woven into the material in such a way that they complement the guitar and keyboard textures and enhance the dramatic scope of the material. Byrd and Thompson are careful, in other words, about making sure the added sounds are used purposefully rather than indulgently.

March 2014