Ian Hawgood :: all these places, together

A memo recorded on a phone ends up beneath the same synthesiser as a professional field recording, each on its own plane.

The record began in solitude, with live Mellotron takes, tape loops and guitar, passed through several generations of tape. The wear of the copies, the pitch that drifts and the warble that widens each note, has long been Ian Hawgood’s grammar: an Englishman of the south coast, after an adult life spent between Japan, Puglia and Warsaw. Back from Still Point, the festival hosted by Ambient Label Hub, he asked friends from different seasons of his life to send him recordings of the places around them. They came from South America, from Iran, from Europe and the United States, some stolen on a mobile phone, others gathered by field recordists with serious equipment, and according to Whitelabrecs’ notes every one of them was treated as an equal.

The title track signs that pact at once. The field recordings settle beneath the synthesiser without artefacts; the tape makes no claim on them, and the equality is the work of the edit, which gives each voice a place where it can still be read.

The degradation has moved into the synthesis itself, into a grainy synthesiser that carries its wear within its own matter and lays down a ground where the pitch barely wavers, consuming the piece where it stands. Above that ground, the recordings made on phones sound cleaner than the music that hosts them; they rise by clarity, because everything around them is already worn. On “quieter channels of connection” distance seems to be measured in decibels.

Elsewhere, “the undeniable magnificence of existence” would be an emphatic title. Here the magnificence is entrusted to a single note: the drone holds it like a plumb line, what R. Murray Schafer called a keynote. Around it move sounds of string and wood, worked until the gesture is lost, and the field recordings enter like the letters Vermeer’s women read beside the window, arriving folded in four from far away and opened only indoors.

Home Normal, the label Hawgood founded, already carried in its name an idea of home made by sediment, and the record, like a herbarium, has pressed each place onto its own page, with a handwritten label and the name of whoever gathered it.