On his new EP Murmurist, drone-glitch-ambient artist Hanetration successfully challenges our expectations of the genre. Make no mistake, this record is all about the drone and the glitch and the ambience – heartbeat pulses and synthetic hums and squalling feedback and washes of textural noise are its DNA. But Hanetration has also tweaked the formula, and in doing so has added flourishes and techniques that some fans of the genre might consider taboo.For the most part, Murmurist has a beat. It has a groove. If you tried hard enough, you could probably dance to it.
“Morning’ opens with a plaintive whale-call of murky synthesisers and a rapid crescendo-decrescendo wash of overdriven electronic shrieks. Everything slowly grows more intense: The whale-call grows more urgent, the shrieks grow more shrill, the wall-of-noise starts to feed off itself, throwing out aural spikes and shards. At the point when this blare starts to really hurt, a low-low-low bass-drum pulse emerges, anchoring the mix and leading the track and capturing our attention.
“Begin’ treads similar ground, yet is even more invested in the rhythm. It begins (no pun intended) as it ends, with an up-tempo Motorik beat seemingly made of equal parts glitches and real drums underpinning an oscillating wave of droning tones that sounds as if its both caught in a feedback-loop and reacting to the beat, a subsonic drum-free breakdown the only break from the propulsive rhythm. “Fly’ is more a sketch than a song. Barely thirty seconds long, its combination of feeding delay and a relaxed and airy acoustic drumbeat is over all-too-soon.
“Wither’ is the exception to this rhythm-focussed rule. Devoid of drums and percussive glitches, it is a moody piece, the abrasive edges of the drones, pulses, and synthesisers toned done in comparison to the rest of the record. A high and keening electronic melody slowly dominates, while the rest of the assorted drones provide a sympathetic and low-key accompaniment. The overall tone is of melancholy and regret, and associations with Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack are inevitable. But this is no bad thing – the atmosphere that Hanetration creates is dirtier and grittier than the studio-polish of Vangelis’ work, while the tones that Hanetration employs are coarser and more fragmented, and almost seem more appropriate to the seedy milieu of the SF classic.
“Sundown’, the final track of Murmurist, is perhaps the most far-out. It’s definitely the track that stretches the genre’ boundaries furthest. Is that reedy drone a heavily treated melodica, or is a distorted calliope, or is it merely one synthesiser among many? Are they underwater bass clarinets, or low-low-low electronic frequencies? Is that a muddy violin, or just a rough oscillator lost in its own little world? Are the clunking, almost-random woodblocks and wind chimes and gongs playing along with the drones, or are they found sounds and field recordings? No matter how hard I listen, I can’ really tell where the “electronic†ends and the “acoustic†begins and what is “synthetic†and what is “naturalâ€. This track alone is worth the price of admission.
You can download ‘Murmurist’s for free from http://hanetration.bandcamp.com/album/murmurist-ep
