Having developed her very own language, the Swedish sound artist and composer Hanna Hartman creates music that are exclusively made up from authentic, unprocessed sounds that she has recorded on various locations around the world. Through new constellations of sounds taken out of their original context – and thus perceived in their purity – she creates an extraordinary music revealing hidden correspondences between the most diverse auditive impressions.
Since 1990 Hartman has composed works for radio, sound sculptures and numerous performances all over Europe. More recently she started also to write pieces for instrumentalists. Her many awards and grants include Prix Europa (1998), the Karl-Sczuka-Preis (2005), the Phonurgia Nova Prize (2006), and a Villa Aurora grant (2010). During 2007 and 2008 she was Composer-in-Residence for Swedish Radio. Hanna Hartman lives and works in Berlin.
“H ^ 2†is Hanna Hartmans third CD on Komplott.
Bare Signs
About Hanna Hartman
Of course, you listen differently, if you have seen how Hanna Hartman dissects the sound, how she scalps it from its surroundings and frees it from all remains of its original meaning. You listen differently, if you have seen how she slowly shifts her body weight, so that the old timber piling under her feet begin to sing, and how she then lets the microphone glide over the ground, in order to capture this wooden song in its abstract beauty.
In Hartman\'s work, sound quality and sound source come undone in a peculiar way. She creates an aural inter-space, that rises above the banality of everyday noise, while it refuses immediate access to the musically conditioned ear. It is difficult not to associate the flutter in Messages from the Lighthouse with a bird, even though it is quite clear that this bird doesn't exist. Instead this passage is more about the "par excellency" of the flap itself, about a form of listening that transcends the object by the means of sound, about a jumpy and dry tremolo as an aural entity of its own. From this entity then a music arises, that is charged with meaning, but that obliterates the deixis of the concrete sound by completely abstracting it. The sound becomes a bare sign, in need of the composer\'s interpretation.
Of course, you listen differently, if you have seen with what care and long sight Hartman collects sound, how she auscultates every conceivable object with regard to its sound potential, from a rubber duck to a grommet.
When Adorno spoke of an "disenchanted world", he implied that music would be able to reconstitute this lost magic as a result of its mimetic power. Hartman\'s magic disintegrates the relationship between things, creating a counter-world in which the object-hood of an artifact is nullified by its sound.
The fact that instrumental recordings form the basis of all five pieces on this CD is unusual and indicates, that Hartman has in fact shifted the coordinates of her aesthetics over the past years. The individual sound language of the musicians prefigures the pieces, up to the subtle irony of confronting Ida Falk Winland\'s well trained opera soprano with the sound world of car racing.
Björn Gottstein
journalist and writer, Berlin
