Vital Weekly

Following her \"Longtitude/Cratere\" work on Komplott (see Vital Weekly 498) here is now her second CD for the same label. Hanna Hartman is a composer - full stop. Whereas the first CD was a work about sailing and a work about the volcano Etna, this new one has four separate pieces and it\'s a bit harder to tell what they are about. Hartman goes out with a tape recorder and a microphone and records sound. But unlike many of her peers recording natural events (birds, wind, rain), Hartman focusses on human activity. Sounds of the mouth in \"Wespen Vesper\" - imitating a wasp, alongside other animal sounds, which are thoroughly edited in the studio. Hartman is a pure concrete composer. She hardly uses electronic sound processing, but almost entirely on focussing on concrete sound collages to craft her pieces of music. All around the world she has captured sounds of human doing something. Like a fence being strummed, voices, eating, but of course also birds in the harbor. Unlike some of the older garde in the musique concrete scene, she uses repetition to quite some extent, which connects her music to the world of \"pop\" music, but the actual result has nothing to do with it. No doubt many hours of editing went into these four pieces, which are very soundtrack like. Perhaps a bit of short release, but the four pieces are great. Very impressive stuff here, once again.