Igloo Magazine :: Hana Stretton :: tiarn (Self Released / Lima Loma / PW Elverum & Sun)

A seduction to enter into, like sleep itself

Hana Stretton’s tiarn is an exercise in dream reverie and hypnagogic songcraft. It’s a twilight album set between the edge of waking and sleep, night and day. It’s soft cadences are like the allure of the ocean, a seduction to enter into, like sleep itself, it catches you unaware and before you know it, you are inside another world with its own rules, its own logic.

The pieces for this, her sophomore effort, were crafted during a period of time while living quite alone near the Pacific Ocean on its Australian shores. It was her habit to go down to the water and swim in the blue of dusk. These azure dips overlapped with the winter whale migrations, and perhaps some of their songs seeped into her own mind and soul. Water keeps things in the flow and ideas for music swam into her during her ritualistic purifications in the icy salt water. On the walk back home the melodies would surface and she would record these as the evening progressed. It’s this naturalistic process that gives the album its striking yet elusive character.

Ideas for songs, poems or stories can come in a flash and they can come strongly, but they slip away just as easily. Paying close attention to them by the constant humming, constant singing, constant courting of the songs that wish to emerge is no easy to task, but Stretton has managed to coax these pieces out of that creative borderland, where there is always the risk of them slipping away, and into this suite of recordings that have made them very much alive.

Stretton was born in Canberra, Australia, between Sydney and Melbourne. Permaculture, that mighty gift of ecological philosophy given to world by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison was born in Tasmania. One of my favorite principles from permaculture is the idea to “use edges and value the marginal.” It’s on the margins where different kinds of ecological systems blend together. It’s in the margins where different kinds of musical genres blend together. Here those genres are ambient and folk music, creating an idiosyncratic lo-fi blend. Her inspiration, as noted before also came from the margins of ocean and land, and it’s this dreamy characteristic between waking and sleep I find so pervasive across these wonderful pieces.

Bits of environmental detritus permeate the arrangements which consist of strings, pipes, synth, what sometimes sounds like accordion, many things I cannot make out exactly because of the way they are mixed maximalizes a sense of immateriality. Whiffs of field recordings, captured conversation, rain or wind throughout.

The art of field recording reverses itself ::

Field recording is now a folk art. Not only in the sense that the great ballad preservers of the past such as John and Alan Lomax went out into the field with reel-to-reels to record folk songs, but now, when most anyone can record environmental sounds on the fly, field recordings of the ambience of everyday life. That’s when the art of field recording reverses itself once again from being something that had once been used to preserve vanishing ways of folk life to becoming a folk art in itself.

Hana Stretton’s album tiarn is filled with the kind of hazy lo-fi arrangements that pull on the heart strings of sepia toned memories, fading Polaroid snapshots in sound of private moments and community life alike. It’s not crazy to learn that some old family camera footage is part of the inspiration behind these songs.

Before she was born her family had lived in Japan in the ‘90s. A young family looks over valleys to the mountains beyond during the summer. Her parents had also bought a synthesizer they never used while in Tokyo. She started using that synth and it was a way to reconnect to the past. Some of the sounds from the camera footage also make up the field recordings that were used—the hushed conversations, the rain, the wind, insects buzzing. This is the place where family tapes and home movies form another kind of private documentary, a documentary now shared in all its vulnerability.

“Yet I know these soundscapes and songs were composed even if it feels as if when I am listening, that I am just caught up inside of Stretton’s daydream. It’s not a bad daydream to be inside of, especially on a lazy afternoon” ~Justin Patrick Moore

Isolationist piano tinkles meet lazily strummed, half strummed, barely strummed, guitars and other instruments that just seem to fall out of the speakers effortless. Yet I know these soundscapes and songs were composed even if it feels as if when I am listening, that I am just caught up inside of Stretton’s daydream. It’s not a bad daydream to be inside of, especially on a lazy afternoon.

The group singing of the choir who collaborated with her on the song “As It Was Before This” is one of the points on the record where the tension between the individual and community is felt. The choir is reminiscent of heavenly realms and oceanic expanses. A sense of communion with powers outside the self is heard through these uplifting voices as they bridge material and non-physical realms.

This feels like a very private album, very personal in its overall vision, aesthetic and design, yet I hear a longing for connection in these songs. Other players are here as well, other voices. Yet the mingle in with her own playing, her own compositions.

The word tiarn means landholder. Stretton shows her ability on this record to be a songholder bridging the realms of ocean and land, dream and waking life, bringing back treasures from the deep to share with the world.

tiarn was released independently in August, with vinyl editions through P.W. Elverum & Sun (North America), Brierfield Flood Press (Australia), and Lima Limo (Europe/UK), followed by a tour across Europe and North America.

Dates ::
Sun. Sept.13 – Bristol, UK @ Bristol Folk House
Mon. Sept. 14 – London, UK @ Grand Junction
Fri. Sept. 19 – Chicago, IL @ Constellation
Tue. Sept. 23 – Montreal, QC @ Pop Montreal
Wed. Sept. 24 – Ottawa, ON @ FONO
Sat. Sept. 27 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground
Sun. Sept. 28 – North Adams, MA @ Tourists
Mon. Sept. 29- Catskills, NY @ Avalon Lounge
Tue. Sept. 30 – State College, PA @ Manny’s
Wed. Oct. 1 – Frostburg, MD @ Clatter Cafe
Fri. Oct. 3 – Efland, NC @ Feast Festival
Sat. Oct. 4 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd
Mon. Oct. 6 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Perch
Tue. Oct. 7- Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records
Thu. Oct. 9 – Vancouver, BC @ St James Hall
Wed. Oct. 14 – Seattle, WA @ The Vera Project
Thu. Oct. 15 – Portland, OR @ Maps Good Space
Fri. Oct. 16 – San Francisco, CA @ The Lab
Sat. Oct. 17 – Los Angeles, CA @ 2220 Arts + Archives
Sun. Oct. 18 – Ojai, CA @ The Listening Garden