In 2009 a micro-independent label ‘inspired by the unpredictable, momentary and quiet solitary beauty of the Pennine Moors,’ Hibernate was born. For Jonathan Lees, who operates Hibernate out of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, life in a northern town is less grim than inspiring, judging by the fruits of his labour-of-love front-room cottage industry, now into its fourth year, founded with no idea grander than ‘to just release music we loved and in the best format we could afford.’ The signs are that it’s going strong, at least as evidenced by the different colours, shapes and sizes on show here. Below we try small, medium, and large sizes, the smallest, by Widesky, being in a sense the largest. To pursue this riddle, read on—but first to Talvihorros and Konntinent.
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[Release page] Talvihorros is one of a crop of tone-wrangling guitar-toters emerging in the post-digital ’00s, great axe-scapeists pushing the instrument’s sound envelope, wringing from the necks of their source an other-world of sound. The artist known to his Mum as Ben Chatwin is one of the moodier of the Fender-benders, peddling postrock-doombient collages of six-string steel-smelt laced with organ, harmonium, mandolin, bells, synth and static infusions. Descent into Delta follows Hibernate debut, Music in Four Movements, not only in its sound but also in programmatic nature, though that album’s suicide narrative cedes to a less morbid theme—a map of the mind’s vibrational spectrum, suggesting long ponderings in recording, fluctuations of the mind between states of consciousness, whose wave frequencies the eponymous Greek character represents, along with four others. Of the five, the earlier—“Gamma,” “Beta,” and “Alpha”—are more caustic, clangorous, the later—“Theta” and “Delta”—more mellifluous, tremulous. Descent into Delta retains an in-the-now mien from its live improvisation origins, albeit transformed through editing and processing—the base for sundry string-sieved tone-topping from a palette on which the chorus-swirl of Guthrie, the blues-wooze of MBV, the droning texturalism of Baker and the stretched-out psych of Expo 70 are mixed. The downcast hymnalism of GYBE! and others in its Constellation is another touchstone. Differing architectures and atmospheres reflect the album’s dynamic, a trajectory—from gamma, the most lucid, through to delta, the most Morpheus-inclined, mirroring the slow fall inward to unconsciousness. “Gamma,” for one, seeps slowly from silence to soft swells of chord shimmer and tremolo wooze, dense sound-smears steepling to a foreboding overhang of gruzz and murk. Similarly, the initial quietude of “Beta” becomes a seething oceanic mass, then relents, more pedestrian, plangent, a-glimmer with etiolated whorls of starburst twinkle, before the descent into warm fuzz of destination Delta via “Alpha,” whose relaxed wakefulness is articulated with more reticent realizations, distortion downsized, glistening acoustic fluids prominent. “Theta” soundtracks the slow slide into sleep, the earlier expanses clogged with a fog of unknown provenance, melody atrophying to abstraction. A pealing residue wrung from guitar+FX sustains the mood through to the final “Delta,” on which a viola glides ghostly, gravid, through guitar’s heavy water sopor.
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[Release page] Antony Harrison has built up a considerable body of work as Konntinent, with releases on Home Normal, Dynamophone, Sonic Pieces and Symbolic Interaction. Kiruna, his first for Hibernate, is ideated as ‘a standalone piece,’ a clear disconnect from more hospitable Konntinents (cf. Opal Island), though the inspiring cold is redolent of another alias, Arev Konn. Kiruna’s genesis was against the backdrop of London’s chilliest winter on record (2011), its title alluding to the even more barometer-challenging nights of Sweden’s northern-most city, where he spent time. The terminal gloom of hibernal Kiruna clearly left its mark, Harrison speaking of ‘a relentless, foreboding kind of perma-night, coupled with a brutal cold,’ and the sonic representation he projected as ‘analog waves of blackness,’ with ‘something impenetrably relentless and with a juggernaut of momentum.’ Drawn from improvisations using analogue instruments + FX, the six tracks of this mini-album interpret their conceptual brief with a range of expressive means, refusing to cleave literal-mindedly to dark-bleak-cold paradigms of glacial-isolationist ambient convenience. “Hayashi Drag Track” opens with a lurching neo-Kosmische cameo of spidery detuned psych-noodle, setting the tone of an unsettled twilight zone. “Creep Sxene” deploys down-pitched vox-grabs and 8-bit synth motifs for unheimlich off-melodies, rough-shod beats marshaled into a mutant march of wibbly-wobbly analoguery and shivery ambiance. These proceedings are attended by shades of Radiophonic Workshop chops, but unlike Daphne and Delia, there’s little of the labcoat technician, more of an on-the-fly lo-fi overalled mechanic, engineering unquiet. “Fall City” mixes piano portent, theramin-esque wibble and further transmissions of warped synthesis and babble from the outer limits. “Issaquah” stretches out its synthy one-finger kerrang, subjecting it to feedback attack, before it’s slowly swallowed in inky low-end, shifting to unwontedly euphonic drone stasis, presumably signifying the beauty to be found within cold contemplation. Konntinent’s refuge in consonance continues with the solemn pad sweeps of “Pulserande,” then descends into the sullen netherworld of “The Settlement,” which dissolves in a disorienting miasma of oscillation and modulation, float and flutter, filter sweep and static. Overall, Kiruna artfully portrays a suggestive psychogeography, whose frozen air isn’t so much glacial as dislocative, ranging from errant stumbing to eerie quietude.
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[Release page] Next up is Widesky, whose nom de disque mirrors the vast spaces invoked by his music, previously hosted on Hibernate sublabel, Rural Colours, associates Audio Gourmet and Futuresequence, and Pocket Fields). On these the star was processed guitar, with a supporting cast of piano, field recordings and radio static, ‘woven together through improvisation with DSP chains and looping software to create subtly undulating and centrifugal compositions.’ Seth Chrisman’s stock-in-trade has been big euphonic ambient soundscapes, tapping into the steepling peaks and wide open plains of his home state of New Mexico. His soundcloud site reveals he is now based in Seattle WA, which may or may not have been influential in the slight paradigm shift on Phase Portrait, no.19 in Hibernate’s 3″ cdr postcard series, which sees axe and pick ditched in favour of analogue synth and a strategic finger on the ecstatic drone pulse. That said, there’s no great change of aspect in its broad sweep of tones drawn out into three widescreen drones of stately chronostasis. Perhaps a new tweak is a certain purity—the usual reverb-delay DSP-sprawl held back, enhancing rather than altering states, bringing out the natural buzz and pulse of sawtooth wave and low sinetone. “Pillar of Cloud” embodies this with an eponymous onward-upward float dynamic affording vivid views of slow shifts in the vertical colour of sound. “Approaching The Immemorial” is a warmer fuzzier specimen, doing little compositionally other than to swell and relent to good effect. Best of the bunch is opener “A Sleeping Saga,” the kind of harmonically resonant hum-hymn that makes you lie back and go ‘oooh.’ A big thick sound for a small thin disc, Phase Portrait is not just another day, another drone, achieving with slender means a pure ebb and flow many drone artists strain, over-egging, for.
All releases are available now from Hibernate.
