A Mix of Meditative and Present, Drone and Texture

The new album Glade from Hummingbird

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The opening track of Hummingbird’s tremendous new album, *Glade*, is airy and dense at the same time. The bellows-like audio has a deep, engrossing, maximal-minimalist quality that brings to mind the work of Terry Riley. Titled “Himalayah” it’s a muted raga, an ecstatic pause, a rusty halo. It builds as it goes, gaining mass yet remaining clouded. It’s the first of 14 tracks on *Glade*, which proceeds through variations on this trance-inducing, pastoral ambience.

Much of the record is built on drones that emphasize enchantment over anxiety. This sort of thing can become treacly in the wrong hands, but that’s not the case here. What grounds the work is the drones often engage with textural material, like the audible shaker in “Three Empires,” or what appears to be creaking wood beneath the echoing piano in “Six Points of Tabligh” and a similar creaking combined with a sandpaper burr amid the otherwise entirely winsome “Fragment of a Discourse.” *Glade*’s approach to drones gets orchestral on “Lesson Nine,” where the instrumentation goes in and out of phase in a way that suggests it’s being warped in real time, the fabric of some recording messed with this way and that, gently but perceptibly. The entire album is flush with this sense of heightened everydayness, a mix of meditative and present, drone and texture, placid and grounded.

This idea of “discovery” has been on my mind a lot lately, so I wanted to mention that I found *Glade* via Bandcamp, thanks to one other person than myself having publicly acknowledged on our Bandcamp user feeds that’d we’d purchased another album, *Dual Concentric* by Nature Program, which I [wrote about yesterday](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/03/nature-program-dual-concentric/). I clicked through to that person’s list of Bandcamp purchases, and then listened to several of them. My first experience to *Glade* was as an accidental overlay to Dual Concentric. They pair well.

The album is available at [facture.bandcamp.com](https://facture.bandcamp.com/album/glade), though the [fac-ture.co.uk](http://www.fac-ture.co.uk/) website (whose first release was another Hummingbird album, *Our Fearful Symmetry Remixes*) doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2013, and the [Discogs.com](https://www.discogs.com/artist/1882723-Hummingbird-2) site [attributes](https://www.discogs.com/artist/1882723-Hummingbird-2) *Glade* to [Fluid](https://www.discogs.com/artist/1882723-Hummingbird-2), whose [site](http://fluidaudio.bigcartel.com/product/hummingbird-glade) offers some glimpses of the packaging of the limited-edition physical release:

glade-fluid

It’s Unfortunate Bandcamp Lacks Playlist Functionality

It'd be nice to whittle Nature Program's excellent Dual Concetric to its ambient core

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Update (April 4, 2016):** My playmoss.com account was upgraded, so I was able to make the playlist discussed below embeddable:

The original post appears below.

This is the wonderfully textured yet ethereal track “Supine Anchor” off the album *Dual Concentric* by Brooklyn-based Nature Program. Nature Program appears to be the recording moniker of the individual who made the HC-TT, a device [I wrote about yesterday](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/02/landscape-hc-tt/). The HC-TT allows a musician to manipulate a standard tape cassette in real time, to edge the music forward and backward thanks to a large circular knob.

Screen Shot 2016-04-03 at 8.34.41 PM

The website for the HC-TT, [hc-tt.com](http://www.hc-tt.com/), on its Letters page includes a link to [the Bandcamp page of Nature Program](https://tonewheel.bandcamp.com/), where there is currently one album: *Dual Concentric*. Elsewhere on the HC-TT site there’s a “Why” page — the sort of thing more makers might consider. (That is, if the why isn’t justifiable, maybe there’s a better problem out there for you to solve.) The Why for the HC-TT is compelling, even if you haven’t heard the super cool sound samples associated with it. The site makes a clear case for the cassette’s unique sonic properties and the HC-TT’s potential as part of an electronic musician’s kit. Also, it’s written from the perspective of a curious, exploratory musician:

>This device was made for a fairly selfish reason: For years, I’ve wanted to have a compact, organized device that mirrors the compact, organized cassette medium. It’s an obsessive-compulsive dream to create your own library of tape loops which stay safely packaged and organized inside individual cassettes.

“Supine Anchor” is among the most relaxed of the tracks on *Dual Concentric*. It is a sequence of layered loops whose texture and warped quality suggest they originated on physical tape, perhaps even involved the HC-TT in their production. There’s a lush voice, a falsetto, that brings to mind Brian Eno’s, and it appears about midway through the piece, after the initial bout of fractured minimalist abstract beatcraft melts into something ever more echoing and lush. There’s a lot more to the record than “Supine Anchor” might suggest: techno, light gamecore, electro, instrumental proto-hip-hop. But within that expansive coverage, 20 tracks in all, are about a half dozen or so with a more ambient quality to them.

It’s unfortunate that Bandcamp doesn’t have a playlist function. Unlike services from Spotify to SoundCloud, Bandcamp lacks the ability for listeners to serve as collators. You can learn a lot from following and looking into the acquisitions of fellow Bandcamp users, but you can’t do much more than that. You speak through your wallet (and your wishlist) on Bandcamp. If you buy something, it’s associated with your account (mine is at [bandcamp.com/disquiet](http://bandcamp.com/disquiet)), but you can’t, for example, create an ersatz hits collection for an artist with multiple albums, or, as I was drawn to do with *Dual Concentric*, whittle 20 tracks down to their background-music essentials.

Fortunately there are other services, such as [playmoss.com](https://playmoss.com/en/disquiet/playlist/dual-concentric-select), which do allow for collecting material found elsewhere on the web. I can’t embed it (*note: my account was upgraded, so I now can embed playlists — see the top of this post*), but I’ve made a playlist at [playmoss.com](https://playmoss.com/en/disquiet/playlist/dual-concentric-select) that collects seven key tracks off of *Dual Concentric*, the ones that largely do away with rhythm in favor of something more murky and enticing. The tracks are, in order of appearance, “Sources Say,” “Nature Program – Breathers,” “Supine Anchor,” “Flourishings,” “Inclement,” “Fulfillment Center” and “Understand.”

The full album is available at [tonewheel.bandcamp.com](https://tonewheel.bandcamp.com/). More on the HC-TT at [hc-tt.com](http://hc-tt.com).

Playing a Tape Cassette by Hand

Listening to a new device, the HC-TT

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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This little device, called the HC-TT, is a “human controlled tape transport.” It plays standard tape cassettes with no motor, no automation. The only power is a turn of that large knob. The knob moves backward and forward, allowing for gestural effects, as demoed in this Instagram from the account of the manufacturer, the Brooklyn-based Landscape:

A video posted by Landscape (@landscape_hc_tt) on

In this next example, it’s paired with a looping machine, the Elektron Octatrack:

A video posted by Landscape (@landscape_hc_tt) on

There’s a large set of audio examples at Landscape’s [SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/landscape_hc-tt), drawing from flamenco, hip-hop, business self-help, and other sound sources:

The tape cassette has proved to be a useful tool for musicians in recent years to inexpensively release physical documents of their recordings. It’s also prevalent as an instrument, for such things as old-school tape echo and looping, thanks to both reclaimed reel-to-reel systems and cassettes. The HC-TT brings a modern, gadget-maker ingenuity to the medium.

More on the HC-TT at [hc-tt.com](http://www.hc-tt.com/). It ships with a power supply and “one randomly selected old cassette tape.”