Simon Eliasson

Hamuli Plene - Midelaghe 1

Liner notes (printed insert)
2019
Ny Agenda

Hamuli Plene is a collaboration between the Swedish artist Emanuel Sundin and the German artist Phil Struck. Acquainted through the fringe scene evolving around experimental electronics and post-club dance genres, they found a shared vocabulary of auditory aesthetics. Sundin coming from a varied background as both a live drummer and producer of music with a leaning towards genres like dub, afro and disco. Struck has, in contrast, mainly worked in the niche of cassette-released ambient & noise.

Midelaghe 1 could easily be mistaken for the sounds captured by an anthropologist happening upon a contemplative ceremony on a prairie farm in an isolated village far from civilization. All silent faces in the constant hum of life from insects and the surrounding nature. The slowed down pace of the summer season wrapped in the spell of heat.

The recordings for the album took place early spring on an old farmyard in the countryside of Börringe in Skåne, dating back a few centuries. The soil itself is rich with even older remnants of farm life, scattered with clay pottery and a once lucrative red brick industry. Location and ancestry has apparently seeped through the floorboards and coloured the sessions at the farm.

The album toys with the concept of field recording. While they might be built on various samples of field recordings, in the hands of Sundin and Struck they are manipulated and molded into a mythological landscape of their own.

This is evident also in the cryptic language of the track titles and the duo’s name itself. The effect is an abstraction of the familiar which comprises a sense of both the uncanny and the nostalgic. Distortion and tape static mingle with rain and wind. The distinction between the organic and the electronic is blurred beyond recognition.

Perhaps this is a reflection on the technocentric times in which we are living; how all matter is subject to the same force of deterioration. Or how the natural world is gradually replaced with mechanical replicas. Midelaghe 1 hints at the start of a number of releases, yet falls upon you as a lamentation over a period long gone.