Another fine cassette release from the Montreal label Presses Précaires. This one is simply called a tape and was made by a.hop, who are a nine-piece collective who have been busy for the last 5-6 years.
The team of Lynette Quek, Bonnie Han Jones, suzueri, Elizabeth Millar, Valentina Villaroel, Ryoko Akama, Liew Niyomkarn, Verónica Cerrotta and Anne-F Jacques are separated by geography (spread across five continents, is their proud boast), so they have formed a very pragmatic approach to working together. Today’s record, for instance, started out at the Tsonami Festival in Chile in 2023, but from what I can make out a.hop weren’t exactly playing as a “band” on the “bill” or performing for an “audience”. For starters, they weren’t all on site, so one imagines that collaborations took place over online meetings, file-sharing, or via smartphones. They weren’t so much “playing a set” as discussing ideas and trading notions back and forth. Yes, sometimes a recorded file might be sent down the wire or sometimes a written score might change hands, but they also communicate via images, or simple prose instructions which contain an idea for an intervention in a particular area.
The finished cassette gathers up all the outputs from a single month’s activity during this residency, and what we have here is a “weaving together” of sounds and events. Note the term “weaving”, which is evidently the group’s preferred way of expressing it, rather than “sound collage” – an appellation I would reach for without even stopping to think. “Weaving” does imply a more considered and organic way of shaping the work, and that benign effect is reflected very clearly on both sides of this short set, which incidentally compresses a month of effort into just 30 minutes. If you want some suggestion of what’s going down on the magnetic strip, it might help to put a.hop in the wider context of their other activities, which including installations, video, sound sculptures, projections, and such like; in fact “live music performance” seems quite low on the list. If physical unusual objects are involved in the making of these electro-acoustic site-specific field recordings, the approach is quite gentle and unassuming.
Anne-F Jacques is already familiar to us (she runs the label and has sent many examples of her lovely sounds) and so is Canadian Elizabeth Millar form the Mystery & Wonder label, but the other names are new to me; Lynette Quek does audio-visual in Singapore, Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean improviser and poet, suzueri is Japanese, Valentina Villaroel is Chilean, Liew Niyomkarn is based in Brussels…very refreshing to hear this innovative and intuitive approach to sound art, finding ways to collaborate productively despite their separation across the globe. Sadly this one is sold out, but you can stream it on Bandcamp. (31/03/2025)