Review: Hanetration - Timelapse

Music is building in the room above me, in the air in front of me, in the corridor through the open doorway. At some points, Timelapse sounds like those psychotic horror movie moments where clocks and kitchen utensils activate themselves in rhythmic unison, as though there is a will within objects to ascend into music rather than receiving any organic instigation – existing somewhere outside of both the natural unfurl of field recordings and the manipulation that leaves composer fingerprints over each audio fragment, the music is that of a fictional space playing itself, as though a mutual will circumvents through each of Hanetration’s sonic constructions.

One of the most prominent sounds is a strange, gleaming string sound, which replaces the initial attack of the bow (how ever slight) with a unsteady, woozy increase in friction, like the song of a circular saw as it leans into its first moment of contact – it squiggles through the air like a neon sign, planting a melancholic and malformed melody throughout the dusty, dropped-ball trip-hop of “Moon”, and then gliding up and down in ritualistic free-form over the jarred drum hand-slaps on “Opal”. The album art is a photograph taken through a mucky train window, capturing both the parallel lines of the track itself and a horizon of squared-off factory buildings, rendered somewhat hazy by the gunk accumulating on the windowpane. Visiting the photograph midway through my first listen to Timelapse, I realise that it’s a perfect match: the industry grind and grey steel, the transience of a space materialised in a momentary cross-location coalescence, the window through which eyes vacantly draw in old memories and nostalgic snapshots (now blurry and degraded with age), and the click-clack of the track that implants music within object.