Rounding out an absolutely incredible year for the Australian born, Berlin based cellist, performer, and composer, Judith Hamann, Blank Forms delivers 'Shaking Studies' and 'Music for Cello and Humming', 2 stunning albums from one of the most exciting artists working at the boundaries of contemporary improvised, classical, and experimental music. Both are among our favorite records of the last year.

Judith Hamann is having a pretty astounding year. She’s already dropped 2 stunning albums - ‘Peaks’ on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle imprint, and ‘Days Collapse’ on the venerable Another Timbre - and now she’s back with two more incredible releases for Blank Forms, Shaking Studies on LP and Music for Cello and Humming on CD, her first releases as a soloist. If there was any doubt that Hamann fully has emerged as a crucial voice on the global scene, working at the boundaries of improvised, contemporary classical, and experimental music, these 2, in all their stunning, sonorous beauty and visionary creativity, are sure to lay it to rest.

Despite only having begun to receive the attention that she deserves over the last few years, Judith Hamann has been an active member of the global experimental music scene for well over a decade, bending her talents within the records of James Rushford, Francis Plagne, Oren Ambarchi, Graham Lambkin, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, and numerous others, while working in the live ensembles of Ambarchi, Dennis Cooper, Arnold Dreyblatt, Jürg Frey, Lambkin, Lucier, Seijiro Murayama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Michael Pisaro, Ilan Volkov, and La Monte Young, to name a few, as well as in maintaining duo projects with Rosalind Hall, Anthea Caddy, and Lori Goldston.

Blank Forms’ pair of releases - Shaking Studies and Music for Cello and Humming - were intended to be her recording debuts as a soloist, but were delayed due to the global pandemic, allowing them to now emerge as a highpoint in an absolutely incredible year, pushing on from the ground charted across ‘Peaks’ and ‘Days Collapse’.

Shaking Studies, issued on vinyl, is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds Hamann’s long standing examination of the expressions and manifestations of shaking as a generative subject within her solo performance practice. A truly immersive approach to sound, while the album deploys a vast range of audible techniques across its length - micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity - much of its power is activated by Hamann’s expanded conception of the term, becoming a form of conceptual doubling that is activated by the use of sphygmological readings of the pulse of her cello and the combination of beating chordal structures with electronics and recordings of real world shaking. The result is easily the most beautiful and fascinatingly unique manifestation of drone and durational tone that we’ve heard in years.

Like great art, Shaking Studies balances raw humanity and creative intuition with singularly brilliant ideas that draw the ear through inner and outer worlds. Seemingly complex when reduced to description, the album reveals a deeply poetic and deceptively simple approach to sound that culminates as a tense dance through raw, sonorous form. Shaking Studies witnesses a rising star of profound talent and skill at the top of her game.

Music for Cello and Humming, issued as a CD, is an intuitive extension of the similar creative territories to those that traced their way across ‘Shaking Studies’, having arisen from Hamann’s investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance. In addition to her own “Humming Suite” and “Study for Cello and Humming”, it features her performance of 2 stunning pieces for cello and humming composed for her by Anthony Pateras and Sarah Hennies respectively.

While Music for Cello and Humming channels many of the same creative approaches and temperaments as those heard on ‘Shaking Studies’, here we encounter them in an expanded sense of range and dynamic form. The Anthony Pateras penned piece, Down to Dust, deploys sprawling space and ambience that envelopes Hamann’s cello and voice, while the 5 parts of her “Humming Suite” trace through remarkably versatile sets of interactions between their sonic actors; the intimacy and vulnerability of Hamann’s voice playing subtle interference with her cello, triggering microtonal beating and instability within each work’s total form. This capacity for rupture and fragility - Hamann conceives of the voice as referencing dislocation and ventriloquism within her practice - reaches new heights on her rendering of Sarah Hennies’ “Loss,” a piece that deliberately instructs her to hum beyond the limits of her vocal range, incorporating oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves, within a strikingly singular work that positions failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being.

A truly stunning and visionary body of work that challenges the orthodoxies of chamber music, Music for Cello and Humming joins Shaking Studies as a profound poetic by one of the most exciting artists working today. As ever, Blank Forms has their finger on the pulse.