A major new project from Tim; multi-generic, exquisitely orchestrated and haunted by silence, this 64-minute CD for voice, piano, percussion, harp, violin, viola, clarinets, French horn, acoustic and electric guitars - and both electronic and concrète sounds - offers 37 very different musical settings of Japanese Haiku.
The project was born in lockdown when the poet Harry Gilonis decided to mark each day by translating one haiku from the Japanese. For a hundred days, Tim Hodginson was one of the email recipients of these labours 'I wasn't sure what to make of this obsessive procedure, or, indeed, what to make of the poems themselves, but something about them slowly insinuated itself into my mind. I first thought of setting them to music sometime in mid 2023...[and], from the very beginning the point, was not to set individual haiku as stand-alone, inspired, moments but to set a whole series of them as an extended network of sonic inter-relationships.... Atsuko Kamura, with whom I had already worked [on Yumi Hara's Lindsay Cooper songbook], was someone who I thought would excel at singing across the kind of abrupt changes in genre and sound-world I was beginning to imagine -since these songs are situated in an extremely wide musical space, not only in the sense of being surrounded by silence and tending towards economies of texture, but also in the sense of being free from any over-all uniformity of genre, technique, sound-world, or style.'. Although the overall feel of the CD evokes the austere disjoint precision of the postwar masters (think Boulez' Marteau sans Maitre) its soundworld crosses multiple genres and aesthetics. Full of exquisite confluences, it's a world to itself; a river - give it a chance to adjust your listening.