(2023) Liz Hanks - Land        


Review:
On ‘Land’, an immersive album of depth and subtlety, Liz Hanks helps us understand how a place changes over time. She reads her surroundings like a vast physical palimpsest, peeling away roads and buildings to examine the earthy underbelly, the strata of human activity and natural change. When we experience a landscape, we tend to think in terms of the present moment. That is understandable: a landscape is defined by how we perceive it; the unique atmosphere of a place is born out of an immediate relationship between our senses and the physical attributes that a place has at a particular time. Our interaction with landscape is sensual and instantaneous. But this way of looking at the world, rewarding as it can be, often misses something. We can forget that each individual landscape exists as part of a vast and interlinked historical, topological and perhaps psychic continuum. Each woodland or street – indeed the position of each brick and the silhouette of every rocky outcrop – is shaped by a series of events and processes, some artificial and some natural. What is thrilling, at least for the historian or the psychogeographer, is the way in which those events and processes can be read in the various faces the landscape presents to the world. The reading of a place can be academic and can be looked at through various lenses – archaeology, geology or the history of architecture, for example. But in recent years, we have begun to look at the history of place more and more through the eyes of artists, particularly poets, writers of fiction or autofiction and musicians. The trend in literature can be traced back through Morag Rose, Iain Sinclair, W.G. Sebald and Guy Debord, as far back as Walter Benjamin, but the musical precedents can be harder to pin down. Whatever its origin, music that responds to a particular place has been growing in popularity. Often, at least in the wider sphere of folk or folk-related music, these are albums that seek to reflect the timeless or sublime aspects of an ostensibly natural landscape. Jenny Sturgeon’s 2020 record, The Living Mountain, which dwelt on the slopes of the Cairngorms, is an excellent example. But Land, the new album by Liz Hanks, does things a little differently. Hanks, a cellist and composer living in Sheffield, is interested in both the human and natural histories of her corner of the city. In creating the ten instrumental pieces that make up Land, she has attempted to go beneath the surface of the city’s streets to reinterpret visual clues into sonic cues that help us understand how a place changes over time. She reads her surroundings like a vast physical palimpsest, peeling away roads and buildings to examine the earthy underbelly, the strata of human activity and natural change. Her subject, the suburban district of Meersbrook, turns out to have an engrossing past. Now a sought-after residential area, it was, until Victorian times, something of a rural idyll, a picturesque valley called Rush Dale. It is this valley and its surrounding area that Hanks attempts to explore. So how does this translate into a piece of recorded music? Each track takes its name from an old word for a specific feature of a landscape. The first, Meer (meaning ‘boundary’), is an exploratory, mournfully melodic cello piece punctuated by the occasional plucked string and cloaked in damp background noise. The tone of Hanks’ playing is by turns sombre and delicate, as if she is both mourning and reimagining a lost past. A crunch of footsteps brings the piece to its close, a reminder of the human effect on Rush Dale’s geography. A high shimmer introduces Keld, followed by a tune that seems intriguingly familiar. Although this is the only explicitly traditional tune on the album, there are folk-adjacent melodies scattered throughout, stretched out or slowed down, hiding in plain sight within the neoclassical or minimal superstructure, just as the ancient lie of the land is both visible and elusive in the contemporary topography. Hanks explains in her illuminating liner notes that the keld or spring, its course now altered by human intervention, can still be heard and even felt through the road. These are the little clues that she is acutely attuned to and make this deceptively simple album into something complex and personal. Field recordings – birdsong, the movement of water – filter through the whole album (recorded by Alisdair McGregor). They are perhaps most explicit on Brook, which has a relatively bucolic feel, the cello rising and falling at its own easy pace. The birdsong that runs through Brier, the piece that ends the record, seems to become almost a part of the composition or, looked at another way, the composition becomes part of the landscape. Ride has more intricacy: thudding, almost percussive notes are juxtaposed with quick, adroit bowing. Hide, by contrast, begins in a stately fashion before becoming increasingly elegiac; it almost has a narrative arc of its own, conjuring the lives and hardships of generations of people who have lived on the site. The longer, winding Carr (an old word for marsh) sees Hanks delve further back through history and into prehistory to a time before Sheffield existed when the area was damply wooded. Particularly effective is the moment about halfway through the piece when the field recordings fall away and leave the instrument isolated, as if finding its way through a dark passage. The brief Kerf (the width of a saw cut) is an evocative snippet of neoclassicism that references Victorian industrialism in the form of tree-felling and the building of new factories. Glind (enclosure) takes us back to Tudor England: slightly courtly edges gild an otherwise wild and windblown soundscape. Land was recorded during the Covid pandemic, at a time when many people began to see their surroundings in strange and different ways. This strangeness permeates Hanks’ playing; there is a sense of immersion in both time and place, a willful disregard of the boundaries set out by popular, classical or folk music. She is able to show an area, somewhere that may seem mundane, from multiple perspectives in time and space, and without the need for verbal language. Sheffield, possibly one of Britain’s most liminal city landscapes, is the ideal location for this kind of endeavour. Where Hanks has most in common with her psychogeographical forebears is the way she presents the album as a walk through a tangible, locatable space – the album even has its own app, with a voiceover by Sheffield poet Sally Goldsmith. It helps to cement Land’s status as a fully immersive experience and also situates it in a long line of experimental work that deals with place. Hanks has an extensive CV as a collaborator, working with artists as diverse as Paul Heaton, Smokey Robinson and Self Esteem, but it’s unlikely anything she has previously worked on has the depth, subtlety or ambition of Land. — folkradio.co.uk


   


Track List:
01 - Meer (boundary)
02 - Keld (a spring)
03 - Brook (small stream)
04 - Ride (path made by humans or animals through woodland)
05 - Hide (measurement of land needed to sustain a family)
06 - Carr (marsh)
07 - Ley (an open area of land, clearing in a wood)
08 - Kerf (width of a saw cut)
09 - Glind (enclosure)
10 - Brier (many plants with thorny stems growing in dense clusters)


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, classical
Country: Sheffield, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


Note: If you like the music, support the artist