Sophie Hutchings
Becalmed
(Preservation)
Becalmed is an album title uncommonly suited to its contents. ‘Becalm’ is the softest type of verb, one that describes a kind of state, not a movement. Something left to the winds. It’s a quaint word, almost archaic, left to poets and word hoarders, associated with ships and salt and sou‘westers and Roaring Forties. All things easy to conjure when describing pianist Sophie Hutchings debut album, redolent as it is of lonely places and uneasy calm.
On ‘Seventeen,’ the eleven minute opening track of
Becalmed, Hutchings unfurls a long, largely solo piano piece written at the titular age. Some years have passed for Hutchings since then, but in this one track is a clear sense of what she has continued to do in her subsequent work. It’s somewhere between Chopin’s dreamy nocturnes and the heady, tense urgings of Chris Abrahams. A calm and lyrical beginning yields to a second half where torrents of notes recall The Necks at their most hypnotic. The development from this early but mature piece is all at once metaphorical, formal and musical: motifs and themes developed here resurface on other tracks. We will hear some stray notes and themes again in the brief, untitled piece that comes as track three.
Between ‘Seventeen’ and its reprise, though, is ‘Sunlight Zone’. Despite its sunlight, Hutchings here evokes isolation. Rather than happy scenes of frolicking in the sun, I think instead of ‘Lonely Stretch’ by The Triffids. Long drives along baked highways. Here we get the first flutters of violin on the record. Every note of the violin stutters and scrapes, before diving into an uncertain end, drifting off into thick reverb. Warren Ellis and others have made the association of this sound with Australian landscapes a kind of second nature.
It’s not until ‘Portrait of Haller’ that there comes a moment of seeming happiness and clarity. And even then it comes with portentous thumps of drums and a quick turning back to the moments of uncertain and downcast mood. It gathers pace again at the close, speeding to the end with the windows down and shoes off. Here and on ‘After Most’ do we get the two tracks that take off. On ‘After Most’ the piano disappears behind cello, guitar and the heartbeat pulse of a kick drum. It’s a beautiful encroaching movement, the album’s dominant instrument swallowed up by drones and bows, bells and slides, voice and tape. It’s unmistakably the production work of Tony Dupe, the sometimes-Sydney-sometimes-Berlin-based producer.
Becalmed is a subtle and sad album. Like many such albums with neo-classical and romantic inspirations—Max Richter, Peter Broderick and Goldmund—it can act at times as if the 20th century didn’t happen, as if tonal dissonance and serial composition were yet to be imagined. The violin scrapings, the tape treatments and drones do push
Becalmed into the 21st century--where we should be happy to have it. But you’d have to be a particularly unforgiving modernist to miss the beauty and heart in these songs.
Ben Gook
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