Hummingbird - Our Fearful Symmetry Remixed

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  • Our Fearful Symmetry, released last year on Fluid Audio under the mysterious Hummingbird pseudonym, was an ambient record that delivered incredible sound design through mostly acoustic elements. Focusing on the resonant qualities of strings and pianos, notes were left to ring out endlessly across each track, modern classical written in deep breaths rather than proper musical notation. It was a bit like a walk through thick woods in the daylight, as an array of purely natural sounds came together to make something bigger than the sum of its parts. Hummingbird seemed to give new meaning to the word "earthy"—the album even came packaged with a pinecone. The album rightly caused a bit of a hubbub in the appropriate circles, and its extremely limited release finds itself an unlikely companion: Our Fearful Symmetry Remixed. No, new label Facture has not produced an album of bedroom techno re-imaginings, but rather inserted a ticking pacemaker, sending bolts of modernity shooting through its nomadic veins. The conflicting two-universe dichotomy is generative, sparking beauty and awe-inspiring synthesis more often than discord. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "Sketch of the Mythology (Interval at the Station)," where the solo piano is edged by persistent crackle until what sounds like TV dialogue bursts through the microscopic cracks, tainting the once unfettered landscape with the remnants and throwaways of human culture. Whereas on the original, piano and strings were left alone to define the compositions, here individual sounds are isolated, desiccated and blurred. "Little Green Box" shatters its titular music box, strewing each note almost randomly across the aural spectrum, Elsewhere the album explores texturally convoluted electro-acoustic drone, typified by the perpetually peeling vaporous layers of "Defining Space (Colour Space)" or "Seeds of Deception." Remarkable, unexpected cohesion—the convergence of oppositional frequencies, separate instruments congealing into one pure sound—was the crux of the original album, and it remains so here, only with the impetus reversed. On Remixed electronic becomes nature, and the result is more soothing than dystopian. It might be a little charred, and with a few more clearings than I remember, but as it turns out that forest is still a fine place to take a stroll through. Part of me wonders if this one's going to come with a robo-pinecone.
  • Tracklist
      01. Uncertainty in Copenhagen (Nowhere to Turn) 02. Seeds of Deception (This Life) 03. The Little Green Box (Landscape) 04. Sketch of the Mythology (Interval at the Station) 05. Eemina (Unpopular Culture) 06. Florian (Not in My Back Yard) 07. Thoughts in the Head (Cassiopea) 08. Starfish Seastar (The Water Table) 09. Defining Space (Colour Space) 10. The Garden of Secrets (Groups, Rings, Fields) 11. The Making of a Revolution (Bounded Sequence)
RA