Hallock Hill

A Hem of Evening

released  8 April 2012

These pieces were recorded last summer, a few months after the release of The Union and just after the release of There He Unforeseen. In the wake of the latter, I felt the need to go back to the acoustic guitar and revisit some of the central themes and methods of The Union: overlapping improvisations, twisted melodic weavings, and a limited palette. What came, though, was something much more naked and spare. Where some of the tracks on The Union were built around the idea of continually stacking great density of sound and involutions, the tracks on A Hem of Evening worked with a different geometry. Air and space. Expansion of themselves within themselves, rather than an expansion coming from additional voices. I also, admittedly, wanted to prove to myself again that I could craft something solid around my explorations of a single instrument. On The Union you will hear several different acoustic guitars at work. On Hem, I stuck with a single guitar: its voice heard throughout, and as such this album is as much a celebration of the sound of this one instrument as it is a collection of improvisations around a theme.

Not that it matters what I think of my own creations, but if anything I feel them as physical entities. As bodies entwined. As families walking through the woods. As children swimming in the lake, or sliding down a hill. As people in the bar talking with and through one another. But my opinion really doesn’t matter, nor does it matter where they came from. They’re gone now. And perhaps they are with you. If so, many thanks.

A book of photographs and prose poems based on these pieces will be released soon in an edition of 26 lettered copies, with details to follow. In the meantime, A Hem of Evening can be heard and downloaded over at bandcamp.