Soon by Hana Stretton

and "the Art of the Release" workshop

Hello! Two pretty major announcements in this newsletter. Welcome to it.

The first is that my little non-label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, is dressing up as a real record label for a minute and releasing someone’s record! It’s happened a few times over the decades but it’s been a while. This is momentous.

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“Soon” by Hana Stretton

This was originally released in 2023 by Brierfield Flood Press & Restless Spring, and then quickly sold out. I first heard it when I was checking out who I was going to be playing a show with in Melbourne last fall. Immediately, I was lost. It was apparent right away to me that this recording is an all-timer, an extremely unique world in sound and song. Mysterious, deep, resonant, inhabitable.

Over the course of the last 6 months or so Hana and I have been slowly working on preparing this remastered re-release. We gave it a deluxe treatment. Re-cut for vinyl by John Golden Mastering, new artwork on heavy tip-on jackets, a new 16 page booklet of photos and writing, a postcard, a bookmark, a download. It’s finally ready, and available now. Only 500 copies though, so jump on it.

Here’s what I wrote about it as a press release:

I am extremely honored to present this record to you. It’s a reissue of the now out of print short first run, remastered and redesigned, with words and booklets and etc. Yes, the object is beautiful, but more significantly, it carries a recording that does something very rare: a breathtaking internal world held in sound, crackling with life and free from intervention.

Artists try to quiet the chatter for moments long enough to collect ideas and bring them back to show the rest of us, polished off, decorated, built up. With these recordings it seems Hana Stretton was able to move completely in to that quiet place and just stay. Instead of picking the fruit, she gives us the whole orchard.

From what I can gather, Hana lived for many months, a year?, alone on a remote farm in deep rural New South Wales (Australia), Captain’s Flat. She spent her generous days tending to cows and eyeing down brush fires and floods. During this time these recordings were made. She says she set up the recording gear outside and that “the world was thick with sound, and so the music mimicked.” Yes. But more than that. I hear an artist who has entered completely into the stream where creation originates. Beyond mimicking a world, these recordings are made of it, no inside and no out.

Hana Stretton has truly recorded the deep flourishing sound of a quiet listening mind in full blossom. The chatter subdued, she brings forth the tapestry of the world itself. Accompanying animals and choirs of internal voices sing ribbons of inspired hunches, fluttering, then blowing away.

The thing that happens to a person’s mind on retreat has a sound. Silence isn’t silent. The world goes on. With enough time and breathing room, the rippling multitudinous activity of a place rises back up and fills the emptied bowl of sky. Hana was there to catch all this, to somehow record and play it back for us, to get out of the way enough to reveal the terrain and its singing. She is in the terrain too, with her tender actual human voices braiding together with the birds and grass and sky. The space between her fingers whiffing the air near guitar strings, making the space ring, clear and close.

Why this version? I am no record label. I put out my own stuff and that’s pretty much it, but every so often there’s an undeniable need for a thing to exist and I don’t know another way besides to just do it. When I heard Hana’s album in advance of playing a show together in Melbourne last fall, I dropped everything and went completely in, totally absorbed. I’d never heard anything like this. I thought forward fifty, a hundred years and saw others continually re-entering this tender world she’s made. It is a precious lost artifact, and we are the lucky ones who get to live in the now where it is made, not lost yet, not ancient yet, but absolutely timeless. So that’s why this non-record label is releasing a seemingly random (masterpiece) record from an Australian home recording recluse: because it needs to be heard.

- Phil Elverum, May 14th, 2024

and here is a goofy video of me talking about it:

and here are some pictures of what you get when you order it:

ORDER A RECORD HERE

or BUY IT DIGITALLY HERE

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Listening deeply to Soon, and working on that piece of writing above, brought me back to a different mind-zone, one I’ve returned to often over the years. Imagining Hana living alone on a remote farm in Australia for a year and slowly dripping song ideas and recordings, I thought about the winter I spent alone in Norway, 2002/2003. It was a similar type of retreat-era for me. Maybe I was close to the same age Hana was during the making of Soon. A I lived in a small rented cabin in a remote area in northern Norway (Kjerringøy), and had no big work other than the daily chores. My difference is that I didn’t have a farm of cows to commune with. Instead, I talked to the small scrubby frozen trees and occasional reindeer and one moose.

But what my mind did that winter is the point. A bell was rung that continues to resonate all these years later. The fruitfulness of solitude, the wild fermentation of a brain left alone, the potency of empty space. I wrote a ton of songs, most of the songs that ended up on the Mount Eerie record Dawn. But listening to Soon, I had to wonder “what if I’d had an 8 track reel to reel with me in the cabin?” There was no electricity. (Actually there was a solar panel, but in the arctic in winter there is no sun, so…) The songs I wrote had to be memorized, written on paper, played over and over, recorded in my bones, incubated by candlelight.

If I’d had a way to record, I would have tried to make a record like Hana made. The clarity that comes when spending a vast amount of time alone with the land makes a person want to recede into the background. The internal hubbub dies down and integrates with the richness of the place itself, an individual voice honking a loud “me” horn immediately feels wrong. The world blooms and the protagonist is still there, swimming in it all. Hana’s record does this so beautifully. I am in awe.

yes I saw it

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The second momentous item in the newsletter is:

“the Art of the Release” workshop

I am one of the teachers of a new online school program called The Art of the Release from the people at School of Song. It runs from June 2nd to 23rd. (My lecture is June 2nd). Sign up now!

It’s about what to do with a song or an album or whatever once it’s written/recorded. Should you release it? Probably yes. But why? and how? and what does this all mean? Are you going to be an artist of some kind? Is this what art is for?

I’ll try to get into these ideas by talking about my experiences with releasing music over the last 20+ years, how I did it, what parts have proved important, what distractions to avoid, etc.

The songwriting workshop I taught with School of Song a couple years ago was a really excellent experience and really unlocked some powerful ideas and methods, for me as the teacher and reportedly for many attendees as well. I expect this one to be the same. Sign up now!

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A few other little things:

• I added a show to the Mount Eerie live concerts listings:

Sat. Sept. 7th, 2024 - Olympia, Wash. - Northern Sky Festival at Oyster Bay Farm (in****ram post of it)

• I put a song on this jumbo benefit compilation whose proceeds go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) and Palestine Legal.

• This is old news but in February I had a truly delightful interview appear in the Ojai Valley News. Read it here.

• and what the heck, why not? I’ll include a bonus recording for paid subscribers here. It’s another alternate version of a new song from the forthcoming Mount Eerie album, more info on that later: