The Hum is a low pitched noise reportedly heard around the world. It is a mysterious entity, an unexplainable sound that derives its energy from somewhere unknown (or even somewhere nonexistent). London-based composer, performer and multimedia artist Jamie Hamilton takes this idea and turns it into a drama that imagines The Hum as a malevolent entity encircling Earth. His source material comes from texts and conspiracy theories, or the stories told to try to grasp this strange phenomenon. His music mimics this concept in its never-ending spirals, and particularly in its glitchy patchwork patterns that feel imagined and real at the same time.
Every beat on Versionland is jam-packed with chaos. A stilted vocalization might sputter while at the same time an electronic purr zig-zags and strings blare a warning siren. The album, written by Hamilton and performed by London-based contemporary music group Phaedra Ensemble, mutates human-made sounds into splintered fragments, blurring the lines between natural and synthetic. Though at times kitschy, Versionland ultimately offers an absurdist take on the ways that sound, and how we hear it, is a driving life force.
Versionland is a natural progression for Hamilton, whose artistic practice explores the power of sonic perception. Early works like 2013’s Braby Silo Harp, a sound installation, amplified the resonance of a grain silo, inviting listeners to go inside and experience vibrations as they rang throughout the cavernous tower. More recent works have brought these drone-influenced concepts to texts, like 2021’s Activity Report, which sets police reports against the distortion of a slide guitar, conjuring the hiss of a radio as you flip between stations. His prior work with Phaedra Ensemble, too, has focused on blending art and technology, particularly in an arrangement of Laurie Anderson’s beloved pop experiment ‘O Superman’.
Sonic perception is both the central story and musical line of Versionland, a cohesive throughline that ties each part together, no matter how chaotic. To make this music, Hamilton used machine listening to transform vocal and instrumental fragments, turning each acoustic sound into a mutated distortion. This choice comes at a time in which the use and benefits of Artificial Intelligence in art is uncertain; Hamilton offers one example of how to use this technology as an experiment. It is also a satirical take on the technology itself, rife with metaphors that at times become too on-the-nose (take pieces like ‘We are having an excellent nuclear war’ or ‘I have a huge, massive, big body,’ for example). But Hamilton thrives at exploring the textures possible when blending acoustic instrumentation and technology, particularly in the album’s swarming, often overwhelming, tone clusters and his vocal shifts.
Vocals especially live at the center of Versionland, setting the stage for each of its collaged pieces. They whisper and shout, speak and sing melismas, or sound uncanny like the words spoken in Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. Much of the album deals in murmurs, harkening to the unknown of The Hum itself, as if the lyrics are secrets shared from somewhere afar. Most intriguing is when Hamilton arranges the vocals such that they feel like their own puzzle to piece together, nearly unintelligible in their metamorphosis. Tracks like ‘How would you describe the rain?’ explode each word so much that they begin to sound like alien gibberish (later, the words are revealed yet remain equally confounding). Throughout, the vocals also steer the album’s absurdity and musical direction. The singers whisper about annoyances and “swarms of bees”, detailing all the ways The Hum may terrify or hurt them. When they lean into ASMR-style crunch, the instrumentals follow, playing swishing, subdued drones. When they become more punchy, instruments mimic by playing staccato and fervent pulses.
Despite the album’s constant, wavering motion and left turns, Hamilton is good at matching textures so that the collages sound like they’re meant to be put together, not just like loose threads strewn about. Texture shines most in the album’s instrumentals, which often feel akin to Penderecki’s tone clusters, swarming like clouds of bees around the eerie lyrics. ‘In the air itself’ exemplifies this, building around screeching strings that glissando up to the highest pitches of their instruments and shriek when words cut out; ‘Cabin Story’ reads similarly, growing out of a bubbling rhythm and airy harmonics that float around a ghost story. Elsewhere, the short interlude trio of ‘Waiting Room’ pieces – each a half-minute long or less – find dissonant chords held in suspension, buzzing underneath concerned whispers. Though they often feel like they are secondary to the whiplash of the album’s vocals, these instrumentals provide a necessary grounding force to its many twists and turns.
While Versionland can feel like an experiment that lives in a computer, it is also a surprising embrace of humanity. Its core is the myths we tell ourselves to try to understand a world which is never quite knowable. Every voice maintains its supple vocal timbre, never fully succumbing to robotic inflection; every bow against the string is dragged with the uneven force of human arms. There is only the funhouse mirrors that reflect Hamilton’s blown out phrases. That is what makes Versionland so surreal – its pure embrace and acceptance of the unexplainable.
