hymenia by Simon Aulman

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"hymenia = the spore-bearing surfaces in fungi" (Chambers Dictionary),

this album is best appreciated at very low volume,

........

Months ago I quickly did three very similar albums - Hymen, Hymn, Hymnal - which were quiet, lofi, very simple, lots of short tracks, and all (I hope) exuding a pleasantly melancholy affinity with the countryside - yes, another series of lofi "rural electronic" albums that come in and out of phase throughout the recent decades.

With hindsight I've come to appreciate that they are among my own favourite albums. It's not that they have lots of great tracks - e.g. Hymen only has one outstanding track, and the other two albums have 2 or 3 each - but that they keep a mood which builds to something greater than the sum of its/their parts. Well, I think so.

Lately I've been out in the countryside a lot and it's got me minded to make another album of the same sort. I don't know how successful this one has been - it took me many weeks to realise how good those previous three albums were - and I've only just finished this album - the final few tracks were made this morning.

Everything's scattered randomly. It would be no use for me to try to make things "perfect" - I don't know what perfect is. Nor does anyone else. Many (all) of the tracks on this album would get me excommunicated from the Musicians' Union if anyone ever heard them - they are all criminally simple and lofi and repetitive, using the few most basic and lazy and obvious effects.

Sadly, in spite of my advancing age and my difficulty in absorbing new information, I do seem to have learnt a bit more about music-making over the past few months - and this additional knowledge/skill is of no benefit. Quite the opposite.

Those earlier albums were made in a daze of naivety - and consequently I did things that no "proper" musician would try to do - and sometimes, entirely by luck, things worked out wonderfully - albeit in very brief bursts. With this album, I more often felt that I knew what I was doing, which alas meant that I only did things that I thought would work out okay. They didn't always work out okay. So that's good.
And there's plenty of bad music left lying on the cutting-room floor here. However, I do like what I've so far heard of this album.

As I said at the top of this piece, I think it's important that the album is played very quietly - preferably in the middle of the night, playing from an adjacent room in that sleepless lull that so many of us experience. It's not a case of "good tracks and bad tracks" - it's a case of a quiet seamless mood that's created on the very edge of your hearing.
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