Album Review
Hum is a musical statement establishing Sawako as one of the foremost practitioners of blending field recordings with carefully constructed passages of digitally manipulated sounds. With the epic "Cloud No Crowd" (which could easily best anything on Kompakt's highly successful Pop Ambient series), Sawako subtly welds together elements of the organic with the synthetic, wasting no time in establishing a fragility and beauty that are often lacking in the harsh world of processed music. Her explorations of drone and atmospherics continue throughout, with "Incense of Voice" reminiscent of a long-lost Slowdive single from their creative peak. Beautifully consistent, calm, and meditative from start to finish, Hum takes the listener through the magnificent experience of hearing the world through another person's contact microphones without becoming formulaic new age fodder.
