Although I had heard of Floating Points, the project of London-based musician Sam Shepherd, it was the 2021 album Promises – made in collaboration with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra – that captured my attention, and I wrote about it in the End Rant ("One Degree") of Tape Op#160. Through mutual friends, Stella Mozgawa [Tape Op#169] and Suzanne Ciani [#148], I met Sam a few years ago, and we ended up doing some cycling and...
Interviews
Hana Stretton
Terroir is a term often used in the worlds of food and wine to describe the geographical and environmental conditions of a region, and I would argue that it also applies to music. Not just the way a room sounds, but the geographical and social surroundings around an artist as they write and record a record. The places and things you see and the people you interact with every day can have a huge impact on the music you make; much more really than what kind of microphone you might use. A record made in Las Vegas is likely to sound quite a bit different than a record made in a small rural village in upstate Maine.
I feel like Australian ambient-adjacent folk artist Hana Stretton embodies this concept and embraces and reacts to the environment around her as part of her music-making process. Her first LP, Soon, was recorded in the New South Wales bushland, but for her most recent album, tiarn, she relocated to a small beach town called Tabourie...
