Ben Chatwin

Drones meet strings and samples for what is perhaps chatwin’s best work yet (and we don’t say that lightly) – this is the perfect encapsulation of his neoclassical meets hauntological style that needs to be heard by any fan of max richter’s ‘infra’ era, johann johansson or labradford.

Part of what makes ‘the hum’ so special is the way it effortlessly moves between the quiet and the loud, the subtle and the forthright – this is an album that will take you from a passage of ethereal, rachel’s-y layered sound sculpture up to a blanck mass style synthetic attack without making either jarring. In chatwin’s words, "there are so many sounds around us that are lower and higher than we can hear. i wanted to make it all audible." – in bringing the loud and the quiet together in a way that allows both to breathe and not compete, he’s somehow managed to do this. ‘The Hum’ is the hum of the world, the noise around us that could, in less talented hands, be overwhelming and an assault on the senses, but through chatwin’s vision it becomes spectacular and profound.

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