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| 4.401 Ft
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| 1. | Long Dune
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| 2. | Shiranui
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| 3. | Seki no Gohonmatsu
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| 4. | Circular Dune
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| 5. | Scattered Forest
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| 6. | Hopeful Impressions of Happiness
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| 7. | Awayuki I
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| 8. | Awayuki II
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| 9. | Distant Dune
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| 10. | Futa
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Jazz / Avant-Garde, Prog-Rock/Art Rock, Experimental, Jazz-Rock, Avant-Garde Jazz
Recorded by Yumi Hara in London, UK, February 2008
Hugh Hopper bass guitar, loops
Yumi Hara Cawkwell keyboards, vocals
From soothing moments of calm reflection to jagged swipes at the psyche, the collective voices of HUMI form textures, moods, improvisation and formal compositions into a cohesive, expressive language. Beyond the confines of genre, there's an eloquent, spellbinding quality that arises when two risk-taking players go exploring. Subtle, exotic and eloquent, don't expect anything obvious from Hugh Hopper and Yumi Hara Cawkwell.
Of the many recordings electric bass guitarist Hugh Hopper has produced over three decades since leaving Soft Machine, this one might be the bravest and most distinctly innovative and atmospheric of his career. With the bassist teamed with keyboardist and vocalist Yumi Hara Cawkwell, the paradox of a hot, steamy desert caravan as opposed to cold and bleak deep space is somehow conjured and realized. While Cawkwell has an ethereal quality to her wordless vocals and a free sense of spatial time, Hopper uses his typical probing basslines and mixes them up with sharply framed electronic passages and the kind of forsaken, foreboding imagery heard in the most macabre movie soundtracks. "Long Dune," somewhat based on the 1922 text -Sunayama, has the patient and cascading piano of Cawkwell alongside Hopper's bass in a most evocative and unhurried pace, with "Circular Dune" in a repeated mode, playful and childlike, while "Distant Dune" has a rickety piano sound offset by scary layered and edgy synthesizer in a purposeful disconnect. Aeronautic phrasings couched in wordless vocals during "Seki No Gohonmatsu" (Five Pine Trees of Seki) create a clearly pungent reflection, a religious organ during "Awayuki I" and "Awayuki II" extends in a wispy electronic baptism, while backwards loops with Hopper's signature hard-edged legato sound lead to some actual unison playing (perhaps all Hopper overdubbed) for a quite interrogative, provocative, and certainly dramatic move on "Futa." More loops rivet "Hopeful Impressions of Happiness" with Cawkwell's oohs and ahhs leading to singing lines referencing the sentiment of "be careful what you wish for." Full-blown sky church electronic declarations à la Hopper's bandmate in Soft Machine, Mike Ratledge, identify "Scattered Forest," although the spare electric bass and the traipsing piano of Cawkwell add to the infinite contrasts these two generally conceive. A strange and wonderful confluence of modernity, scientific experimentation, and futuristic vision, this may very well be Hugh Hopper's most challenging recording date since his epic 1984, and a coming out for the intriguing ideas proffered by Cawkwell.
--- Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide
Hugh Hopper: "If born in 19th century, Hugh Hopper would have been a cartographer or topographer, an explorer of territory and definer of space. Not for him, the observer’s projections onto peoples and customs of anthropology. First and foremost, he makes music that charts landscapes, if it has an emotional aspect, it is in our reaction to it rather than in the places and attractions to which it takes us." (JazzWise Magazine, UK)
Yumi Hara Cawkwell : Yumi Hara Cawkwell studied medicine at the University of Tsukuba in Japan and practiced as a psychiatrist for eight years before moving to the UK in 1993. In 1999, she graduated in music from City University in London with a first-class honours degree specialising in acoustic and electroacoustic composition and performance (piano). She also undertook extensive study of non-western musics. Yumi Hara Cawkwell has completed her PhD in composition at City University under Rhian Samuel in 2005 and has received a number of awards including a prize in the Continuum Ensemble Improvisation Competition, Sculpted Sound competition and the British Medical Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology Fanfare Competition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. Her music has been performed by, among others, PianoCircus, Ensemble Bash, Jane Chapman and OKEANOS in concerts and festivals in the UK and Japan. Yumi has led voice improvisation workshops for the Yokohama Boys and Girls Chorus at the ISCM World Music Days in 2001, taught music production to young offenders at the Islington Youth Offending Centre and gave a paper on The Oral Traditions of Japanese Blind Mediums at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. She regularly gives improvised performances as a solo vocalist, duo with David Cross, and HUMI (Hugh Hopper & Yumi Hara Cawkwell). In addition, Yumi Hara Cawkwell is active as a DJ, and since 1996, has been a member of the performance-art girlband Frank Chickens. She also performs with Vaseline Towers and Lemon Squeezer and is a Lecturer in Music at University of East London.
HUMI : Hugh Hopper and Yumi Hara Cawkwell met in August 2007, and they decided to start a new project immediately. Hopper's complex, multi-layered bass sound with various effects and loops, together with Cawkwell's delicate, but at times violent and explosive keyboard playing and her vocalise stemming from Japanese folk singing create a highly cerebral, yet extremely sensual sound world which breaks the boundaries between psychedelic, progressive rock, free jazz, contemporary classical and world music: in other words, it is 21st century international Canterbury music. Their distinctive stage presence, concentration and communication during the performance have to be witnessed live.
Hugh Hopper
Active Decades: '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Avant-Garde, Prog-Rock/Art Rock, Experimental, Jazz-Rock, Avant-Garde Jazz, Canterbury Scene, Avant-Prog
Bassist/composer Hugh Hopper has worked on a variety of projects in his 40 years in music. Hopper was born and raised in Canterbury, Kent, England. In 1963, he became involved in a jazz and poetry trio with Daevid Allen, who would go on to form Gong, and Robert Wyatt. In 1964, Hopper was a founder of the Wilde Flowers, a band that included Richard Sinclair, Pye Hastings, Richard Coughlan, Robert Wyatt, and Kevin Ayers. Although a fairly typical beat group, the Wilde Flowers would split into two legendary bands: Caravan, with Sinclair, Hastings, and Coughlan; and Soft Machine, with Wyatt and Ayers, who was replaced by Hopper late in 1968. Hopper left Soft Machine in 1974 and worked on numerous projects before forming the Hugh Hopper Band in 1985. The group released a CD, Meccano Pelorus, on the Cuneiform label in 1991, and has since released other material on that label as well as on Voiceprint and PONK.
--- Jim Dorsch, All Music Guide |
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