Versionland
Jamie Hamilton & Phaedra Ensemble
New album released on Don’t Look Back Records 29th November 2024.
First single Test Tubes released November 8th 2024.
Second single Strange Song released November 22nd 2024.
Bandcamp
Stream
Test Tubes Streaming Links
Strange Song Streaming Links
The Quietus Album of the Week
“Hamilton thrives at exploring the textures possible when blending acoustic instrumentation and technology, particularly in the album’s swarming, often overwhelming, tone clusters and his vocal shifts [...] That is what makes Versionland so surreal – its pure embrace and acceptance of the unexplainable.”
-Vanessa Ague, The Quietus
Versionland is a new album by composer Jamie Hamilton and contemporary chamber group Phaedra Ensemble.
It is a prismatic collection of songs and fragments about 'The Hum’ – an unexplained sound reported by people in certain geographic locations.
Versionland fuses instrumental music, text, and sound design into an expansive satire on catastrophe and transformation. Through maximalist, genre-weirding arrangements, and overlapping streams of language, it imagines The Hum as a malign force destroying the world.
Drawing from thousands of pages of enthusiasts' explorations of The Hum found in obscure corners of the internet – re-enactments, recording experiments, and conspiracy theories – Hamilton used early neural network technology to process and reimagine these texts. Collaborating with Phaedra Ensemble, he transformed this material into a series of scored pieces, improvisations, and experimental recordings.
Through machine listening – a technology that allows computers to interpret and reimagine sounds – the recordings were reconstructed into dataset facsimiles, creating bizarre instrumental and vocal masses that splinter and mutate. Each iteration of this process fed back into new performances, transcriptions and transformations, blurring the line between human interpretation and technological intervention. The resulting album is a darkly humorous fever-dream on paranoia and internet-age mythology.
Versionland was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and was made possible by Sound and Music's New Voices programme.
With thanks to the Marchus Trust and the Vaughan Williams Foundation for additional funding.
