Hana Stretton (AU)

About

Hana Stretton recorded her debut album Soon almost entirely alone on a farm during the Australian bushfire season of 2019 to 2020, caring for her late grandmother's animals with a borrowed nylon string guitar and whatever else was nearby. That isolationist approach shaped everything: the album sits somewhere between ambient folk and musique concrète, full of field recordings and textures that draw comparisons to Grouper and William Basinski. Phil Elverum reissued it on his P.W. Elverum and Sun label, and Stretton went on to support his project Mount Eerie on tour. Her follow up, tiarn, came out of a similar retreat, this time to Tabourie Lake on the New South Wales coast, where she watched the winter whale migration, joined a regional folk choir, and sat with what she calls ecological grief. The album title means "landholder" in the local language and is named after someone she met while living there. It rounds out a body of work that is quietly extraordinary in its patience and sense of place.