No matter what Terence Hannum attempts from tape to zine to LP to CD-R, you can always tell he’s done his homework. Even when he was pumping out cassettes with regularity, you never got that half-baked gutter-drone from him, and with a new LP out on Shelter Press and Via Negativa rolling off the ash-black assembly line at Utech, this might just be Hannum’s year to shine as a solo artist. But again, don’t get stuck on the idea of quantity; it’s quality work, eternally. Via Negativa fills its luscious light-blue wax with synth-drone on Side A, so you’ll feel tension even as the soft timpani-ish percussive accompaniment lulls your senses to sleep. This is the science of synth, refined in laboratories and viewed at magnifications of up to a million times, all to deliver the gooey goods to you, cogent listener. Also note the ghostly chorus at the outset, welcoming you into a world of shimmering crystal sound-powder and hovering florescent sprites; a slight eruption then breaks up the flora/fauna into the synth-dro mentioned above, closed out by a collage of Kubrick-esque voices and apparitions, not exactly a portent of friendly relations. The flip continues the drift, albeit in a more angelic key, not unlike Tangerine Dream/Steve Hillage at their ambien(t)-chugging best yet more crystallized and frosted over than either, ideal for modern consumption. Hannum was searching for a mystical connection to the “meditative process of subtraction” when he recorded Via Negativa, and without getting too heavy-handed/ham-fisted about it, I’ll agree he achieved that and more. This is one of those records you’ll treasure as time goes by, folding sound, concept, and visual aesthetic into a stunning new shape, wreathed in black. Three-hundo copies, which is unreal because if this record came out on Southern Lord, they’d put out 1,000 on three different colors and you’d buy them all. WHAT THE FUCK. It’s time to stop trifling around, collectors.
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