Michael Hann has been making waves in the North East with his high-impact performance-orientated readings of his fiction and poetry, through which he explores the darker sides of life with a perverse glee. Not one to be shackled by any one medium, he’s branched out into music under the guise of Rejections, and, recently signed to Tiny Lights, makes his first mark with this three-tracker.
However, apart from his literary background, and the fact his musical preferences include the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Swans, there’s something else you should know about Michael Hann: he is the brother of Tim Hann, singer, guitarist and creative force behind respected Leeds band I Concur.
If you haven’t already pieced it together, this EP takes some I Concur demos as its starting point and reshapes them to sculpt an entirely different musical animal altogether. It is, of course, the height of postmodernism to treat everything as ‘material’ and to reconfigure pre-existing work in such a way, challenging the notion of ‘the original’. The Concur EP isn’t so much an act of destruction, so much as cannibalism and reconstruction.
Of course, one could argue that originality is born through the most innovate assimilation and redesigning of that which preceded, and on the face of it, the source material could have been pretty much anything and the result would be the same: suffice it to say Rejections’ bleak, dark ambient sounds are largely abstract and couldn’t be much further from the music of I Concur. Clomping electronic pulses fade in and out on ‘Tread’, providing minimalist dance beats that provide just enough of a ledge to get a grip on before they recede back into the whorl of sound, while on the ten-minute epic that is ‘Empty Horizon’, the beats flicker in distant caves, half-submerged in cathedrals of sound, out of reach and almost subliminal amidst a rising sonic storm.
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The final track, ‘Fold’ is the soundtrack of a descent into the inferno, a juddering swirl of spiralling sounds and disembodied voices emitting wordless cries of anguish. Around the mid-point, the tension dissipates and the listener is led slowly toward the light. It’s a long tunnel, but we emerge, blinking, on a world that’s the same as it ever was, but somehow slightly altered.
Rejections Online
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