I call you another name is the new EP release from Hannya White, an artist who inhabits the strange, and beautifully dark corners of electronic, avant-garde music. It’s been a while since Hannya White’s last full release, the 2021 EP No Preview which gathered praise from many quarters and even led to curating a playlist for Stuart Maconie’s 6Music show Freak Zone as well as guest hosting shows on NCCR, Resonance FM and NTS Radio.
Hannya White builds layered soundscapes with multiple sources that drift in and out of tracks. Beats that would normally hold things together can be disembodied, as if heard from a far-off source, while over the top other sounds creak and pulse, sometimes layered together and sometimes overlapping. This is evident on the title track which Hannya says is “about playing someone else, being someone else. A game you can play with another person” and on ‘Roam, Roam, Roam’.
‘And a POW World’ is described as a “whimsical escape into a realm where imagination reigns supreme”. It feels like the soundtrack to a psychological horror film where someone is trying to silently move through the crawlspace of a house. In fact, a lot of White’s music inhabits those rarely visited places; grey areas where we can’t quite get purchase on what we are hearing or experiencing. It’s happily unnerving.
Hannya White’s tracks are like the musical equivalent of ASMR, an audio caress that also puts your senses on yellow alert. It’s not always an easy listen, but the reward is to be given a guided tour of worlds that are unfamiliar, sometimes unsettling, but always compelling. She is a radio antenna for the strange and the enigmatic, tuning in to ghostly voices, navigating inner and outer worlds, decoding and giving expression to liminal spaces.
Hannya White socials: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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