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Sid The Cat Presents Hana Stretton with Cate Kennan 4/26/2025 at Scribble British born, Melbourne-based composer/songwriter, Hana Williams, introduces herself with a debut album of rare poise and unqualified emotional breadth that's left a few jaws on the floor round here. Soon doesn't quite arrive outta nowhere, with a few tapes having been released under the name Honey Stretton as far back as 2016 - and streaming numbers online show they certainly found an audience, too - but the shift to the use of her own first name might be read as a kind of rebirth of creative voice. However you want to interpret the presentation, these eleven tracks of varying length and consistently intimate recording style are undoubtedly potent, where piano, six & twelve string, field recordings and Williams' low, mellifluous vocal emerge in a gentle swell. Songs don't so much announce themselves as drift into view, on the breeze through the open window, just where the light gets in. Brierfield Flood Press, with whom Williams has partnered to release the record, have also worked with Little Wings, and it feels like a convenient comparison, a shared way of shifting the lexicon of folk into their own specific dialect. You might also hear traces of that golden era of folk experimentalists who emerged around the start of the century - Diane Cluck, Josephine Foster, Marissa Nadler (who in turn borrow from Sibylle Baier, a thread to which you can draw to Williams) - articulating complex emotion in ways that feel both familiar and new, though i will say that Williams' music feels more impressionistic, the songs more open-ended, the voice buried within. And so, if Soon might be considered part of that rich lineage, it's also very clearly its own vision, too, unhurried, at times abstract but often moving, and in service only to itself. Haven't been able to put this one down since it floated in the door. A year high (so far).
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