About Versionland

 

Versionland is a new album by composer Jamie
Hamilton and contemporary chamber group Phaedra
Ensemble.

It is a prismatic collection of songs and fragments
about 'The Hum’ – an unexplained sound reported by
people in certain geographic locations.

Versionland fuses instrumental music, text, and sound
design into an expansive satire on catastrophe and
transformation. Through maximalist, genre-weirding
arrangements, and overlapping streams of language,
it imagines The Hum as a malign force destroying the
world.

Drawing from thousands of pages of enthusiasts'
explorations of The Hum found in obscure corners of
the internet – re-enactments, recording experiments,
and conspiracy theories – Hamilton used early neural
network technology to process and reimagine these
texts.

 

Collaborating with Phaedra Ensemble, he transformed this material into a series of scored pieces,
improvisations, and experimental recordings.
Through machine listening – a technology that allows computers to interpret and reimagine sounds –
the recordings were reconstructed into dataset facsimiles, creating bizarre instrumental and vocal
masses that splinter and mutate. Each iteration of this process fed back into new performances,
transcriptions and transformations, blurring the line between human interpretation and technological
intervention.

 

The resulting album is a darkly humorous fever-dream on paranoia and internet-age
mythology.