Hana Stretton has shared Before This, an AA single from tiarn, the Australian ambient-folk producer’s second album, out on August 7th. It pairs As It Was Before This with Seagull Theory II, two songs that came out of a decision to stop working alone.
tiarn was self-recorded in an Australian beach town of a few hundred people, where Stretton lived in isolation near the ocean, overlooking the winter migration of whales. She swam during the blue hour, the twenty-minute window at the brink of night, and walked home in the dark carrying melodies to record that same evening. It follows 2023’s Soon, which Phil Elverum reissued on P.W. Elverum & Sun in 2024, calling it “a breathtaking internal world held in sound”.
The album started somewhere else, though. Stretton found home camera footage of her family in Japan, where they lived in the ’90s before she was born — distant mountains, her young family looking out over a valley in the soft static of one summer evening. Using the untouched synth her parents had bought in Tokyo in 1991, she recorded directly to that footage and let the images pick the melody. Voices, insects, weather and the ambient sounds of the valley run through the record itself.
As It Was Before This sings about a lineage of women, “a long thread of strength and resilience”.
On Seagull Theory II, Stretton built the percussion from whatever was to hand. “When I came to record ‘Seagull Theory II’, I didn’t have the people I needed to make it,” she says. “Instead, I took a plank of wood from the garage and 5 different pairs of shoes up to my bedroom to try to mimic the sound of a group of people dancing… but a time came when I knew I had to find people to finish them. I started tentatively moving out into the world. Quickly, it cascaded, and now, the songs hold over 50 voices.” She has since joined the regional Australian choir Forest Creek Folk, who have sung, danced and performed both.
The album track Stove, feature in our The Monday Morning Brew #161 back in June. The Brew is a weekly playlist for our paid Substack subscribers, and it’s where records like this one tend to surface before they reach the site.
tiarn is self-released, with vinyl handled territory by territory: P.W. Elverum & Sun in North America, Brierfield Flood Press in Australia. Now UK label Lima Limo and Japan’s Inpartmaint have announced a joint edition for Europe and Japan, up for pre-order via Bandcamp. Lima Limo director Sam Beste — whose album as The Vernon Spring, Under a Familiar Sun, we reviewed last year — has been a fan since hearing early versions of Stretton’s first EP. “It feels like on this record she’s gone even deeper into exploring a sonic universe that is entirely her own: she weaves musical tapestries so subtly full of a sense of narrative, memory and cinema, her music making remains a magical mystery to me!”
Stretton tours Europe and North America from September:
Tour Dates
Sat 5 Sep — Dublin, Unitarian Church
Mon 7 Sep — Glasgow, Hug & Pint
Thu 10 Sep — Oxford, The Nest
Sun 13 Sep — Bristol, Folk House
Mon 14 Sep — London, Grand Junction
Fri 19 Sep — Chicago IL, Constellation
Tue 23 Sep — Montreal QC, Pop Montreal
Wed 24 Sep — Ottawa ON, FONO
Sat 27 Sep — Burlington VT, Higher Ground
Sun 28 Sep — North Adams MA, Tourists
Mon 29 Sep — Catskills NY, Avalon Lounge
Tue 30 Sep — State College PA, Manny’s
Wed 1 Oct — Frostburg MD, Clatter Cafe
Fri 3 Oct — Efland NC, Feast Festival
Sat 4 Oct — Washington DC, Songbyrd
Mon 6 Oct — Philadelphia PA, The Perch
Tue 7 Oct — Brooklyn NY, Public Records
Thu 9 Oct — Vancouver BC, St James Hall
Wed 14 Oct — Seattle WA, The Vera Project
Thu 15 Oct — Portland OR, Maps Good Space
Fri 16 Oct — San Francisco CA, The Lab
Sat 17 Oct — Los Angeles CA, 2220 Arts + Archives
Sun 18 Oct — Ojai CA, The Listening Garden