Hulm are pure present of avant-garde music in the Iberian peninsula (…)
Hulm is a band that makes improvised music from an absolutely personal vision, whose line-up includes Eduardo Pons (sax), Ernest Pipó (guitar) and Joan Torné (electronics). With two albums released; their eponymous debut in 2021′ and ‘Do you have a minute?’ in 2022; as well as a piece of sound art included in the exhibition by Servando Rocha and Jordi Costa for the C.C.C.B, entitled ‘La máscara nunca miente’, the trio from Barcelona publishes now this third studio work called ‘Landfillandfillandfill’, which is a declaration of intentions: That is, landfill diving. Oxygen and immersion. To go down, down and down until reaching densities that alter perception, floating in a doughy and indefinite place where formal emptiness does not seem to exist and where hyperstimulus projects our sublimation to the limits of aesthetic asphyxia.
However, after the initial impact, and although our cognitive perspective is altered by such an ecological-sonic abstraction, Hulm are equally capable of misshaping and rearranging their own timbral lines to sketch before us ideas or occasional melodic motifs that alter the narrative, change course, and to which our mind responds by clinging and prefiguring something we could call «anti-song». That is to say, pieces that reconcile atonal developments with exciting harmonic transitions of non-resolution.
Eminently conceptual, this work by Hulm is risky and of an undeniable personality, as is the cold blood with which Edu, Ernest and Joan are capable of taming the beast live, but there is more: the impact, the expressive power of their pieces is such that in the end one comes to doubt whether we are really in front of an improvisational band or whether everything has been composed or, at least, prepared beforehand. Hulm are pure present of avant-garde music in the Iberian peninsula and this album is the international surprise of 2023. Thank you for existing.
