If there’s a common principle to folk music, it’s in its sense of community. It draws on shared language—histories and myths, mountains and the people who climbed them. Folk music has taken on many faces, but a key feature is its ability to be repeated, sung again and again throughout time by any number of different performers with only the barest of instruments. For Australian singer/sound-collagist Hana Stretton, however, her songs aren’t organized around melodies or lyrics as much as moments: the tune a floorboard makes when it creaks, or how a harmonica’s whinny wilts as it travels through the air. It’s traditionalism made internal, the qualities it takes on as one person whispers it to the next, and it gradually begins transmuting into something new.
Stretton’s last album, 2023’s hypnotic, mirage-like Soon, came together while watching over her recently passed grandmother’s farm in a remote stretch of New South Wales, totally alone. The sounds of the house, her grandmother’s animals, and Stretton’s barely materialized melodies all wove together into a warm haze of dreamy half-songs that emerged as softly as they disappeared, as if Stretton were melting into the world around her. This approach resonated with longtime world-melter Phil Elverum, who took it upon himself to re-release Soon via his P.W. Elverum & Sun label in 2024, elevating Stretton to a more prominent stage. Now, after another extended period of solitary recording, Stretton has returned with a record that deepens her craft and welcomes other voices into her blurry landscape.
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Dispatching this time to the small beach town of Lake Tabourie, Stretton sets up an immediate contrast with Soon: If that album’s strummy shroud of tape hiss captured a sweet sunset glow, on tiarn, dusk has fallen. There’s a quieter yet more pronounced feel to these tracks, and Stretton handles each of her instruments with a soothing touch. “Nojiri 1993” slowly comes into focus with sighing harmonium, birdsong, and surreal opera vocals—a tuning-up moment for an album that might as well be one long tuning session. The best way to follow Stretton’s music is closely, in a quiet place where you can notice all the wonders scampering underfoot, such as the swooning woodwinds that bend against the harmonies of “Stay Involved,” or the delicately breathed horns that decorate “Right Whale” as the song seems to let itself drift away. Stretton’s music is subtle, easy to blend into the background at times, yet there’s a careful logic to how her pieces unfold.
While tiarn is still largely impressionistic, Stretton crafts some of her most fully defined songs yet here. “As It Was Before This,” which features a local 60-person choir called the Forest Creek Folk, is a dissolving Southern gospel-style hymn whose Carter Family sway becomes harder and harder to pin down, like trying to trace the color of the sky as it shifts between hues of powdery blue. This contrast between detail and opaqueness is where Stretton’s music is at its most potent. Her tender yet sharp voice could easily belong to a much more coffee-shop-ready type of folk artist, but by submerging it in a rich pool of texture—the firefly synths of “Stove,” or the brushed footstep rhythms of “Seagull Theory II”—she finds a hypnagogic quality, one suffused with grace rather than smear.
