Vinyl - Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres - LUCID DISTANCE - Édition numérotée à la main

Seeing each album as therapy through concept and design, composer Alexandra Hamilton- Ayres has a talent for reframing her own emotional processing as vivid storytelling experiences.

She weaves together classical and electronic sound worlds in an experimental and humanistic journey. Hamilton-Ayres’ debut 2 Years Stranger took us to the hospital bed of her father in a coma and her second album Play Echoes, a collaboration on Nils Frahm’s Leiter, with Her Ensemble at Funkhaus’ iconic Saal 3, said goodbye to her childhood home with an attic full of patchwork memories. Three years on, Hamilton-Ayres’ style has developed, becoming more confident and personal with her third full album, Lucid Distance that encapsulates the listener on a voyage into space. Bringing sonic distance into the main part of the composition process Hamilton-Ayres has recorded the first ever music in the European Space Agency’s Large European Acoustic Facility.

The 16.4m high room at ESTEC in the Netherlands is used to test satellites going into space and see how resilient the structures are to noise vibrations under saturation of sound and it’s the largest floating reverberation chamber of its kind in Europe with giant nitrogen speakers that blast sound through horn-like structures. There’s plenty of artists who have visited the space but never actually recorded in it. “I was inspired seeing the models of satellites and rockets my grandfather had worked on in his study. As a child I liked to imagine them floating around, distant from the world but still orbiting over everything going on.”

For Hamilton-Ayres this album had to be a move away from a high production studio album and back to sound exploration, particularly working with a 1960s electronic Philicorda organ, and an interplay between old and new technology in music and space as a means for taking a listener on a journey. “I wanted to create something closer to my own personal live sound with an interplay between electronic and acoustic elements and head back to the more organic recordings on family pianos of 2 Years Stranger.”

Hamilton-Ayres had been in communication with Mark McCaughrean at the European Space Agency for a while and was keen to make a collaboration with them happen before his move to Germany. “I was so lucky to get awarded the PRS composer fund and I asked him what facilities we could have access to, and reading up about the LEAF (Large European Acoustic Facility) it made perfect sense for my ideas and sound development and family history”. Hamilton-Ayres was interested in taking the purpose built reverb chamber she had used at Funkhaus to the extreme and exploring what that could add to music. In a live setting Hamilton-Ayres improvises and performances change based on mood, venue and friends on stage, making each show and tour unique. Her albums are no different, standing for a moment in time and autobiographical eras of her life. “As people we grow, change and go through phases, and I hope my records absolutely echo that. I’m not the same person I was three years ago.”

Lucid Distance is a personal exploration of Hamilton-Ayres’ battle with a desire for escapism, feeling distant and removed from the world. Through what she retrospectively realised was a tumultuous combination of an artist friend’s suicide, prenatal hormones and depression - on wild rollercoaster of emotions, Hamilton-Ayres found herself five months pregnant recording at the

European Space Agency’s Large European Acoustic Facility in Winter early 2024. “Something about being isolated and closed in this massive chamber saturated in sound, two heartbeats, got me thinking about the journey from being encapsulated in the womb and transitioning into the world. A lot of this time writing I was coming to terms with upcoming motherhood.” It was hearing that other heartbeat that spurred Hamilton-Ayres back into writing. Just as Play Echoes contains an intimate conversation of Hamilton-Ayres as a child talking to her mother, Lucid Distance opens with the heartbeat of her daughter, recorded during a midwife appointment.

“It gave me so much energy to hear this beat at 140 BPM, so we recorded it there and then and I took the sample straight into my studio. I realised I needed to let go and deep dive on
experimenting with sound in this full circle moment.”

Lucid Distance boldly enters a space of vast isolation, encapsulated in technology that craves the warmth of human touch. The album frames these escapist moments as a metaphorical journey through space, some more fantasy and some more introspective. The violin melodies on Ascent soar where Into Darkness rolls a hypnotic drum loop over organs. “I am very proud to have had full autonomy over the production of this album with it being such a personal record, close collaborators for vocals and strings; my mum’s piano - It puts a comfort blanket on a very painful time.”

With Hamilton-Ayres film work, she is often navigating personal portraits or complex emotional rollercoasters and so her album and film work feed each other very well. “I’m just glad I have different outlets for writing music, but this album has been one of the biggest outlets yet. In a time I hid my problems and didn’t get the mental health care I needed, I leant heavily into making this record.” It nurtured Hamilton-Ayres, who is finally coming out the other side. “I have said to so many people, I can’t move on now until this record comes out - it’s like giving birth all over again except this time, to the next iteration of myself.”