Have you ever just listened to the sound of your own breathing? Listening to Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow is a little like that. It's also a little like watching clouds drift overhead in layers, scudding cumulus puffs nearby and stretched-out, nearly motionless cirrus high above. It's a little like whale songs, or the gauziest, most slow-motion part of a Sigur Rós song, pulled out over an hour. Imagine if an audio tape, unraveled and stretched out in the breeze, could capture the sound of its own undulations.
That's what Hammock sound like. Lazily, it's drone music, and it plays by its own rules. An event in pop music is the verse going to the chorus, or the double-stop, or the re-introduction of a riff. An event in this music is one note changing to another, or two notes colliding to make a new vibration, or a slow swell in volume that leads to a tiny moment where you can perceive the difference in timbre between the guitar and the keyboard. Andrew Thompson and Marc Byrd check their egos at the door when they record this stuff and simply allow the sounds they generate to meld with one another in an ultra slow-motion dance.
Their last album, 2006's Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop an Echo, offered a few vocal tracks and a bit of percussion to ground its explorations, but this one is a lot more elemental and simple. It's also an immersive listen if played at the right volume and paid the right amount of attention. Short of that, it works well as ambient music, not so much filling the room with sound as merging with the very air in the room. I swear it practically changes the temperature.
Speaking relatively, the most active track is "Mono No Aware", which takes its title from a Japanese phrase that roughly means "the sadness of things." It opens with a bit of back-masking and drifts through a passages of ethereal guitar, before finally bringing in a solemn cello line. Tonally, it's a calmer, more Zen cousin of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It's also hard to recommend wholeheartedly-- some people simply won't be able to get to music this placid, and that's fine. If you have any kind of even passing affinity for atmospheric music with an uncanny ability to stimulate any of your five senses, though, hear this.
