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Sonorine - My Fun | |||||||||||||||||||
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 A Sonorine was a black lacquer disc, made around the time of the First World War, used to send a ‘talking postcard’. Sonorine, the second full-length release from My Fun aka Justin Hardison is a postcard from more recent times, made in part from field recordings Hardison collected as a way of remembering the people and places of his journeys. ‘Setting Fires’ opens with a gentle melodic meditation over distant sounds of everyday industry before taking a more sinister turn into a darker-sounding, shifting between radio station frequencies and what appears to be someone breathing nervously or sobbing before resolving into a series of tonal piano chords. ‘Anchor’ features more sampled radio frequencies before transforming into a wavering drone. The mixture of these more processed sounds with literal audio-portraits of particular places creates a fine balance between tracks that merely show you that place, and others that tell you what it was like to be there. While some tracks show you a photograph (the birdsong of ‘Musik-Postakarten’ or the cricket song and passing car featured in ‘A Field in Freilassing’), others are more akin to the writing a lonely traveller would send home on the back of the card. ‘Sonorine’ could easily be the musings of a frustrated backpacker stuck inside, staring at the rain, while in ‘Signal Drift’ a background that sounds like a constant telephone ring and snatches of foreign-language conversation (again from shortwave radio) could be a lone traveller trying to reach out to those around her. With original artwork designed by Hardison’s partner Kimberly Ellen Hall, the CD comes in a beautifully designed ‘envelope’ whose writing hints at turn-of-the-century Europe but also somewhere contemporary. Not listening to the CD inside would have been as difficult as not turning over a postcard to see who it was from. Review by
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