Jerry Hunt: Haramand Plane [Pogus 21069-2]
Haramand Plane is a reissue of the last works of the Texas-based electronic composer Jerry Hunt (1943-1993). A one-time Rosicrucian adept who founded his own correspondence course church at the age of 13, Hunt created music with occult overtones. As he explains in the highly idiosyncratic liner notes accompanying the CD, these final pieces, all dating from 1993, were composed using a “translation” system drawing on tables supposedly encoding angelic name and numbers obtained in seances by the 16th century English occultist John Dee.
Its allegedly supernatural provenance aside, the music sounds like the soundtrack to a film the narrative logic of which hovers just on the other side of comprehension. It’s highly atmospheric, and seems to allude to interior states that like beneath and beyond the capacity to describe them. The pieces move through multiple waves of moods and colors, as for example in the nearly half hour-long Chimanzzi Link (2), where samples of low-pitched strings lend a certain gravitas that is then offset by the exaggerated vibrato of upper register samples.
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